Early Japanese settled on land now owned by Donald Trump

By David Hosley

(This is part of our ongoing series, Lost Kinjo- a look at the more than 40 Japanese communities that disappeared after World War II. It is supported by funding from the California Public Library Civil Liberties Project and the Takahashi Family Foundation.)  

With the nation’s focus on a presidential election in which immigration is a primary issue, it’s worth noting that a Japanese immigrant incarcerated during WWII tilled the land on which Trump National Golf Club sits in suburban Los Angeles. 

It’s unlikely Donald Trump knows the history of Rancho Palos Verdes, or the towns like San Pedro that grew within it, for Trump bought the course in 2002.  The area had a rich blend of settlers, including Portuguese, Italians, Slavs and Japanese newcomers who made a living fishing from the sea and farming on bluffs above the Pacific Ocean.

Japanese Pioneers

Among the early arrivers from Japan were two brothers, Kumekichi and Tomio Ishibashi. With the forced opening up of Japan to trade in the mid 1800’s, and the subsequent Meiji era, southern Japan was economically behind the more industrial areas in the north.  Sons, especially those not the oldest who would inherit land, sought a better life in America.  They believed wages would be doubled, and so Kumekichi left southern Japan for San Francisco.

Family history says Kumekichi walked from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, where he found employment as a domestic.  In his early 30’s he got work on Harry Phillips’ farm on Palos Verdes Hill, where hay was the primary crop. By 1906 Kumekichi had saved enough to rent his own plot nearby above Portuguese Bend.  He built the first house on the hill.

Kumekichi was joined on the farm by his younger brother Tomizo, who went through Mexico to get into the U.S.  Kumekichi then looked for a spouse, and married picture bride Take Oka when she arrived in Washington State in 1910.  According to records, she was just under five feet tall, a dozen years younger than her husband and with a mole on her left forehead.  She would soon become the mother to a son, Masaichi, the first of five children. 

The land that the Ishibashi’s farmed had first to be cleared of sagebrush and cacti.  It had the characteristics of the Channel Islands, and for good reason.  At some point eons ago the most eastern island in the chain had joined the mainland.  Some of the Japanese kids exploring nearby caves found arrowheads that linked the peninsula to ancient inhabitants.

First Peoples

The first humans to live in the area were Tongva people whose ancestors had come from Asia more than 10,000 years prior.  The next group came from the other direction. A ship captained by a Portuguese conquistador arrived via Mexico in 1542 and named the bay after smoke from fires onshore. 

Once California became a state, immigrants continued to come as well as veterans from the Civil War. Tomizo married Umeno Iwahashi from Wakayama in southern Japan, and they started their family which grew to five children.

The farmers in the communities around San Pedro did not own their land.  Anti-Chinese legislation from the late 1800’s reflected decades of antipathy, and after the turn of the century there were increased efforts to limit Asian immigration.  Then, in 1913, the California legislature passed the Alien Land Law, which outlawed ownership by first generation Japanese, and limited leases to just a few years at a time.

A Living From The Pacific

Some of the first Japanese in the area were harvesting the ocean rather than the land.

Abalone were being brought in at White Point in the 1890’s. By the 1910’s, there was a group of Japanese fishermen at Timm’s Point in San Pedro.  Later, Mitsuo Endo’s fishing barge was anchored a mile offshore and small boats ferried to it.  Anglers caught bonita, sea bass, halibut and mackerel.

Sumiko Seo Seki grew up at White’s Point.  Her grandfather had come to California from Hiroshima and her father Midori Seo followed him to California.  The men reunited in Fresno.  Wanting to stay in the U.S., Midori went south and worked as a field hand in Gardena.  By 1913, he had been married by proxy to Kazue Henmi, a cousin.  They looked for land and found some above White’s Point that had been improved by a previous Nisei farmer.

Using gold coins, Midori rented the parcel from Roman Sepulveda and started dry farming.  The only water available was from a gravity fed tank, and that was for household use, not field irrigation.  The marine layer provided some moisture, augmented in the winter by rainfall.  The topsoil was only about a foot deep.

