Lessons on Keeping a Diary: Stanley Hayami
Document life inside and around you.
Embody humility.
Show respect.
Draw what words cannot say.
Make lists.
Even before this American teen was forced to live in a concentration camp on American soil from 1942 to 1944, Stanley Hayami kept a diary. His Heart Mountain internment camp journals reveal resilience through observing and documenting everyday moments.
Hayami’s writing style feels personal yet objective; he balanced his observations of people, places, and things with subtle opinions.
Lessons we can take from Hayami’s diary:
Document life inside and around you
Vast and varied occurrences mark a day—big, mundane, pleasant, and unpleasant things. In just a sentence or two on a page, encapsulate the heart of an event.
Hayami recorded it all, from a blackout in the concentration camp where he was imprisoned to an irritating Algebra teacher—“Man did my Algebra teacher give us some tough problems.”
This included his distress about his Japanese American identity—“Darn it anyhow us loyal Jap[anese] Americans have no chance. When we’re outside people look at us suspiciously and think we’re spies. Now that we’re in camp Jap[anese] look at us and say we’re bad cause we still love America.”
Read this page from the Stanley Hayami diary—Dec. 15, 1942 . This one, too—from April 29, 1943. (Online Archives of California.)
Embody humility
Can you admit that nothing spectacular occurred and that your life sometimes feels ordinary? Can you simply notice the day’s weather?
Hayami wrote in his diary even if he felt uninteresting—“Didn’t do much all day today. Just played some football and watched some football and that’s about all. It was plenty cold today.”
Nothing spectacular is required for participation. Hayami recorded his days, ordinary as they might have seemed—the practice of writing in his diary was the important thing.
Read this page from the Stanley Hayami diary—Dec. 26, 1942 (Online Archives of California).
Show respect
Explaining where you’ve been—and why you haven’t had time to write in your journal is a way of writing in your journal that shows respect for the practice.
Hayami acknowledged his diary as if it were a friend, a teacher, or local shopkeeper—as if to say, I see you, we intersect during our day-to-day routines. He accounted for himself—“The reason I didn’t write for a few days was because I had to go to parties.”
He also acknowledged entries that he cut short—“Well pa is mad and wants me to go to sleep so goodnight until next year.”
Read this page from the Stanley Hayami diary—Dec. 31, 1942 (Online Archives of California).
Draw what words cannot say
A diary isn’t just for words—it can be a sketchbook, too. Doodle, sketch, and make diagrams in your journal to activate the right hemisphere of your brain (journal writing activates the left side).
Hayami often sketched in his journals—his drawings were sometimes humorous and other times haunting.
Sketch by Stanley Hayami
View another Hayami sketch from the Stanley Hayami diary—Dec. 1, 1942 (Online Archives of California).
Make lists
Lists tell stories. Write lists in the pages of your journal—the books you read last year, your friends, favorite local eateries, or your physical aches and pains. Stanley wrote few lists, but they tell their own story:
Books I Have Read in High School
Java Ho!
Cape Horn Snorter
Knute Rockne
Lawrence of Arabia
Americanization of Edward Bok
Far Away and Long Ago
Falcons of France
Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come
Thar She Blows!
View the list in the Stanley Hayami diary (Online Archives of California).
Stanley Hayami
Stanley Hayami was a typical Japanese American teenager from a suburb of Los Angeles, California—whose life forever changed when his family was bussed to a concentration camp in Wyoming, in February of 1942. He left by enlisting the Army and fought for the U.S. in WWII. Hayami was killed in combat in Northern Italy in April of 1945, at age nineteen, while trying to help a fellow soldier.
Hayami’s journals show that one of his New Year’s resolutions, which he recorded in his diary on January 1, 1943, was to resolve to become more tolerant.
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Read more of Stanley Hayami’s diary on the Online Archive of California website.
Published on The Day of Remembrance: Japanese American Incarceration. Learn more on the Japanese American Citizen League website.
