Since the 1970s, Japanese Americans have observed the Day of Remembrance on February 19, the anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 that authorized the forced removal and incarceration of all people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. Activists conceived DOR as a radical act to bolster the then-faltering movement for redress and reparations.

Today, it largely is embedded in mainstream Japanese American culture, but this year’s musical commemoration at the Getty Center in Los Angeles—“120,000 STORIES with Nobuko Miyamoto and Guests,” presented in collaboration with the Japanese American National Museum and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival—reconnected it to its radical origins and linked it to today’s racial and social justice activism.

Nobuko (as I call her) is an icon of Asian America who has melded art, culture, and politics in her life and work since the 1960s.

A professional dancer early on in her career, Nobuko was a rare Asian cast member of the original West Side Story film and performed on Broadway. But before all of that, she was one of the roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans the U.S. government incarcerated during World War II.

The “120,000 STORIES” are for all of those incarcerees, and the program begins with songs about their experiences at camp, as Nobuko and all of the other Japanese Americans I know, including my own family, learned to call it—just camp, not modified by internment or incarceration or concentration. Her first song is familiar to me: Nobuko going to the camp at the Santa Anita Racetrack, holding her obaachan (grandmother)’s hand on the way to the toilets with no privacy, wondering if they would be interned there all their lives.

Camp—camp plays, camp music, camp art, camp photography—has been our default genre for so long that it can be hard to imagine any other Japanese American genres. But breaking through the camp narrative has been part of Nobuko’s life’s work, and this is reflected in the expansive performances and stories shared on stage that night. This is why, alongside stories of her family moving to Boyle Heights after the war and of her brother-in-law biking from Pasadena to Santa Anita Racetrack searching for his Japanese American neighbors, she includes a narrative about joining her mother-in-law, Mamie Kirkland, who is Black, on a pilgrimage to her Mississippi hometown nearly a century after the family was forced to flee from a lynch mob.

Nobuko also performed songs by the late Chris Iijima, who she traveled the country in the 1970s with making Asian American folk and protest music. Collaborating with musician Charlie Chin, they eventually recorded Grain of Sand, considered the first album made by artists who called themselves Asian American, embracing the pan-ethnic term coined by activists in the late 1960s.

And Nobuko spoke about her fears of raising her Black son, who was only 10 weeks old when his father, Attallah Ayyubi, was killed at the Ya-Sin Mosque, a major gathering place for Black Muslims in 1960s and ’70s Brooklyn.

By the end of the show, nearly 20 musicians joined Nobuko on stage, from shakuhachi and taiko players to violinists. Los Angeles musicians and community organizers Atomic Nancy of the Atomic café, Sean Miura of Tuesday Night Project, artist Dan Kwong, and Quetzal Flores were among those who brought their own radical histories and musical lineages into the room.

Nobuko’s work gathers and galvanizes artists and audience, musicians and activists, alike. Sitting in the theater that night were the aunties and uncles of the 1960s and ’70s Asian American movement. They were members of Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, who won reparations for those incarcerated people; of Gidra, the monthly newsletter that was “the voice of the Asian American experience” from 1969 to 1974; and of the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization, which fought against redevelopment in their downtown L.A. neighborhood in the ’70s and ’80s.

Their stories, and Nobuko’s, are as primal as any folktale or origin story for me, and for so many others. They are embedded into the work of reimagining our narratives today.

In January 2021, JTOWN Action and Solidarity—a group I co-founded, but of which I am no longer an active member of—started weekly mutual-aid actions at the main encampment of unhoused residents in Little Tokyo, providing electricity to charge their devices, personal protective equipment, food, and other essential items. These weekly “Power Ups” became a way to build connections among community members, housed and unhoused, and today include open mics, communal tables, and birthday celebrations. But the effort provoked conflict with and within the community. Some of Little Tokyo’s small, legacy businesses, struggling through the pandemic, believed that supporting the unhoused and bringing visitors back to the neighborhood were mutually exclusive.

The conflict escalated on the Day of Remembrance, when JTOWN Action and Solidarity released a statement about reparations. They asked why only Japanese Americans had received redress—in contrast to other groups also forcibly removed and incarcerated during the war, such as Alaska Natives or Japanese Latin Americans. By extension, they questioned the very possibility of reparations to address injustice, given that they are functions of an inherently unjust, illegitimate state that continues to forcibly colonize indigenous land. To some, this was a denigration of hard-won battles. To others, it was a show of urgent solidarity.

But despite such conflicts, the people in the audience that day, and the Japanese Americans engaged in this work, were raised by the stories of 120,000 incarcerated to believe in the possibility of a better world. That evening at the Getty brought us together and reminded us of this shared endeavor. It sought to highlight our intimacy in all its thrilling, maddening contention.

And at our center was Nobuko, the feminist troubadour who used her voice to create our folk songs, manifestos, and mythologies, for whom multiculturalism and coalition-building was the source and handiwork of her life-art.

When introducing “Not Yo’ Butterfly,” a song that shares its title with her recently published memoir, she addressed Giacomo Puccini, the Italian composer who wrote Madame Butterfly, the opera “that has plagued Asian women ever since.” All those aunties who were the Asian American Movement got up and danced, a joyous rejection of Madame Butterfly, and all her progeny, the fantasized figures of weak Asian women, subject to the desires and violence of a racist world.

One of Nobuko’s last songs of the evening was “Bambutsu.” Before performing it, she taught us the looping choreography of the accompanying dance in the style of Bon Odori, the traditional Japanese folk dance performed in a circle during the summer festivals that honor the harvest, spirits, and ancestors. Because of the pandemic, it had been a long time since I last danced Bon Odori in temple parking lots or on the streets of Little Tokyo. But there we were, in the auditorium, together. We all rose to our feet, guided by Nobuko’s movements, guided by our memories.

The post Nobuko Miyamoto and the 120,000 Stories of Japanese America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The association’s brand-new Adam’s Track was supposed to promote commerce and community relations. Japanese-American cyclists arrived at the track riding the latest racing models and dressed in bold cycling uniforms. Residents of all backgrounds arrived from throughout Southern California to celebrate opening day, an event preceded by fireworks and a military band. The debut of the track, which was designed for fast-paced, exciting racing, celebrated competitive cycling among Japanese-American riders, who were moving to Riverside county in increasing numbers.

In the 1890s, cycling became a popular pastime all over the U.S., in immigrant and nonimmigrant communities. It was particularly widespread in the semirural communities of inland California, where workers used country roads that connected scenic groves to navigate the flagship citrus industry.

