By Raymond Douglas Chong
(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.)
Before 1942, the Japanese American community thrived in Mountain View Japantown, south of San Francisco. They settled in a farming center near Dana and View Streets, where they flourished as flower growers. The farm cluster was part of the agricultural Santa Clara Valley, The Valley of Heart’s Delight.
Background
The Japanese Americans engaged in truck farming and fruit growing. In its heyday, Mountain View Japantown had one photo studio, three grocery stores, one boarding house, two barber shops, one pool hall, one restaurant, one confectionary store, one manju shop, one fish store, one tofu shop, one carpentry contractor, and one gambling house near Villa and View Streets. The Buddhist Temple, Japanese Community Church and a Japanese Language School served the community.
In her My First Hundred Years: The Memoirs of Nellie Nakamura from 1902-2002 (2019), Nellie Nakamura narrated life in both pre-and post-World War II in Mountain View from 1930 to 1950.
Nellie was born to Matsunosuke Sumiye (father) and Rui Suzuki (mother), pioneer Isseis or first-generation Japanese Americans, in the Agnew neighborhood of San Jose. She grew up on the orchards of Cupertino and the farms of Mountain View.
On October 25, 1921, she married Harry Nakamura, an immigrant from Yamanashi Prefecture in Imperial Japan, at San Jose Methodist Church. They lived in Los Angeles for nine years. After their dry-cleaning business in the Boyle Heights neighborhood failed, during the Great Depression, Nellie and Harry returned to Mountain View. They raised David, Margaret, Kenneth, and George.
Nellie’s daughter Margaret Nakamura Cooper gave AsAmNews permission to excerpt the following passages from her late mother’s book.
Heyday of Japantown
Moving Up North to Dale Avenue
We left Los Angeles in 1930, during the Depression. David was three and I was pregnant with Emmy (Margaret’s nickname). She was born in October 1930 at my stepfather’s house on Whisman Avenue. After she was born, my husband and I started the berry business with the money we had saved when we worked at the Lewises.
Four families were partners in a ranch. We got a five-year lease on a big patch of bare land from Jimmy Dale, about ten or twelve acres, and we all had, our portion to farm. The other families trusted Harry because he was good in mathematics. They asked him to do the surveying, and he cut the plot into fourths. Each family farmed one section. I forget how much – an acre or two acres, I guess.
Everybody built their own house on the piece of land that was allotted to them. My husband and all his friends built our house. It was pretty neat, you know.
The Raspberry Business
We sharecropped raspberries. Men from the city called commission merchants contracted to buy the fresh berries. They were mostly Italians. I think they were the ones that furnished the containers. They called them “chests:’ Each chest contained so many drawers for the berries. The small chests had 10 drawers, and the ordinary chests had 20 drawers. Raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, all the different berries went into those chests.
Picking the berries was women’s work. We used different methods in different years, but we usually picked the berries into cans. They were all the same-sized cans — I don’t know where they got them from. We strung two cans on a string and tied them around our waists. In one can we put the nice fresh berries, the “number ones:’ The number ones were the perfect ones. The “number twos” that we put in the other can were not so good. We could still sell them, but only for about one-fourth the price of the good ones. The price was almost like nothing. What I did with the number twos was make raspberry juice. I made concentrate, with a lot of sugar in it. It was good!
The men had other things to do, getting the chests ready, putting the baskets in the drawers and all kinds of things. The chests were made of wood and so were the drawers. In the very beginning, the berry baskets were made of shaved wood. After wood became scarce, they started using thin cardboard, with staples on the corners. The farmers would buy the baskets, fill them with berries and put them in the drawers.
The Japanese Community Church
When the church was built, Harry and I were living in L.A. Tommie and the rest of the family were there, but not me and Harry. The church stood for a long time, and the Japanese Christians brought their kids there for Sunday School. After we moved to Dale Avenue, I sent my kids there. Most of the time, not as many adults came as children. The adults went to church on Easter or Christmas or something special, like when somebody got married, or for some family-related gathering.