Sepulveda had retained some of Rancho Palos Verdes and proved to be a fair landlord.  The growing number of families farmed on a sharecropping basis, and their neighbors were a mix of Japanese and Portuguese.  Sumi Seki recalled people mostly stuck with their own ethnic group. “As for the Caucasians, we didn’t have much to do with them. It was only us kids that made contact with them. They had kids of their own, but we never associated as families…We just kept to ourselves.”

Seki said Sepulveda would ride on a large white horse daily from San Pedro to check on the farmers.  In seasons where crops didn’t come in, he would let them work on projects at his other holdings.  To a childlike Sumi, the handsome Sepulveda was impressive. She called him “The King.”  He was in many ways California royalty, born just outside of San Pedro, and by the time the Seo’s were established had been a principal in starting the town’s First National Bank, harbor district, water works and a grid of roads in the area.

White Point Hot Springs

One of the Japanese community’s crowning achievements was a destination built by Tojuro and Tamiji Tagami on a part of White Point that featured natural sulphur springs that were appreciably warmer than ocean waters.  Starting with a hotel and children’s pool, it later featured a gambling hall and a much larger pool.  Japanese came on weekends to relax and enjoy their friends. They also gathered in associations based on their hometowns in southern Japan.  Sepulveda owned the land on which the resort was built, and the Olympic sized pool had been his idea. He later built a second hotel, the Royal Palms, which did not admit Japanese.  An earthquake in 1933 decimated the Tagami’s resort and closed some of the vents that produced the hot springs.  It closed for good a few years later.

Scratching Out An Existence 

Sumi was born in 1924, the youngest in the Seo family.  She said in an oral history that she thinks she was delivered by a midwife in Los Angeles, because there weren’t Japanese midwives locally.  But her birth certificate says she was born in San Pedro.

While her father was relatively tall at almost 5 feet 8 inches, her mother was more than a foot shorter.  That didn’t stop her from having a command presence.  “My mother was the boss of the family,” she advised. “My mother would hire the men who would come to work but my father would go get them, especially at the peak of the season.  He would go up to Los Angeles to the boarding houses to get men to pick string beans, or pears, or at tomato time.  My mother used to run the farm and she was a tiny little lady.”

Kazue Seo also did all the cooking, rising at 4 a.m. to wash the rice for the workers’ meals.  She would mix in chicken or fish and vegetables, and then would provide an evening meal as well with workers gathered around a table in their living room.  During peak times, field hands would sleep in a seed storage shed out back.  In the 1930’s, Sumi recalls workers would be hired as well from Terminal Island if they weren’t in fishing season.  There were also some Mexican field hands from time to time, coming over from Simi Valley during the winter to get some extra income.

Daughter Sumi had her own work to do.  “It was my job to clean the chickens.  I had to wring their necks, and then de-feather them and all that.  It was something we had to do, so I just did it.”  Together, her family farmed 130 acres at one point, which was a far cry from the beginning, when her father and his workers had to hoist big rocks up on sleds and dump them in gullies to create suitable fields.  During the labor strife at the nearby harbor docks, striking men would moonlight at field hands, making 25 cents an hour.

Transforming San Pedro

Three things changed the course of life for families in San Pedro and the farm enclaves of the former Spanish land grant.  The first was the railroad linking San Pedro to downtown Los Angeles, some 21 miles away.  Second was the district school system, in which the children of the 1920’s baby boom started at a nearby grammar school but went for junior and senior high to San Pedro.  The third was the remarkable development of an all-Japanese village across the channel from San Pedro on Terminal Island.

The railroad came before there were Japanese settlers in the area.  It was built about the same time as the transcontinental railroad further north in California.  In fact, part of the early concept for the Los Angeles to San Pedro line was that it would be part of a southern route across America.  The new tracks opened in October of 1869.  Now goods and passengers could reach markets much faster by rail.  Shipping by sea was also picking up, with improvements to waterfront infrastructure, and the 1874 construction of a lighthouse at Point Fermin.  The Japanese farmers prospered along with the rest of the region’s residents, and they formed an association to market their products.  There were social institutions such as a community center and Japanese language school.

Making Of Terminal Island

Among the maritime improvements was a breakwater that connected two islands in the bay.  That was the beginning of man-made Terminal Island, which became a hub of fishing vessels and canneries turning the catch into commercial products shipped far and wide.  Cannery companies built housing for the fishermen and their families, with settlers from Europe on one end of the island, and the Japanese on the other.  Its island was formally called East San Pedro, but it became known as Terminal Island.