In the town of Riverside, where 75 percent of Riverside County’s Japanese and Japanese-American population resided, bicycling brought the community together, elevating their place in the broader local society. But within a short period of time Riverside’s bicycle friendly roads also became treacherous places where police used surveillance and racially targeted laws to limit Japanese-Americans’ movements and to enforce their separation from their white neighbors.

Riverside Wheelmen. Courtesy of the Museum of Riverside, Riverside, California.

The Adam’s Track opening represented a high point in Japanese-American relations in Riverside. Some 1,590 people had come to the town from Japan by 1910, and cycling’s rise paralleled the sport’s popularity in Japan, where business owners established sporting goods and repair shops, manufacturers developed Japanese-branded models, and the national army was newly equipped with bicycles.

Likewise, a Japanese-American bicycling culture thrived in Riverside. Recent immigrants, including the Nishida and Yoshida families established bicycle shops soon after arriving to the community. Oral histories suggest these stores serviced not only the community, but also the multiracial populations who lived nearby. As time passed, these bicycle services evolved into motorized services. The Nishida family turned their bicycle shop turned into an automotive shop and the Yoshida family established a motorcycle agency and a garage.

The Riverside Japanese Association planned the inaugural bicycle races at the Adam’s Track as part of a grand gala honoring the birthday of the Meiji emperor, who advanced capitalist industrialization and Japanese expansion across the Pacific. A highlight of the event was an invitation-only celebration at the downtown Loring Opera House, a Romanesque theater specially decorated in Japanese lanterns, flags, and flowers. Local dignitaries made speeches, and the association presented a display of Japanese arts and technology, including daytime fireworks.

As the birthday gala’s formal program concluded, organizers invited participants to head to the newly built Adam’s Track to watch the races: in individual heats of one to eight laps around the three-eighth mile oval track, which was banked on the curves to maximize speed. There were six races in total, ranging from three miles to a mile-and-a-half sprint, which spectators watched from a newly constructed clubhouse and grandstand overlooking the track. Races were restricted to Japanese-American participants, with the exception of a single two-mile race opened to “everybody, Japanese, Americans, Indians and even Russians,” as noted by the local press.

The races were much anticipated. Regional news sources followed the opening of the track closely, detailed the race schedule, and highlighted event sponsors and prizes. The press lauded the energy and high speeds of the bicyclists. The Riverside Daily Press reported before the event: “The Japanese are enthusiastic sportsmen, and particularly enthusiastic bicycle riders, and as they promise a revival of the old sport … Their first race meet will undoubtedly be attended by an interested crowd of spectators.”

Japanese laborer riding through the groves on his bicycle. Courtesy of the Riverside Public Library, Riverside, California.

Previously, cycling races in Riverside had been held in the Athletic Park downtown, but local leagues of riders with Asian surnames were never present. This reflected a color line set by the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), a membership organization, founded in Rhode Island, which oversaw national bicycle racing regulations. LAW explicitly excluded African-American cyclists beginning in 1893. Racial exclusion also took hold in the Southwest, where bicycling was so thoroughly internalized as a white sport that the exclusion of nonwhite riders did not need to be articulated in formal guidelines. Consider one invitational meet in Riverside around 1897, which drew 88 riders from across the region. Only two registrants had Spanish surnames. None had Asian surnames.

Adam’s Track races were intended as an answer to this exclusion. Judged, officiated, and featuring men from the Japanese-American community, these races showed off these riders’ skill in a forum where they alone determined the grounds of success. The event’s judges included prominent community members like Ulysses Kaneko, a successful business owner and court translator, and—in a rarity for an era that denied U.S. citizenship to Asian immigrants—a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Built four miles away from the downtown Athletic Park, the Adam’s Track was near the Japanese camp of the Arlington Heights Fruit Company, which employed hundreds of recent arrivals to tend citrus plants and pick fruit each year, many eager to race.

Racers arrived at the track with elite U.S. racing bikes, including Pierce Cycles, a beautifully designed line based in New York that sold bicycles at $50 a piece. The cyclists earned awards for their victories, such as a $10 suitcase from Reynolds Department Store for first prize in the three-mile race, a $7 silver watch from Pollock Brothers for first place in the two-and-a half-mile race, and expensive clothing from cycling stores for sprints. In a period when sport was often used to express white racial dominance and national strength, Japanese-American boosters promoted the cyclists’ successes and lauded their athletic ability.

It is difficult to know if Japanese-American women joined in the craze; they are notably missing from public accounts of cycling activities in Riverside during this era. That is a stark departure from reports of cycling practices in Japan—where bourgeois women commonly rode bicycles in public spaces—and throughout the United States, where women cycled independently and in clubs from the 1890s onward.

Studio portrait of boy on bicycle. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

For all the potential for cooperation displayed at the Japanese emperor’s birthday gala and Adam Track’s opening race in 1905, the following years saw a distinct backlash against Japanese-American cyclists. And that backlash became part of a more general push for racial exclusion. In the city of Riverside, over half of all arrests of Japanese-Americans over the next decade were for bicycle violations.

An important turning point in cycling enforcement came in 1910, with the passage of a traffic ordinance. In the media coverage leading up to passage of the 20-page local law, public safety and police enforcement against speeding motorists were emphasized. But the ordinance itself placed heavy regulations on common cycling behaviors, including speeding, racing, riding on sidewalks, and cycling at night without a light.

The cycling ordinance also marked a new era of police enforcement and surveillance. Notably, the city equipped its police with motorcycles, “for use in running down traffic violators.” This was a significant early investment, at a time when the largest motorbike manufacturers only produced a few hundred units a year. The ordinance also extended special privileges to officers, such as requiring privately owned vehicles (including bicycles and horse-drawn carts) to surrender the right of way.

Violation of bicycle ordinances, a misdemeanor, carried heavy fees and penalties. For a first offense, cyclists could be fined up to $100 and imprisoned for up to 30 days. Three or more offenses heightened the penalties to as much as $500 and up to six months’ imprisonment. Although there is nothing in writing that explicitly targeted Japanese-Americans, police and the community clashed with great frequency in everyday enforcement.

Original arrest numbers carefully recorded by sociologist Morrison Wong reveal that Japanese-Americans were cited for cycling infractions at rates as high as 22 percent of their share of the population—a stark figure given that they had relatively lower arrest records in the county. In fact, cycling infractions accounted for 58 percent of all arrests of people with Japanese surnames. When riding bicycles in downtown spaces, where restrictions were starkest, or in multiracial neighborhoods, where a lack of infrastructure created incentives for prohibited practices, Japanese-American men were particularly vulnerable to traffic laws, which required police discretion of subjective acts like speeding.