Living at the Calvos’
When we moved to the Calvo property, we moved the house, too. There were professional house-movers who did that. They cut the house in half and moved the two parts to the new site by truck. Harry figures that it was much cheaper than building a new house. After we moved the house. We added on an extra room for the kids.
We rented half of our land, three acres, to my father’s brother, Mr. Amimoto. The Amimotos had an old house, too, that they had moved onto the property.
Community Groups
The Japanese Association (Nihonjinkai) had a meeting every few months. Sometimes my husband would go, sometimes he wouldn’t. He didn’t like them too much. It was mostly for social affairs, ’cause nothing important was going on.
Just before the war, people were more interested and anxious because they wanted to know what was going to happen. The JACL and other groups had meetings where leaders in the community would talk about what to expect. We belonged to the JACL. My husband didn’t want to get involved in groups with Japanese names. The JACL was all citizens. He didn’t belong to anything else.
Incarceration
Under Presidential Executive Order 9066, February 19, 1942, the War Relocation Authority ordered the mass evacuation of Japanese Americans in the exclusion zone along the West Coast, including Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona.
Preparing to Leave
We knew a few months ahead of time that we were going to have to leave in the spring. I started sewing right after we heard, because I sewed, you know. I made these new outfits that we were gonna wear. I made myself a tan jacket because my sister bought me a brown skirt. I made green and white seersucker mother-and-daughter outfits for me and Emmy, with pleated fronts. And I made Emmy a brown corduroy jacket and pants. I also saw that everybody had some underwear; we bought the underwear.
The government told us what we could take and what we could not take, and how much. Each person in the family could only take what he could carry. They modified that after a while, because we couldn’t really carry anything besides our own clothes. So the government said we could carry boxes or other light containers that were not too heavy to manage — fifty pounds. I think we had two wooden boxes. One box was made by David when he was in high school; he made it out of wood in his shop class. I still have it in the garage. It’s a box with a cover, and it was about two feet wide, three feet long and three feet deep. I put underwear and clothes in it. It held most of our clothes.
Mr. Calvo had asked Harry if the Macedos could stay in our house while we were gone. The Macedos were migrant workers who came up from Mexico every year to work for him. Harry had said, “Of course. We’ve known them for years and we know that they’ll take good care of the house.’“
About a month before we had to leave, we started storing things. Mr. Calvo kept some things for us, and we stored tables and books and whatever furniture we had in our Japanese church. The whole Japanese community used it to store valuables that they couldn’t take to camp with them. The place was just crammed full of furniture from everybody in that area, not just the Christians.
We stored some things in the church, but after we left we found out that anybody could break into that church. Mrs. Minton said that every time she would check on it, she could see that people had gone through there. Lots of stuff was scattered around from people’s boxes. She said it was awful. People who lived nearby, and who knew that all the Japanese were away, could get into the church and take whatever they wanted. When we got back after the war, I found that the covers were torn on some of my books, as if someone had taken a knife and cut them up.
Harry hid two things in the rafters of the house. He was afraid that they’d be confiscated by the authorities. If they were found, they would put him and the family in a bad light. He hid a Japanese archery set: a bow and arrows. He also hid a medal that Harry’s father, who was a Shinto priest, had received from Emperor Hirohito upon his investiture in the 1920s. Harry’s father had given him that medal, and we still have it displayed in the house. I don’t know what happened to the bow and arrows.
Eviction Day
I don’t remember if I ate anything or not. You know, you’re so nervous and keyed up. I know I had something, because I prepared it the day before. I served everything on paper plates or something. I thought of doing that so there wouldn’t be a mess of dishes the morning we left. We kind of dressed up to go out, didn’t we? Everybody dressed up to go to the train station.
We didn’t have time to mope or be sad or glum because we knew that this was the day and we had to go. There was no time to weep or laugh or do anything. We had to just grimly eat our breakfast and leave.
Selling the Truck
No hakujin came by to buy any of our things, except the truck. That was the sad part. We had already sold our family car. The only vehicle we had left was the truck. Two or three days before we had to leave, a hakujin man came by and said, “It’s too bad you have to move. I know you have to use this truck ’til the last. It would be nice if you got some money for it, so I’d like to buy the truck from you.”