Even though a Japanese town in so many ways, Terminal Island had a profound impact on San Pedro.  The islanders relied on the city for commercial and social resources, including transportation, medical, and financial services.  As the island’s children grew up, they took the ferry to attend junior and senior high school in San Pedro.  Banking, marine supplies, and trains were all across the channel as well.

Rapid Response To Pearl Harbor

Proximity to Terminal Island also affected the Japanese and Japanese Americans on the nearby mainland when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941.  When arrests began on December 7th on Terminal Island, the fishermen and their families at White Point as well as farmers up above the cliffs became suspect, too. 

Frank Endo was in San Pedro on December 7th.  It was a Sunday, and he had left his home on Terminal Island to see a movie at San Pedro High School, where he was a student.  He had been born on the mainland, but a job on a fishing boat caused his father to move the family into company housing on the island in 1935.  Endo had played baseball with other Japanese American teens on the San Pedro Skippers, which competed with teams from other southern California towns.

Endo said in an oral history interview that he heard about the attack while getting a haircut but continued on with his plans for the day.  A military policeman detained him after Endo got off the ferry. After questioning, Endo was taken with other males to a fenced holding area in San Pedro.  “It was frightening.  I knew that war might come.”

Some of those detained were jailed immediately.  Others, like Endo, were released.

Adding to his concerns, Endo’s father was in Japan.  His Dad had moved six months before to take over the family rice distribution business.  

The Enemy’s Face

On Monday, Frank Endo got on the ferry again and went to class at San Pedro High, where the Japanese Americans were about eight per cent of the student body.  “The attitude of the kids in school, of course, changed dramatically. They looked at us differently now because we look like the enemy’s face.  And the word “J*p” started appearing very shortly.”

Sumi Seo was also in class on December 8th.  She recalls getting along well with the Caucasian students at San Pedro High School “because I’d gone to junior high with many of them.” 

That didn’t matter anymore.  “We used to gather at one part of the school—all my friends.  But nobody was there that Monday.  I thought something was funny. But I just went along and went in the hallway and said “hi” Elaine and “hi” so and so.  They just turned their head.  I felt like they were making me feel I was the one who signaled the Japanese to come over.”

The Seo’s had already felt the fallout from the attack.  While harvesting celery on December 7th, one of their neighbors, an Oklahoma native, aimed a gun at her father from an adjacent field.  A curfew was put in place the next day, and her brother didn’t observe it and was arrested.

Another neighbor who had been on friendly terms stopped visiting Sumi’s family, and when she went over to ask why, was ordered off the porch.

When she went looking for a job in Long Beach, no one would hire her.

The FBI soon came to Endo’s home.  Before Pearl Harbor, a picture of the Emperor of Japan had hung on the living room wall. Frank Endo said the small house was “ransacked.”

Dislocation Begins

Endo remembers that people started moving off Terminal Island almost immediately after Pearl Harbor.  He went to live with an uncle in south central Los Angeles and enrolled at Fremont High School.

The United States went on war footing, and that affected the military facilities, shipping industries and fishing in the San Pedro area.  Fear of attacks on the Pacific Coast of the U.S. put extra scrutiny on the Japantowns of California.  Federal agents continued to interrogate and arrest Terminal Island’s Nisei leaders in January.  A leader in the minds of the authorities could mean a church official, head of a language school, or someone who coordinated a business association.

In Washington, D.C. there was debate about how dangerous the threat was from the more than 100,000 residents of Japanese residents, the majority of them citizens because they had been born in America.

The FBI came to farmhouses along Palos Verdes ridge lines on February 8th and took more Japanese men into custody.  Sumi Seo’s father had been in downtown San Pedro selling tomatoes during the raids and he avoided being jailed.

Some of her San Pedro classmates were leaving school because their families were moving outside the restricted zones that had been established.  One family went to Fresno County and started planting for the new season.  Another similarly moved to Utah.

In late February, an executive order was signed by President Roosevelt.  It gave the government the power to assemble and relocate residents of Japanese ancestry in the three western states.

The roll out of the plan was uneven, but largely unopposed by Americans.  

Terminal Island had almost exclusively women and children as residents by February 1942, when business owners were given just a few weeks to relocate.  Then what was left of hundreds of Japanese families were given 48 hours to vacate.