The cycling ordinances represented just one of many ways Japanese immigrants were policed by forces of the state. Better known examples included the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement banning the immigration of Japanese laborers to the United States, and the 1913 California Alien Land Law, which prohibited Asian immigrants from owning land.

Today, more than a century later, many people still wrongly associate cycling with white middle-class hipsters—perhaps because history has buried the cycling stories of immigrants and nonwhites. But if you look hard enough, in places like Riverside, you will find rich stories of bicycling for pleasure, sport, and work—and of riding as an enduring method of resistance for people on the move.

The post When Police Clamped Down on Southern California’s Japanese-American Bicycling Craze appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sato’s photo series, “The Go For Broke Spirit: Portraits of Courage,” which was exhibited earlier this year at the Go For Broke National Education Center in Los Angeles, records the images and shares the stories of many of these veterans. This is an edited and condensed version of a conversation between Sato and Zócalo.

I was born here in Los Angeles, but my dad’s side was from Hawai‘i. The Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i weren’t interned in concentration camps during World War II, because they were more than 50 percent of the workforce, and without them, the islands would’ve shut down economically. A few of my uncles, on my dad’s side, fought in the 100th Infantry Battalion of the U.S. Army. Some of them might have been in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, but they passed away such a long time ago that we didn’t get a lot of information. My portrait series is of veterans who were in the 100th, the 442nd, and the Military Intelligence Service.

On my mom’s side they were from Visalia, California, so they were put in a concentration camp in Poston, Arizona. So my family had both experiences: One side didn’t go to camps but they fought in the war; the other side was interned and lost their land.

I tried to get personal stories from the veterans. In Hawai‘i we call it ‘talk story,’ and it’s something where people are just hanging out, talking, and they start telling their stories, personal stories.

It wasn’t easy. I’m Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American. But for the Nisei—or second-generation—like my mom and my dad, it was almost universal that they didn’t talk to their kids about the war or talk about the camps. Some say it was too traumatic or it was too shameful. So all my friends didn’t know about this until we were much older.

To get the men even to take the photos was a challenge in itself. The best way I found to obtain their cooperation—what I called my secret weapon—was to find the one lady who all the veterans talk to. There’s always someone who’s just hanging out, drinking with the veterans. And they would congregate around her. And the veterans would do anything that she asked.

The hardest part was to get them to put the uniform on. Some still would not do it, and I can understand that. I’m lucky enough that when I was working in Hollywood, I worked with a lot of celebrities. I worked on movie sets, things like that. And they don’t give you a lot of time, nor did they give you a lot of input. So it’s kind of the same thing with the veterans. I study their faces and decide what I want to try and bring out, what I know of them. Are they proud that they made it? Are they reflecting? Are they sad for what happened? I remember one man was crying the whole time, and I got him to just kind of glance up. And that’s another thing with Nisei men: Very rarely do you get a lot of emotion out of them. They’re very stoic, especially with photos.

I spent a lot of time working on the feel of these pictures, and I did a lot of tests. Asian Americans were always portrayed as weak, or feeble, or goofy—never strong. What I decided to do was add a lot of contrast. For me, that adds strength. And for this series, I desaturated the photos and I did many layers of work. I didn’t want to make it too glamorous or too bright. It should be a somber mood, but strong. Even if the veteran is glad he survived, it’s still something that he had to go through.

There was one veteran I was talking to, and we did a little interview over the phone. And he said at the end, “Can I tell you something?” I said sure. And he went on to tell me that he was a medic, and how this soldier had died in his arms. And he knew the man, and he felt that if he’d done his job better he could’ve saved his life. And he said he’d never told that story. He told me he wanted to get that off his chest. And so he had never told that story for 70 years. He kept that inside him.

I hope this series will bring back that history, and let not only younger Japanese Americans—but all Americans—know that this existed, that the camps existed, that it should never happen again.

The post Portraits of Loyalty appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Harry was present as a favor to a friend and seemed to know everyone. He circulated among the crowd, using flawless Japanese and native English. Bowing to the Japanese and chatting with the North Americans, Harry ushered the foreigners towards the media spotlight. Rarely had I seen anyone so bilingual and adept with different cultural styles. Was he Japanese or American? I was not certain.

I soon learned that the white-haired gentleman with ramrod posture and cosmopolitan grace was a retired U.S. Army colonel and specialist in military intelligence. His impeccable Japanese had first been honed during five years in pre-war Japan as a teenager. Today, many would regard this bicultural and bilingual background as an enviable advantage. But in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it made him suspect in both nations.

Born in Seattle in 1920, Harry Katsuharu Fukuhara was the son of Japanese immigrants to America, a generation called Nisei. He grew up hearing Japanese at home and attending language school, but would never have become fluent had his mother not moved the family to her native Hiroshima in 1933 upon the death of Harry’s father.

Once in Japan, Harry and his family were considered Amerika-gaeri—returnees to Japan from America. The term implied merely a sojourn abroad, but no matter how quickly they returned, the Amerika-gaeri were regarded as less than wholly Japanese. It was correctly assumed that America had changed them.

Although many Nisei held dual citizenship, Harry carried only an American passport. He did not view himself as a returnee and railed against his mother’s decision. Harry was ethnically Japanese but not a Japanese; he was an American by birth, law, upbringing, and inclination. This status was a predicament in an increasingly anti-American Japan already at war in China. Nisei, thousands of whom had been sent to Japan for part of their education, were singled out and bullied by peers and strangers. Harry found himself defending the United States to classmates and teachers. “I did not like it in Japan,” he said. “I did not like Japan even before I arrived.” Nothing Harry experienced there changed his mind. As soon as he graduated high school in 1938, he boarded a steamship alone for Seattle, after an affectionate parting from his mother and three brothers.

Harry Fukuhara (bottom left) with his brothers and parents in Auburn, Washington, c. 1927.

 
Upon arriving back in his beloved America, Harry received a chilly welcome. Even his best friend’s family rejected him. He discovered at 18 what he had not been sensitive to earlier. The state of Washington had a long history of anti-Japanese legislation, rooted in the fear of a “Yellow Peril” that reflected a stereotypical view of Asians as invasive “others.” As Japanese aggression in China increased, anti-Japanese sentiment escalated at home. Regarded as an American in Japan, Harry was perceived as a Japanese national in his native land.

Three years later, Harry was living in Los Angeles when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Fear-mongering and racial hysteria enveloped the nation. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, he authorized the removal of 120,000 ethnic Japanese, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, from the region. Less than three months later, Harry entered the Tulare Assembly Center, a fairgrounds-turned-transit camp, in California. Shortly after, he was incarcerated at Gila River, Arizona, the location of one of 10 internment camps dispersed throughout America’s most desolate regions.