Harry said, “That will be fine. I don’t want to drive to the station and just leave the truck.”
The man said, “I’ll drive you to the station?’
At the last minute, the man gypped my husband. Harry had to take whatever the man wanted to give. How could he stand and argue with him when we had to go whether we got the money or not?
That’s terrible. Ninety dollars when he promised three hundred. It was a little pick-up truck, like every Japanese family had to put our produce in and take it to the ice cars. That was the way we did. That’s why every farmer needed a truck, small or large.
At that stage, nothing could have made me any more angry and sad than I already was. I didn’t think too much about the truck because I was already so mad and devastated that I wasn’t going to let any more things bother me. But you know, if I had the capacity to let it bother me, I’d have gone crazy like my friend.
On May 26, 1942, the War Relocation Authority evacuated the Nakamura family to the Santa Anita detention center in Arcadia. They lived in converted horse stalls at the Santa Anita Racetrack.
The Nakamura family were eventually transferred to the Heart Mountain concentration camp, at Cody in Wyoming, on September 10, 1942. In the barren wood barracks, they endured dust storms and wintry chills on the sagebrush desert near the Shoshone River.
They finally departed on January 20, 1944, to Minneapolis in Minnesota on Citizen’s Indefinite Leave. They stayed with relatives.
During their agonizing imprisonment at Heart Mountain concentration camp. Nellie suffered the worst maternal tragedy. Kenny contracted meningitis, the inflammation of the brain lining. He died at the concentration camp on September 18, 1943.
Writing Out the Grief
I couldn’t think about losing Kenny for a long time, but afterwards, I wrote two poems. They’re in my book of collected poems.
Kenny
My little son Kenny left me a year ago today
To find the Happy Hunting Ground far away…
I called and called, frightened,
But he never glanced backwards,
His resolute stride told me I called him in vain,
And then I remembered
He was going exploring!
He had asked for permission time and again.
Each time there was something
That kept him from going.
Either ticks or rattlesnakes or scorpions and such!
“When all danger is over
You may go,” I had promised.
Evidently his grapevine had kept him in touch.
He’s exploring the caves
of the Indians and pirates,
(How the pirates had got there I never will know!)
But a little boy’s instinct
Is as true as the arrow.
I gave my promise, so I had to let him go.
Thus our little son Kenny left us a year ago today
To play in the Happy Hunting Ground far away.
To play in the Happy Hunting Ground far away.
Resettlement
The Western Defense Command issued Public Proclamation No. 21 that lifted the West Coast exclusion orders and restores the right of Japanese Americans to return to their former communities, effective January 2, 1945. They resettle to Mountain View in 1945. By 1950, they had brought a new house in Los Altos. Nellie remembered their resettlement.
Back at the Calvos’
When we came back to the Bay Area, at least we had a house to go to. The Calvos had kept our old house, which was on their property. They let their farm manager, Mr. Macedo, and his family live there. The Macedos kept the house clean; they didn’t mess things up. Mr. Calvo knew that we were coming because we wrote him after the war ended. The Macedos moved out and they cleaned the house up nice because they knew we were coming back.
We lucked out. We were better off than a lot of people who had no place to come back to. People who didn’t have a place to go stayed at the Japanese language school in Mountain View. They just got a mattress and slept there. They had a big hall where people could just stay for awhile.
And people like Mrs. Minton and the Duvenecks, and others who were sympathetic to the Japanese, tried to do whatever they could to find homes and jobs for us and things like that. Mrs. Duveneck started the Fair Play Committee to help people get re-established.
The Loucks Place
We only stayed at the Calvos’ for a few months because Mr. Calvo’s lease ran out. He had to move, and so did we. We had to find another place to live. We were friendly with Annie White and her husband. Mrs. White was the daughter of Mr. Dale, our former landlord at Dale Avenue. The Whites were a childless couple who lived nearby. They were very kind to the children.
We were lucky to be able to live there because it helped us save the money to build our own house.
Anything that Anybody Would Hire Us to Do
We weren’t really able to save any money in Minneapolis. When we came back, we didn’t have any money, so we had to struggle right away to work I don’t know how we made it, but we did.