It was a ghost town by February 27th, taken over by the government with the living spaces for the Japanese soon to be torn down.  The canneries were allowed to continue operation. Since the canning companies usually owned 51% of every Japanese fishing boat, compensation to the fisherman was minimal before they were repossessed.

Kumekichi Ishibashi’s lease for his farmland had been broken and the family moved to the Central Valley and once again started planting.  But their plots ended up in the restricted zones, and so they were sent to an Arizona holding facility.

The forced removal was complete by spring.  A newspaper photo shows a two-block long caravan of automobiles lined up on April 4, 1942 on Seventh Street in San Pedro.  

Sumi Seo’s mother had gone to Little Tokyo to withdraw money she had deposited at Sumitomo Bank.  Her funds had been frozen, and wouldn’t be returned until after the war.  Their neighbors couldn’t understand why they had to leave.  On April 5th was the last day on the farm, she remembered.  “We left our dog, cat, we left our horses and chickens.” They didn’t know where they would end up.  “It was sad,” she said. “They never told us.”

As her father was patting the horse that had plowed their fields so for long, Semi saw he was crying. She recalled his last words to his trusted steed: “I hope you work as hard for your next family as you worked for me” 

The Tagumi family, who farmed nearby, had a truck and the two families piled up what possessions they could take. Hideo Endo advised them to go to the electric train station in San Pedro, which was famous for its red cars.  Others took a special train or drove themselves to imprisonment.

Racetrack to the Interior

Most of those who lost their freedom were taken to a racetrack in Arcadia on the other side of Los Angeles.  Barracks were not completed, and so many were assigned quarters in horse stalls only recently vacated by animals.

The food was so different from the healthy diet they were used to that mealtimes were an ordeal, with government surplus items mixed in with hot dogs.  They had been used to fresh fruit and vegetables, with fish ordered from the man who would come to the farm every few days.

At Santa Anita, the people from the Palos Verdes Peninsula were said to stick to themselves, especially the Terminal Islanders, who spoke little English.  They did not get along with their nearest neighbors, who had come from Bainbridge Island in Washington State and were thought to be cooperating too much with the government administrators of Santa Anita Assembly Center.  They were all in a holding pattern, waiting for “relocation centers” to be built in the interior of the country.  

There really wasn’t much to do.  Those incarcerated at Santa Anita have said the primary occupation was endlessly walking around the oval track talking with family or friends about camp dynamics and what might be next for them.

The young people adjusted better.  They had far more opportunities to be with other teens than back home, and there wasn’t much work to do, or any real school for that matter. Sumi and her pal Kay Tagumi got jobs working in the main shower area, which had previously been a washing off place for racehorses.

Frank Endo had been a champion gymnast growing up, and got a job teaching the sport at the assembly center, while also working in a mess hall.  When his senior year was cut short at Fremont High, he’d demanded his diploma in the spring and got it.  Now college would have to wait.

The War Relocation Authority had identified ten sites where thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans could be held away from the Pacific Coast.  They were an odd assortment of surplus land, as close as the Owens Valley from which Los Angeles got much of its water supply, to a swamp in Arkansas whose owner lost the land when he failed to pay taxes.

While efforts were made to keep families intact, that wasn’t always the case.  And there were too many people from greater Los Angeles to be assigned to one concentration camp.  So former residents of San Pedro and its surrounding towns ended up in several camps—Poston, Manzanar and Amache among them.

From there the dislocation continued almost immediately.  With many farm operators and their field hands enlisting in the Army, there was a national crisis when the crops ripened in the fall of 1942.  So men in the camps were offered jobs picking sugar beets and harvesting other crops.  Some got released for other jobs on the outside, including working in the war industries.  Later, after federal officials administered a loyalty oath to all those held under guard, second generation Japanese Americans could enlist in the military, or later be drafted.

By 1944, it was pretty evident that Japan wouldn’t be invading the United States, and that forced removal had not only been unnecessary, it had been a violation of human rights. There were lawsuits challenging the legality of steps taken to carry it out.  By then, most of those who could depart camp had done so, leaving many older Japanese who were not a threat to anyone and mothers with children.