In camp, the community divided. Owing to his years in Japan, Harry was considered a Kibei, a Nisei educated in Japan who had returned to America. The Kibei, often more fluent in Japanese than English from years in Japan, were looked down upon by the Nisei as awkward Americans. Alienated from their nation of birth and derided among those of their shared heritage, some Kibei espoused loyalty to Japan in defiance. In Harry’s mind, he was still an American first and a Nisei second.

But the time in camp changed Harry. For the first time in his life, he questioned his own behavior. “I possessed more than the average bitterness against everybody and everything,” he wrote later to a friend. When an opportunity to leave camp arose, he seized it, enlisting straight from detention into the U.S. Army as a linguist for the incipient, top-secret Military Intelligence Service. By spring 1943, Harry was bound for the Pacific.

Harry (right), an officer in the U.S. Army, interrogates a Japanese POW in Aitape, New Guinea, in April 1944.

 
Why did Harry volunteer to fight for the country that had imprisoned him? How could he head to the Pacific when his brothers were most likely in the Japanese Imperial Army? How did he react to his mother’s radiation sickness and brother’s painful death in Hiroshima? These questions inspired my early research, after initially meeting Harry at that press conference in 1994.

In time, Harry would respond in detail. The simple answer is that his identity as an American was forged during his early years, and tested and reinforced in the crucible of war. The reality, however, was far more complicated and anguished. Each successive military operation brought him closer to Japan—he was in Manila when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima—but, luckily, Harry never had to fight any of his relatives directly.

In October 1945, two months after the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered, Harry, by then a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, set out for Hiroshima to find the family he had not seen in seven years. He had no idea whether they were alive. Even though he had helped the U.S. defeat Japan, he had also made a personal vow upon setting foot in Japan that, whatever happened, he would not forswear his ancestral land. “I felt some responsibility to help postwar Japan recover,” he recalled later.

Harry subsequently spent nearly four decades in Japan as an American military intelligence officer, strengthening relations between the two nations during the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the Cold War. In 1990, at the age of 70, he accepted awards given in the names of the emperor of Japan and the president of the United States.

Harry was a man of conviction, competence and, most remarkably, resilience. At every stage of his life, Harry selected to place his trust in others, although he risked being rejected in two countries. In repudiating his despair in the internment camp, he embraced optimism and joined the military that had imprisoned him. In spurning the hatred so contagious in a war against a ferocious enemy, he sought empathy while never forgetting which side he represented. When he had an opportunity to assert his superior authority in negotiations during the occupation, Harry chose respectful cooperation. “The government couldn’t deny anything that the United States’ military wanted,” said Kiyoshi Hashizaki, a Japanese prefectural official Harry often dealt with, but Harry “didn’t ask for anything impossible.”

On that day in 1994 when I attended that Tokyo press conference to learn more about a diplomat and the refugees he had rescued during World War II, I was seeking to understand how certain individuals surmount cataclysmic challenges, embrace a global vision, and contribute to history. In the end, the man who personified a capacity for humanity beyond the ethnic and national divide was the one I least expected to encounter.

The post The Japanese-American Officer Who Helped Take Down and Then Rebuild Japan appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Issei and Nisei—first and second generation Japanese—began farming vegetables in the Phoenix area in the 1920s. My dad, a Nisei, was born in Idaho, and came to Arizona with his parents and siblings to farm in the 1930s. But in the 1940s, during World War II, many Japanese-Americans, including my parents, were imprisoned in internment (incarceration) camps, which meant they had to abandon their farms and homes. After the war, they were released with few possessions. Some returned to Phoenix and settled near the foot of South Mountain. My father’s family, the Nakagawas, ended up a bit farther east than the spot of their 1930s farm. About six Japanese-American families were nearby.

This rocky desert soil in this area was considered undesirable for farming by most Phoenix residents, but the Nakagawas and other Japanese-American farm families were willing to undertake the back-breaking work of moving rocks, tilling, and setting up irrigation systems to make the farms productive. During this time non-U.S. citizens were prohibited from buying land—alien land laws were not ruled unconstitutional until 1952. So my grandfather, a Japanese citizen, was prevented from buying land he had helped nurture. My dad, as the oldest son and a U.S. citizen, took care of the business, taking out loans in order to lease and later purchase land, equipment, and a place to live.

The Kishiyama family, who owned the land across the street from my dad’s family, was the first to grow flowers in addition to vegetables. They had heard the climate might be propitious for the new crop. Eventually other families added flower varieties of their own. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s the flower farms were a tourist attraction, featured in Phoenix brochures and described in magazines and newspapers. They were noted for their fragrance and the surprise of color in the middle of the brown desert. If Arizona brings to mind sand and heat, the Japanese flower gardens defied this expectation.

The gardens were located on Baseline Road, which initially divided the north and south portions of the city. A 16-block stretch, the fields turned the desert into a blanket of unexpected bright fuchsia, light yellow, off-white, pale pink, and violet-lavender. In spring, driving west along Baseline Road from 48th through 32nd Street, you would pass field after field of colorful, long-stemmed flowers called stocks, kale, sweet peas the color of jelly beans, and flowering purple-gray cabbages. The faint sweet smell of the fields carried for miles. We also grew cucumbers and tomatoes, and light green summer squash covered in a soft prickly coating that made my skin itch when I helped to box them for selling.

Most of the farmers constructed tin sheds to sell what they grew, with wooden shelves to display buckets of mixed bouquets and crates of vegetables. In 1969, to keep up with the times, my dad enclosed his shed with concrete walls and large glass windows, added air conditioning and a refrigerated display case, and built a three-story pagoda tower, with stairs leading to a viewing platform. The tin shed turned into a full flower and gift shop, named “Baseline Flower Growers.” In addition to mixed bouquets of cut flowers and boxes of cucumbers, squash, and other vegetables, we also sold Arizona kitsch like salt-and-pepper shakers in the shape of cactuses, toothpick holders with cowboy hats, and magnets shaped like the state. Wooden pop guns and cup-and-ball games, rice bowls, and tea sets were imported from Japan. Foot-long ropes of sour apple bubble gum, Japanese rice candy, cactus candy, and rock candy filled a shelf. Tourists would line up to climb wooden steps to the top of the tower to see all the flowers in bloom.

A postcard of the flower fields.

 
The business opened at 8 in the morning, although my dad was usually there earlier to check on the crops or meet workers who would be picking the flowers or vegetables. My mom split her time between home and the flower shop, picking us up after school and taking us to the shop when we were too young to be home alone. Large storage cabinets became nooks for taking a nap or reading a book when we were little. As we got older, the weekends and holidays were times for the whole family to pitch in. We learned to make bows out of ribbon, wire flowers for corsages and nosegays, and design holiday arrangements. We bagged the wedding bouquets and tagged flowers for delivery. The shop closed at 5, but during a busy holiday time like Valentine’s Day, we would be there until 10 or 11 at night, prepping for the next day. We would wait on customers, count out change, answer the phone, and take orders.