After the war, Harry gave up farming. He didn’t have the tools or equipment he needed. And we didn’t have the money to buy plants and fertilizer and feed the family until the crops came in. He turned to gardening, like a lot of other farmers who came back from camp. He started by mowing lawns, and soon he had a few steady customers.
All the women around my age did whatever we could – housework, garden work, anything – wash, paint furniture. We did anything that anybody would hire us to do.
The Community Changes
After the war, everybody was kind of on their own. They didn’t want to get together so much for kenjinkai picnics and things. They were busy, more serious about things. Before the war, we were all working at our day jobs and sending our kids to school. But after we came back from the war, we were more serious, and the kids were growing up, so we didn’t have too many meetings or gatherings.
The Japanese Community Church sort of fell in disrepair because we had used it as a storage place during the war. After the war, when people came back, they sort of outgrew that church. My kids went to that church every Sunday before the war. It sufficed when they were young and wanted to learn just anything, but when people came back, they were more sophisticated, and that church was just too small for them.
Besides, by that time, the hakujin-no people who had been the Sunday School teachers were not around anymore, so the church just wasn’t usable. We had a few meetings at the church after the war, and then the church was closed because everybody wanted to go to a hakujin-no church.
Harry’s Gardening Jobs
Gardeners started out at a dollar an hour after we came back from the war, but within a year, it went two dollars. When Harry first started working as a gardener, he had maybe two, three clients. It was hard work, because they wanted somebody to come and mow the lawn and spade up the garden.
Then a lot of people wanted a gardener steady, so Harry was hired exclusively to work in one place. They would pay him by the month or the week. That way, he didn’t have to be there right on time, or leave right on time. He could map out what he had to do to keep the place looking nice, and he could plan what he had to do every day. He wasn’t just hired to do the heavy work. He knew what the bosses wanted, what kind of flowers they wanted where, and how to keep the lawns nice and all that. That’s what the bosses wanted. They didn’t want to have to watch him every second.
His first steady customer was a wealthy older couple up in Los Altos named McDonald. He was an engineer who had invented some kind of cannery equipment and become very wealthy. He had a nice large estate, so he hired Harry to maintain it. His hobby was woodworking. He had a whole shop full of tools, and he made those tables we have outside.
Retrospection
From Santa Maria, California, Margaret, daughter of Nellie and Harry, wrote a retrospective essay about her life from 1941 to now. She was born on October 7, 1930 in Mountain View.
December 7, 1941 – When My American Dream Vanished
By Margaret Nakamura-Cooper, 2024
The Infamous Sunday
My Sunday was exceptionally spring-like, on December 7th, 1941, in Mountain View, California. Sunday School at the Japanese Community Church was over, and about eight of us walked down the country road from the little wooden Japanese Community Church on Whisman Road to the house of Mary Kiyomura, the church organist. I remember sitting with the other kids on her lawn, eating spaghetti on paper plates.
I can still see Mrs. Kiyomura pushing open the screen door and announcing to all of us outside, “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor!” We looked at each other, not comprehending its meaning. Where’s Pearl Harbor? How does that affect us? We were soon to learn its impact.
At first, we were told we couldn’t travel outside our immediate area. My mother tried to catch a bus to San Jose 15 miles away, but the bus driver wouldn’t pick her up. She wanted to go to the bank to withdraw some money. Bank of America froze money withdrawals by Japanese American citizens and aliens alike. All of us were under virtual house arrest. We had done no wrong but were descendants of those at war with the United States.
Even as an eleven-year-old, I felt that surge of patriotism when I saluted, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” I was born in America. This was the only country I knew. I thought this was my country. They said, “Ah, Ah—Not so fast there. Maybe you’re not really an American. Maybe we can’t trust you. Maybe you’re on the other side.”
Like many other immigrants from foreign lands, my father, Harry Takazo Nakamura, came from Yamanashi prefecture, Japan, to seek his fortune, start a new life, raise his family, and help himself through the sweat of his labor, enjoy the benefits of democracy “with liberty and justice for all.”