In 1945, a trickle of Japanese Americans started returning to California.  In some cases family member or two would make a foray to check out the old homestead.  There had been a flurry of anti-Japanese resolutions by local governments, mostly in the Central Valley, and several homes were shot at and in Placer County, a firebombing of a packing shed had been tried.  Despite the hostility, post war lives resumed.

Hardly anyone came back to Terminal Island.  A small number returned to work in the canning plants.  But the homes and businesses of the Japanese part of the island had been flattened in 1942.  Commercial fishing in California had been outlawed for non-citizens, which was directly aimed at Japanese immigrants.  The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the regulation was overturned.  However, the industry had been dying out even before the war due to overfishing.  By the mid-1950’s it was not a meaningful part of the region’s economy.

Sumi Seo married Noburo “Don” Seki, a veteran of the heroic 442nd Regimental Combat Team.  One of the industries of Southern California that had expanded during the war was Douglas Aircraft, and she worked there in peacetime helping to construct airplanes.  When the U.S. made it possible for first-generation Japanese to become U.S. citizens in the early 1950’s, her parents never applied.  Sumi went on to testify at the Commision on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hearings in Los Angeles in 1981.

Frank Endo got drafted in 1945, and while in the Army took a test of proficiency in Japanese.  He did well and subsequently was put on a troop ship from Fort Lewis to Yokohama. Endo served as an interpreter in war crime trials and stayed on as a civilian working for the U.S. Air Force as Douglas McArthur oversaw reformation of the country until 1952.

Starting Over

Kumekichi Ishibashi and his son Maisachi returned to farming in cliffs above the sea north of San Pedro.  Their farmhouse had been torn down during the war.  They found 500 acres to plant.  Kume’s brother Tomizo and his four sons also returned. The next generation of Ishibashi’s had new ideas about farming and marketing, expanding what they grew to include flowers and opening stands to sell some of their produce on site.

But increasingly, the farmland on the former Palos Verdes land grant was being developed for housing.  There was a new baby boom in America, bigger than the one the Japanese community experienced in the 20’s.

Service veterans could use G.I. benefits to buy or build a home, and to get advanced education, which in turn increased their buying power.  The desire for infrastructure improvement post war produced a raft of highways in southern California and Los Angeles grew rapidly.  Also impacting the San Pedro area was the vision for a much larger international port. 

A Field of Homes

With the 1950’s came new opportunities for Japanese American home ownership, particularly in the Gardena Valley, including Torrance where Asians were not only allowed to purchase homes, but they were sought after as buyers.  Southern California was on its way to becoming one huge metropolitan region, its boundaries only signaled by city limit signs.

Developers had their eyes on the Palos Verdes peninsula, and that interest went back a long time.  In 1913, an East Coast banker had bought 16,000 acres north of San Pedro with plans to build residences.  It didn’t happen, in part because of war and then the Depression. After World War II, a Midwest company purchased 7,000 of those acres and sought permission to build a new town to complement three others that had incorporated north of San Pedro on the rolling hills. 

Land available for farming kept shrinking, but several dozen Japanese American farmers stuck it out.  Among the last were Tom Ishibashi and James Hatano.  Ishibashi died in 2011 and Hatano in 2015.  Hatano had moved into San Pedro, and had reduced his work on the farm to three days a week.  It was land he’d worked since shortly after World War II.

The size of the Japanese community was decimated by dislocation during and after the wartime incarceration.  Uniquely, the mass removal of Terminal Island’s residents affected San Pedro’s schools and businesses.  Urbanization killed off farming in the area. Today, about half of San Pedro’s population is LatinX, with only seven percent of residents identifying as Asian.  Japanese Americans there are now a fraction of a fraction.

Not Forgotten

The Japanese pioneers who came to the Palos Verdes peninsula more than a century before are remembered in many ways.  Their stories have been recorded in oral histories available from CSU Dominguez Hills and several other keepers of Issei and Nisei history.  The White Point Nature Center has an exhibit about the Japanese who harvested abalone from the waters off the point.

Places they lived as fishermen and farmers are marked with monuments, including one placed by the Palos Verdes Historical Society.  It marks the site of the farmhouse built by Kumekichi Ishibashi in 1906, and tells how the Japanese community got its start.  It’s on a path open to the public between the golf course clubhouse and the ocean cliffs.

The address is #1 Trump National Drive, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA. 

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