Just a few miles away, downtown Phoenix was becoming modern, with high-rise buildings, wide streets, and a new freeway, Interstate 10. Growth was spurred by new technology, air conditioning, and tourism. But throughout the 1960s and ’70s Baseline Road changed very little. Cars inched along the two lanes on weekends as drivers slowed and rolled down their windows to smell the flowers. Visitors would pull over to the side of the road, stand next to the fields, and take pictures. “Regulars” returned every year to buy their vegetable and flowering kale seeds from the different stands. The local newspaper ran a photo every March depicting children of the farming families standing in the fields to proclaim: “Spring is here!”

All of the flower garden families exchanged tips and helped each other out, sharing equipment and sometimes bartering for items they needed. The farms also created relationships between the Japanese-American families and the Mexican-American and Yaqui Indian families in the nearby township of Guadalupe. Some of the Guadalupe residents picked and bunched flowers or sold vegetables and flowers at the sheds. The farms could not have survived without their labor and support.

The Japanese-American farmers slowly sold their land as children chose to go off to college rather than stay and work the fields. But they were good stewards of the land, preserving a part of Phoenix from developing too quickly and creating a landmark in a city struggling to find an identity. Fittingly, the last family to stop farming flowers was also the first to do so, the Kishiyamas. In 2016, a small monument to the flower gardens and the legacy that the Kishiyamas started will be installed on a corner of the land where their flower stand once stood.

Baseline Road today is a four-lane highway, with apartment buildings, housing developments, and shopping centers where farms used to be. My family’s flower shop remains, but the fields were sold to a home developer in 2005—by that time, most of the children of the flower farmers, including me, were grown and had left to pursue their own careers. It’s now more cost-effective to buy flowers than grow them. But my 92-year-old dad still opens the doors of the shop each day to sell carnations, roses, sunflowers, mums, orchids, and other varieties that are shipped in from California and South America. The pagoda tower was destroyed in a fire years ago, but a photo of what the shop used to look like hangs on a wall.

Many customers at the shop today don’t know the history of the Japanese-Americans in south Phoenix, but every once in a while someone will stop in to reminisce and share a memory of the gardens and the farmers who turned rocks and dirt into a destination spot. In Japanese, we call this feeling natsukashi—“sweet memories.”

The post The Japanese-American Flower Growers Who Made Phoenix Bloom appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first thing I noticed was how much cooler it was in West L.A. than back home in the Pasadena foothills. The Westside front yards had more “poodling” of green shrubs trimmed like floating clouds, a sure sign of the handiwork of a Japanese gardener. Among these Westside relatives, both the grandfather, Yamatoku-san, and the male head of the household, Mr. Yamatoku, were gardeners, just like my father.

A wooden board with a grid for the Japanese game of “go” was carried out into the living room. The grandfather and my father—in silence aside for an occasional grunt, sucking of cheeks, and click of the go disc on the board—would play for hours. Both Yamatoku men have since passed; the last time I saw the younger man alive was in a hospital bed in Santa Monica after he collapsed on a customer’s lawn; he worked until the very end.

On April 1, this area we used to visit—“So-ta-ru” around Sawtelle Boulevard between Santa Monica and Pico boulevards—got a city sign officially christening it “Sawtelle Japantown.” I was thrilled to hear about the recognition, although it came a bit too late. Many of the beloved Japanese-American businesses—certain stores, nurseries, and the auto garage—have gone, replaced by chain stores and expensive housing.

The official Sawtelle Japantown being installed by city workers on April 1, 2015.

But that blue sign with the seal of Los Angeles officially adds another government-designated Japantown on the map. It gives a nod to this Japanese-American settlement in the Los Angeles area and reminds us of the other clusters of Japanese-American residents around L.A., each with their own character if not official recognition.

The Japanese-American community around Sawtelle dates to the 1910s, before that part of town was annexed by the city of Los Angeles. Japanese-Americans were drawn to the Westside by the beach proximity, large estates that needed garden service, and fertile land for growing flower seedlings and cucumbers. But covenants restricted where Japanese-Americans could live in Los Angeles, and the 1.48-square mile of Sawtelle, like many Japantowns around California, was not covered by the covenants. Like Uptown (present-day Koreatown) and Hollywood, it was a magnet for gardeners.

Sawtelle at one time boasted eight boardinghouses for Japanese men, essentially serving as “gardeners’ colleges,” according to scholar Ronald Tsukashima. Men new to the country and the trade could apprentice with a more experienced mentor. If a housewife was in search for a gardener, all she had to do was call the boardinghouse, and she would have any number of choices at her disposal. The veterans’ hospital and the new campus of UCLA had a lot of lawns and foliage that needed tending.

Japanese garden originally created by Issei gardeners in Stoner Park in West Los Angeles, a few blocks from Sawtelle Boulevard.

Most old-time Westsiders I meet wax poetic about the neighborhood’s nurseries. The pots full of seasonal plants and even bonsai. According to the website Preserving California’s Japantowns, Sawtelle had 26 nurseries and flower shops operated by Issei (Japanese immigrants to America) and Nisei (those born in the U.S. to Japanese immigrant parents) in 1941. Only one of those pre-war businesses exists today under the name Hashimoto Nursery. Another very well-known business, Yamaguchi Bonsai, which started in 1949, sits on the same side of the street.
But Sawtelle hasn’t been encased in amber. Today it’s full of young Asian-American professionals looking down at their mobile devices to confirm lunch or dinner at Tsujita LA Artisan Noodle. Korean tofu houses, boba cafes, and fusion restaurants make their homes next to Japanese chain grocery stores and sushi restaurants.

The 2010 Census shows that the tract west of Sawtelle was 17 percent Japanese and Japanese-American, including people of mixed race. The California average is 1 percent.

Eric Nakamura used to go to Japanese school, Buddhist temple, daycare, and the YMCA in the area. When Giant Robot—his photocopied ‘zine celebrating Japanese pop culture and punk music—took off, he opened his first store on Sawtelle on 2001. Two years later, he launched an art gallery across the street. Giant Robot now hosts art and craft shows, public readings and even video game nights. Eric told me he might have accidentally coined the “Little Osaka” nickname for Sawtelle; he regrets that an offhand remark to a reporter in the 2000s—when food trucks made the area a particular hot destination—would be so quickly accepted and spread by outsiders. Residents who had lived in the area for a substantial time (a group that included himself) were never attached to it.