It’s true: people of his race had a tougher time than European immigrants. He wasn’t allowed to become a citizen. He couldn’t become naturalized like Europeans. It was the law. His children, luckily, were by birth citizens because they were born here, so he was grateful for that. Papa’s marriage to Nellie Yae Sumiye Nakamura, my mother, was a help in some ways because my mother was born here and is a citizen. I recently found out that even her citizenship was stripped from her for a time because she was married to my father, an alien. It was later restored.
Why is citizenship so valuable? You can vote or own property and feel a part of this country in your heart.
The Ghastly Incarceration
They told us we’d have to leave our homes and be imprisoned. Prison? Prison is for criminals. I hadn’t done anything wrong, nor had anyone in my family. Was I going to prison for the accident of birth? Why weren’t the Germans and Italians going to prison? We were at war with Germany and Italy, too. Too complicated– too many people, too many intermarriages. They were White. The Japanese and Japanese Americans were not that many – about 120,000 – aliens and citizens alike. Besides, they were easier to spot. What if someone were married to a Japanese American? The Caucasian spouse would also have to go to camp if they wanted to stay together.
We arrived at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia on May 26, 1942. The War Relocation Authority decided to shut down the Santa Anita Racetrack for a temporary duration to house a few of its citizens instead. This was a temporary camp before a permanent camp was made ready for us somewhere. Some of us had to live in stables. They were fancy for stables but miserable as homes. We were there from May to September 1942. The smell of horse manure was pretty overwhelming. Luckily, our family lived in tar paper barracks. The knotholes provided much-needed ventilation for the hot Los Angeles weather. The black tar paper added to the summer heat.
The United States government euphemistically called it a Relocation Center. It was a makeshift concentration camp. We called prison “camp”. The concentration camp looked a little like “Hogan’s Heroes,” a comedy on television: double rows of barbed wire, tar paper barracks, tall watch towers on the barbed wire perimeters. The watchtowers had machine guns on tripods pointing into the camp, not out. Soldiers with rifles made their rounds, and searchlights flashed into our windows all night at regular intervals.
I remember filling a cotton sack with hay dumped in the intersection of the rows of barracks. A lump of dried horse manure was a humiliating souvenir in the hay. My poor mother, who had a bad case of hay fever, was allowed a cotton mattress, though it didn’t help much since five other cots in the room were still stuffed with hay. All six of us were crammed into a tiny, partitioned room in the barracks. We could barely walk around the cots. There was only a little else in the room since we could only take what we could carry.
Since my parents were the only adults, they had to carry almost everything for the whole family: a few clothes and a few personal items. My mother brought her precious pinking shears. They were a relatively new invention then: heavy scissors with a serrated cutting edge to prevent fabric from raveling. She liked to sew. She had to leave her sewing machine behind, so bringing her pinking shears was futile. Those shears meant so much to her that she hid them under a scarf she nailed to the door. She wasn’t sure they would confiscate them as contraband. The items on the forbidden list were knives and firearms, scissors, hammers, files, cameras, and a list of items one would find helpful on a long trip. There were unexpected room searches occasionally, so no one ever knew if his place would be raided for contraband items.
On September 10, 1942, we were transported by train in the middle of the night to a God-forsaken place called Heart Mountain in Wyoming, a concentration camp. It was the kind of place we reserved for Indians, far from any place that was anywhere. Sagebrush and tumbleweed accompanied winter temperatures as low as -36 Fahrenheit and hot summers with vicious sandstorms in between. The same barracks and barbed wire as before, but schools had teaching jobs open to Caucasian teachers.
My saddest day in camp was on September 18, 1943, when Kenny, my younger brother, died. He was eleven and contracted spinal meningitis. My mother saved his ashes. We buried them with my father when he died many years later, in 1977, at Alta Mesa Cemetery in Palo Alto. I thoroughly appreciated my mother’s sorrow only after my motherhood.
I was in camp for a year and a half. I spent the end of sixth and seventh grade in camp. We left Heart Mountain on January 20, 1944. Some people spent three to four years in camp because they couldn’t return to California and had no jobs in other interior states. Uncle Roy and Aunt Pauline left after getting a job as domestics and a place to stay. With extra rooms for our family, we lived with Roy and his family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for two years before returning to Calvos’ old house in Mountain View in the summer of 1945.