And Eric does feel it’s more important to honor the people in the area because they are the ones who have helped Sawtelle preserve its Japanese and Japanese-American heart. As more and more of the physical neighborhood touchstones began to disappear in recent decades, Randy Sakamoto, a son of a gardener, and Jack Fujimoto, a former city college president and the author of Sawtelle: West Los Angeles’s Japantown, wanted to grab hold of what remained and have it grow.

Giving their home the name “Sawtelle Japantown,” they thought, would honor the legacy of the Issei and Nisei pioneers and build momentum for the renovation of the Japanese Institute of Sawtelle. The Japanese Institute has hosted a Saturday Japanese-language school and martial arts dojo, but Sakamoto and others want it to become a full-fledged community center.

This push to name Sawtelle Japantown reminded me of the visits I got from an older gentleman named Saburo 25 years ago when I was the editor of the daily newspaper Rafu Shimpo in Little Tokyo. Saburo regularly walked over from his home, a residential hotel that housed mostly bachelors, to share either a new conspiracy theory or his latest passion project.

Inside the Granada Market on Sawtelle Boulevard.

We had gotten to know each other when he was active with the Li’l Tokyo Tenants Group, which protested the closing of a 100-unit low-income hotel on Second Street after a developer had purchased the property in 1985. The redevelopment of Little Tokyo, one of the oldest and largest Japanese-American enclaves in the United States, was at the beginning of a wave that hit other Japantowns, both official and unofficial, along the West Coast. As this was happening, Saburo and others in Little Tokyo who wanted to rename a short street not far from City Hall—Weller Street—in honor of the Hawaii-born Japanese-American Ellison Onizuka, one of the seven crew members who had died on the space shuttle Challenger.

Even though they faced opposition—many businesses on the street opposed the idea because Onizuka in Japanese literally means “Devil’s Tomb”—the Onizuka supporters prevailed. Saburo’s success should remind us how much we need names, however imperfect; it’s hard for memory to reside in a place without one.

Japanese-Americans can now live outside of Japantowns and do. So why mark a neighborhood with a particular ethnic flavor that nods to a past rooted in exclusion?

Well, just because the past is past doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Like the sedimentary layers under our feet, layers of past experiences and people influence the present. Younger generations are ghost trackers, drawn to cultural and historic gatherings in Japantowns to keep the memory of people like Saburo alive. Sawtelle and Little Tokyo won’t look the same in 20 or 50 years, but they’ll still be Japantowns, just Japantowns of the 21st century.

The post How West L.A. Became a Haven for Japanese-Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My father, 17 at the time, could not make out a single sentence typed by Eric Hughes, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He asked a campus English teacher to translate. “It sounds like he is trying to invite you to come to America,” the teacher told my father.

Hughes, as it turned out, had started a men’s gymnastics team at the University of Washington in 1956, a time when the sport in the U.S. lagged behind Japan and the Soviet Union. While on sabbatical in Japan 1964, Hughes scouted for talent. That was when he first spotted my dad, a 5-foot-3 city and regional champion, ranked as one of the top five gymnasts in Japan.

The author’s father, Yoshi Hayasaki (first on the left), with his junior high school gymnastics team in Osaka, Japan.

The letter stated that if my dad earned admittance to the University of Washington, he would be guaranteed a scholarship to the school, and could compete on its team.

All my father really knew of America at the time came from watching translated episodes of Rawhide, an American Western TV series. His mother, on the other hand, had memories of U.S. mortars reducing her Osaka home to ashes, and racing to shelters with her oldest child in her arms as enemy bombs fell. But the family spoke little about these war stories.

Coaches and teammates could not understand why my dad would even consider competing in another country—in the U.S. of all places—when Japan was already the gymnastics superpower. Everybody was against the idea, including his father.

Still, the thought of America electrified my dad. He had been offered scholarships to Japanese universities, and saw that many former champions became physical education teachers, while others became foot soldiers for corporations. “I saw my future,” he told me. “It was like a blueprint.”

There is a Japanese proverb: “The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.” It is a saying I’ve thought about throughout my own life, as someone who feels like I’ve at times stuck out, even in America. Here, however, it is possible to find your own way, and embrace the road less taken. Back then, in Japan, my dad could practically see the hammer’s face.

For him, America was uncharted territory that seemed to offer an escape, or at least an adventure. Grudgingly, my grandfather assented, telling Dad: “Do not come back until you have accomplished something.”

Sending him on a plane would cost too much; my grandfather had lost his plastics company in bankruptcy when my father was in sixth grade, and the family of six was forced to move into my great-grandparents’ two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. My grandmother sold hairpins on the street. My grandfather never worked full-time again.

Yoshi Hayasaki (second from the left) with his family the day he left on the S.S. Idaho from Yokohama Harbor.

The family hunted around for a cargo ship. On July 30, 1965, shortly after graduating from high school, my father boarded the S.S. Idaho, which was transporting logs from Yokohama to Longview, Washington. The trip cost $300.

My father packed a week’s worth of clothes, jump ropes, a training bar, and one suit—a gift from his father. No one aboard spoke Japanese. When he could no longer see Japan, Dad wrote: “Should I really be doing this? I almost feel like jumping into the water and swimming back to shore.”

He slept in a cabin in the lowest bowels of the ship, where the rocking was most violent. By day three, the sky turned gray and stormy. Seasick, he vomited liquid for four days, as his body turned nearly skeletal. The pages of his diary went blank.

By the eighth day, he could drink water again. He ate a hot dog. “I’m living again,” he wrote.

Twelve days later, he rushed out to the deck and saw land.

He would attend high school again, this time for a year in Issaquah, Washington, to learn English, before taking the tests to gain acceptance into the university. He was one of three foreign exchange students in an all-white school. It took a while to realize that kids were making fun of him when they called him a “Jap” or a “chink,” but he tried not to care. He had a mission: to make it into college, and become a champion.

Once, while going through the cabinets of his host family’s home, he found an aluminum can, but could not read the label. He opened it, chewing its contents, stomaching the odd taste. He later found out it was dog food.

At night, my father practiced English words in front of a mirror. Still, he failed the admissions test twice. He began to fret, hearing his father’s words: “Don’t come back until …”

On the third try, he passed.

He enrolled at the University of Washington in 1966. His first competition in the national championships took place the following summer. To his devastation, he placed at the bottom.
The next year, “I went nuts training,” he said. He came back to the national championships in 1967 and took first place, becoming the USA Gymnastics all-around champion. He did it again in 1968, winning individual titles on rings, parallel bars, and high bar.

Then, he set another goal: to compete on the U.S. Olympic team.

Dad applied for American citizenship in 1968, knowing this was no small step: A few weeks later, a letter from the U.S. government required his appearance at a physical examination. He was being drafted for the Vietnam War.

Was what happened next luck or misfortune? He will never know. One day, while practicing a back handspring twist, he punched the floor with his legs hard, tearing his right Achilles tendon. He received 24 stitches. He failed the military physical. He also missed his shot at making the 1968 Olympic team.

Two years later, he recovered enough to win back-to-back NCAA all-around titles. But in another stroke of fate, he tore his left Achilles tendon.

He continued to train, but his body was never the same. His Olympic dreams over, he contemplated whether he should return to Japan, become the businessman that others expected of him. His father could be proud now; his son had accomplished something. Beyond athletics, Dad could also speak English. He had a cadre of American friends. He bought a 1957 Volkswagen, and began dating an American woman (who would become my mother). When an offer to become the head coach of the University of Illinois men’s gymnastics team arrived, he did not think twice. It was an opportunity to stay, build a community his way, and raise a multiracial family.

The program had been on a losing streak for a decade, so he reached into lessons from his own journey to turn it around: with the best U.S. athletes already spoken for, he could look abroad to revitalize his Illinois team.

He began traveling to Brazil, Finland, and Portugal to recruit, sharing his own story of making it in the U.S. and convincing athletes from far-off countries to compete for Illinois. Their wins soon attracted more local talent, developing top athletes from within the U.S. In 1980, they won the Big Ten title, and five more after that. He was named Big Ten Coach of the Year four times. In his 33 seasons, he coached 14 individual NCAA champions, 89 All-Americans, and three Olympians.

Yoshi Hayasaki (center), waving to the crowd when he was inducted into the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame in April 2014.

At 67 years old, my father continues to teach gymnastics at the private gym he started, The Hayasaki Gymnastics Center in Champaign, Illinois. For him, it’s not about working with the “stars.” He has most enjoyed teaching the hundreds of gymnasts who trained because they simply wanted to see where the journey would lead.

The ideals my father developed in America are now embedded within his gymnasts, and also within me: Growth comes from taking risks. Reinventing yourself is sometimes necessary. Fear of failure can be a powerful muscle. And sticking out? It might be the most underestimated strength of all.

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The Tartanettes enjoying a beach outing, probably at the YWCA’s Eliza Cottage at Huntington Beach.

Before, during, and after World War II, Nisei youth clubs offered hundreds of city girls like Ide a place of camaraderie and belonging where they could play basketball and baseball, socialize with boys, develop leadership skills, participate in community service, and forge lifelong friendships. In an era when Japanese-Americans faced racial barriers to social acceptance, these clubs enabled urban teenagers to claim American identity and enjoy the pleasures of popular culture.

The forced removal and incarceration of Japanese immigrants and their children during World War II have understandably overshadowed the history of prewar community life in both academic study and popular media. The loss of family belongings and club records during the war has further buried this past. Partly for these reasons, I had no idea that many urban Nisei teenagers were caught up in a round of parties, dances, and sports in the 1930s.

I first glimpsed this vibrant social world when, after finishing my dissertation about a Japanese-American farming community in the San Joaquin Valley, the Center for Japanese American Studies in San Francisco invited me to give a presentation on rural youth. Nisei men and women who came to hear the talk regaled me afterward with stories of their prewar activities, which I discovered filled the pages of the ethnic newspapers. My Nisei mother grew up on a farm in East Oakland where her family grew pansies and delphiniums for market. When I told her about my research, she said, “I just knew those city kids were having more fun than we were!”

The Nisei clubs provided a haven at a time when Japanese immigrants faced state laws that banned them and other “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from buying land. Japanese immigrants and their children were barred from marrying white people, were limited in where they could live, and were discriminated against when it came to accessing many public facilities. Journalist Katsumi Kunitsugu, whose family lived in East Los Angeles in the 1930s, remembered, “You go into just any old restaurant, and sometimes the waitresses wouldn’t serve you. They just never came around to take your order.”

The Just Us Girls club (JUGS) in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, c.1946.

Because they were often excluded from school organizations and extracurricular activities in the 1920s and 1930s, many Nisei turned to their peers for recreation and understanding. Clubs formed quickly along the West Coast in cities stretching from San Diego to Seattle. Los Angeles, with the largest population of Japanese-Americans, had the most extensive networks. By the eve of World War II, 400 clubs flourished in Southern California, many sponsored by Christian churches, Buddhist temples, the YWCA and YMCA, Girl Scouts, and Boy Scouts. Girls’ groups such as the Tartanettes were particularly numerous.

For Japanese immigrant parents and their children, city life made both ethnic culture and mainstream leisure culture more accessible, whether it was seeing the movies of Shirley Temple or Shirley Yamaguchi. However, the emergence of the “Modern Girl,” with her bold flapper fashion and pursuit of romantic love, caused concern among elders in Little Tokyo, as elsewhere around the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Nisei girls felt special pressure—and were watched more closely than their brothers—because young women’s behavior was a marker of family respectability in the ethnic community.

Belonging to a club made it easier for girls to gain their parents’ approval for beach outings and hikes, roller-skating parties, and athletic competition. And, as activist Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga recalled, there was an added benefit particularly attractive to adolescents: “Having joined a group of other girls in the neighborhood to form a social club, The Junior Misses … gave us girls opportunities (and excuses) to get together with other Nisei boys’ clubs.” Most groups also took part in community service, making Thanksgiving food baskets for the needy or sewing nightgowns for children at the Japanese orphanage.

World War II disrupted every aspect of the Nisei’s daily lives, as they and their parents became identified with the enemy. Herzig-Yoshinaga described a Los Angeles High School principal announcing to her and the other Nisei in their 1942 graduating class that they did not deserve to get their diplomas because “your country bombed Pearl Harbor.” After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, Herzig-Yoshinaga and her family were among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans—two-thirds of them U.S. citizens by birth—who were moved from their homes on the West Coast and in part of Arizona to confinement in desolate regions.

In the cramped, bleak wartime camps, the Nisei organized club sports and dances to boost morale and relieve boredom. Clubs also offered girls a way to contribute to the war effort. Mary Nakahara, who later became known as the political activist Yuri Kochiyama and became involved with African-American, Puerto Rican, and Asian-American liberation movements after her World War II incarceration, established the Crusaders girls’ club at the Santa Anita Assembly Center. They sent postcards and letters to some 1,300 Japanese-American servicemen. The revival of these youth organizations like the Girl Scouts and Crusaders helped to keep alive a sense of belonging to the outside world.