My Wispy Remembrance
Despite the now-acknowledged wrong that was perpetrated against Americans of Japanese descent, I have come to terms with the past. For over eighty-two years, I have chosen to bury the past and get on with the present and future. Now that I have retired, I remember my life and am pleased that I didn’t allow that experience to destroy my American Dream.
I got a college education in commercial art at San Jose State College with a bachelor’s degree in 1952. I married the man of my choice, Frederic Cooper, on August 30, 1953. We raised three fine sons, Mark (1959), Eric (1962), and Sean (1964). They all graduated from college and became successful in their own right. I taught special education at Righetti High School. We happily lived in Santa Maria on the Central Coast of California.
How do I feel about America after my internment? I appreciate America not for what it is but for what it can be. Our country was finally able to admit we were wrong for interning some Americans during the war and provide an apology and reparations.
Of course, saying “I’m sorry” cannot undo the past and bring back the freedom we lost, the property we lost, and the self-esteem we lost. Yet, it serves as a reminder never to repeat such an injustice. I love America not because it’s perfect but because it knows it’s flawed and is constantly trying to improve.
Life is not always fair, but you make lemonade when life gives you lemons.
California Agriculture – The Valley of Heart’s Delight
Many Japanese American farms clustered in Mountain View, as well as other clusters in Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Gatos, in The Valley of Heart’s Delights. Other clusters formed along the Guadalupe River and Coyote Creek: Agnew, Santa Clara, Alviso, San Jose, Trimble Road, Milpitas, and Berryessa. By 1941, 18 canneries, thirteen dried fruit packing houses, and 12 fresh fruit and vegetable shipping firms served the rich farmland.
Santa Clara County was known as “Prune Capital of the World.” In 1941, farmers grew prunes among their acreage of 56,810 while they grew apricots among their acreage of 18,630. The farmland totaled 101,328 acres for fruits and nuts and 20,880 acres for vegetables.
Across the California, Japanese Americans successfully farmed as owners (34.9%), managers (0.2%), and sharecroppers (65.1%). They specialized in truck farming of vegetables and fruits. They primarily grew truck crops (79,482 acres), field crops (27,067 acres), grapes (27,694 acres), deciduous fruits (17,736 acres) berries (6,075 acres), nursery crops (2,934 acres), nut crops (1,895 acres), and subtropical fruits (1,557 acres). They were engaged in production, distribution, and wholesaling, especially in Los Angeles. By 1940, they controlled 6,084 farms that totaled 223,257 acres, about 2% of California’s farmland. About 47.8% of Japanese Americans were employed in agriculture. However, the racist California Alien Law restricted the Issei (first generation Japanese Americans) pioneers to directly own and lease farmland.
Japanese American farmers transformed barren land in California into lush farms The California Farm Bureau reported that Japanese American farmers were responsible for 40 percent of all vegetables grown in the state, and 100 percent of all tomatoes, celery, strawberries, and peppers. The White farm growers envied them.
After the incarceration, they resettled to abandoned farms and vandalized and stolen farm equipment. They were destitute and demoralized. They had no capital to purchase farm equipment. They faced systematic discrimination by the White farm growers. The Nisei pursued professions and trades, instead of farming. With the onset of high technology, the rich farmlands became industrial, commercial, and residential developments.
Ron Inatomi, founder of Japanese Americans in the Produce & Floral Industry, poignantly wrote this essay:
Santa Clara Valley – Once Known as “The Valley of Heart’s Delight”
The Valley of Heart’s Delight was a name given because of Santa Clara Valley’s high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s, it was the world’s largest fruit-producing and packing region.
The first-generation (Issei) Japanese transformed Santa Clara Valley’s agricultural landscape because their track record proved that it benefited the land no matter where they farmed.
The Isseis arrived in the valley in 1890 and hit the ground running, taking any job they could find, but mostly found work as farm laborers, then as sharecroppers. The Japanese farm laborers were paid less than the White farm workers, and the Isseis, who were sharecroppers, were required to give anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters of the harvest as payment, which they paid more than the White sharecroppers. A few Isseis could save enough to buy parcels of land before the “Alien Land Laws” were passed, forbidding aliens from becoming citizens, owning land, and even leasing property. Despite this discriminatory law aimed at the pioneer Japanese, they persevered for the sake of their children and their future descendants. Before World War II, there were over 4,049 Japanese living in the Santa Clara Valley.
In 1940, 390 Japanese farm operators and 63 Issei farm owners thrived in the Santa Clara Valley. Working fingers to the bone, by 1942, the pioneer fathers and mothers had grown 70% of the greenhouse flowers and 40% of the commercially grown produce in California. Jealously and hatred towards the Japanese farmer’s success from local farmers grew dangerously high, and after Pearl Harbor created a storm that forever changed the lives of Japanese, their only crime was working tirelessly to achieve the dream in the land of the free.
Over 120,000 Japanese, of whom over two-thirds were natural-born citizens, were forcibly removed into assembly centers until the ten main camps were made in haste. Many of the assembly centers were horse racetracks, and incarcerates had to live in horse stalls with the stench of horse urine and feces. The indignities they suffered with terrible food, toilets, and showers with no privacy. Mainly the unknown as to what will happen to them, the children!
It will always bother me that in 1942, there were 695,000 Italians living in America; 1,881 were taken into custody, but only 418 were incarcerated. Over 1.2 million Germans resided in America, yet 11,507 were incarcerated. For the Japanese, however, over 120,000 were rounded up. They searched orphanages, and even if a person was one-sixteenth of Japanese blood, it was grounds for incarceration!
Regardless of losing everything but what they could carry, the sons and daughters of the Isseis served in the United States Army to prove not only their loyalty but also the loyalty of their families. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team is still, to this day, the most decorated unit in US military history for its size and length of service. So many were permanently injured, and too many paid the ultimate price of dying in combat.
When the war ended and the Japanese were finally released, they were given $25.00 and one-way transportation of their choice. For those who returned to the Santa Clara Valley, only a few had lands that were cared for by courageous citizens. The rest had no capital to buy farm equipment to resume farming, so they resorted to becoming farm laborers and later sharecroppers. Still, many chose different jobs to provide food and shelter for the family. They had to start from scratch, but they persevered for the children’s sake.
Today, only a few Japanese American farms are left, which proudly stands as a testament to Isseis, who transformed the Santa Clara Valley. After the war and through the years, some farms were lost due to eminent domain and the rise of Silicon Valley; some sold because the money offered for land was just too good to pass up, and many closed because the Isseis dream came to fruition, as their descendants achieved higher education and secured high-paying jobs.
Over 1.6 million Japanese Americans live in America today, and nearly 28,000 in Santa Clara County. The way time flies, the fifth generation (Gosei) will have their children, the Rokusei (sixth generation), all thanks to the pioneer Japanese fathers and mothers.
Mountain View Buddhist Temple
Mountain View Buddhist Temple is the sole remnant of the lost Japantown in Mountain View. In 1932, Sunday School began with ministers of the San Jose Buddhist Church at the Oyamada Confectionary Store. In 1934, the Buddhist Temple began Sunday worship at the leased Mockbee building. It became a social center for the Buddhist community. After the 1945 resettlement, Buddhist Temple resumed services and activities at the old former Japanese Language School. In 1957, they dedicated a combined temple and social hall. Today, the Buddhist Temple consists of several structures that accommodates and fosters the spiritual and social growth of its members.
Mountain View Buddhist Temple sponsors an annual Obon Festival and Bazaar. Obon is a time to return to one’s home and reflect upon what one has received from others. They dance an Obon Odori in memory of their ancestors.
Close
Today, Google LLC/Alphabet Inc., Intuit Inc., Nuro Inc. and Waymo LLC are headquartered in Mountain View with myriad high technology firms. Before the advent of the Silicon Valley, a Japantown in Mountain View thrived in the Santa Clara Valley of California until 1942. The memories (1930 to 1950) of a lost Japantown in Mountain View by Nellie Nakamura and Margaret Nakamura- Cooper haunt us now.
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