In 1945, when the war and their exclusion from the West Coast ended, many Japanese-Americans returned to their communities. However, their release from the camps didn’t mean that they were met with a warm homecoming. They still faced housing and job discrimination, vigilante violence, and harassment, compounded by a housing shortage and a swelling labor force. Clubs gave vital support to Nisei youth facing hostility in postwar Southern California, even if they would never be as popular as before the war. The JUGS—which stood for “Just Us Girls” and had begun at the Manzanar War Relocation Center—continued to enjoy sports and dancing after resettlement. The lively Atomettes—sixth graders at the West Los Angeles United Methodist Church—organized trips to museums, Knott’s Berry Farm, and Catalina Island. They also started the church’s choir, Easter breakfast, and annual bazaar.

And besides the fun and lasting friendships, these clubs expanded the horizons of girls like Fumiko Ide and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga. As Ide’s fellow Tartanette, sociologist Setsuko Nishi, explained, “Our parents didn’t have connections into the larger community. So that, in a way, the YWCA Tartanettes … meant a linkage into a larger American social world of young women.”

The spirit of the Nisei clubs endures in a number of organizations today, including the flourishing Japanese-American basketball leagues that now include fourth- and fifth-generation girls and boys. Nisei women students who were excluded from Greek letter organizations before and after the war established sororities such as Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi at UCLA and Sigma Phi Omega at USC, which now draw pan-Asian-American women seeking camaraderie and sisterhood. The organizing ability of women such as Herzig-Yoshinaga enabled them to play energetic roles in the movement for redress of the World War II incarceration of Japanese-Americans. Tracing the hidden history of their teenage circles shows how, despite racial barriers, the Nisei found their way onto the dance floor and learned to make a space for themselves in American youth culture. As Fumiko Ide remembered, “We really danced up a storm!”

The post The Hidden Life of Japanese-American Teenagers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In particular, I can’t stand the fact that, in Farewell My Lovely, Chandler writes about Marlowe arriving at a seaside estate: “Through a green gate I saw a Jap gardener at work weeding a huge lawn. He was pulling a piece of weed out of the vast velvet expanse and sneering at it the way Jap gardeners do.”

My late father, who was raised in Japan, was a gardener. He inspired my mystery series character, Mas Arai, a senior citizen and accidental detective who works as a gardener, lives in Altadena (in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains), and drives a beat-up Ford truck. In fact, one motivation for my having such a protagonist is to give the nameless gardener—who also showed up in the film classic, Chinatown—a name and history.

Part of my pique is native pride. I live in Pasadena, where I was born. I’ve lived in other places—Palo Alto, Tokyo, and even Wichita, Kansas, where I spent nine months on a writing fellowship. It was in the middle of the country where the details of my first mystery novel, set in Southern California, came fully to me. I was told by someone that once I was away from Los Angeles, I would better sense what was there. He was right. Wichita helped me hear the voices of the old Japanese immigrant and Japanese-American men hanging out at the local lawnmower shop, see the sharp and narrow turns of the historic Pasadena Freeway, and smell the mixture of the sea and smog. Chandler may be the dean of L.A. crime fiction, but I knew this was a world that didn’t figure in his books.

Chandler was never fully rooted in L.A. He was born in Chicago and spent his early years in England. Once he arrived in Los Angeles, he moved countless times within the western part of L.A. before finally settling in La Jolla, the wealthy and picturesque coastal community north of San Diego.

I was born in Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, delivered by the doctor who would be my pediatrician until I was 16 years old. I inhabited a place where, once a week, I could accompany my immigrant mother to a Japanese grocery store in a blighted business area of Pasadena to purchase shiny-eyed whole fish, large red cans full of the magic clear sprinkles of ajinomoto (also known as monosodium glutamate), metal canisters of soy sauce (then not readily available in your average grocery store), and coils of long daikon picked in fermented miso and sliced in thin crunchy wedges. “Musume-san,” the shopkeeper would call out to me. Little daughter, a term of endearment that reinforced that I was indeed a part of this place.

Being an only child for eight and a half years, I was surrounded by adults and adult problems. I learned to listen carefully in two languages, English and Japanese, and perhaps even more importantly, learned to interpret silence. Watch for signs—did a prolonged silence mean serious trouble? Did a smile mean real approval or brewing anger? At a young age, I became a cultural detective of sorts, attempting to absorb the rules of my households while negotiating the ones in the outside world.

L.A. is supposed to be a good setting for mysteries because of all the reinvention that goes on here, from its palm trees originally from Australia to its official city flower, the South African bird of paradise. Change at L.A.’s pace creates unreliable characters, and unreliable characters drive mysteries.

But I like L.A. as a setting because it’s home, a peculiar kind of home because, through fiction and movies, people all over the world have memories of a Los Angeles they may never have seen in person. And even for those who live here, so many of the region’s places remain mysteries, communities they’ve never visited.

I like writing about these places that are so often ignored: Torrance, Gardena, Boyle Heights, Montebello, Altadena, Sawtelle. These communities I list are places where people of my same ethnic background settled or resettled—pushed into neighborhoods by racial covenants or ethnic preservation after being incarcerated in camps during World War II. And I like to write about such places from more than one perspective; in my new series, I have a young multiracial female rookie cop, Ellie Rush, who travels through downtown L.A. on an LAPD bicycle.

I have a natural curiosity about places, driving me to investigate what types of people lived there in the past, what crops may have been grown there, what crimes may have been committed. The way Los Angeles holds its communities of people, delicate honeycombs overlapping, destroying and multiplying, is fascinating and creates the kinds of conflict that produce interesting plots.

Harmony in such a place is as elusive as any mystery. In my book Snakeskin Shamisen, I imagined one attempt at harmony:

Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki Mortuary specialized in cheap funerals, which you’d think would attract a crowd. … Mr. Lopez was obviously trying to hit the Latino, Chinese, and Japanese markets. A perfect plan in Lincoln Heights, where Mexican seafood restaurants and Chinese Vietnamese auto repair shops stood side by side. But the idea backfired, because mortuaries were like churches; people seemed to prefer them separated and segregated. It reminded Mas of his favorite Neapolitan ice cream—strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla were packaged together, but the solid lines of flavors never blended into each other.

I do share Chandler’s obsession with identity—both real and false—and family secrets. Perhaps this is why the detective novel belongs to L.A. We like to think we can erase our pasts, but we can’t. To escape from past and secrets, those of us who were born and raised here rely on silence.

Maybe I’m still that girl desperately trying to connect the dots in a world where much was left unspoken. By following my detectives, I finally have a chance to forge words and scenarios that make sense in solving the mystery of my home.

The post What Raymond Chandler Didn’t Understand About L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.