Moving Day: May 17, 1942

ABOVE: The Pacific Electric Railway station was at the foot of the Huntington Beach pier, Pacific Coast Highway and Main Street, in 1942.  The majority of Japanese Americans in the Wintersburg Village and Huntington Beach part of Orange County were instructed by the U.S. Army to gather at the P.E. station to wait for the military-guarded buses that would take them to the Arizona desert.  Some were instructed to wait at the Japanese Language School building, off Sherman Avenue in Garden Grove.  Japanese Americans in north Orange County departed from Anaheim by train. By May 17, 1942, all Japanese Americans in Orange County, California, were gone. (Photo, Pacific Electric Railway station circa 1941, City of Huntington Beach archives)

Note: In 2022, it is the 80th anniversary of the forced removal from Orange County.

            "I remember the regulations being posted on Edison Company poles."
             "And this was the only notification you had--the public posters?"
             "Yes." 
             "When you got to Poston, what did you think of it?"
             "I had a real deep sinking feeling when we saw the place."
                                                               
                          ~ Hitoshi Nitta, February 7, 1966. Born in Santa Ana, California, in 1917.

   In Orange County, "moving day" was seventy-five years ago: Sunday, May 17, 1942.  All persons with Japanese ancestry--including U.S.-born citizens--were instructed to report to various Civil Control Stations or designated departure sites around the County by that date.  In Huntington Beach, the departure site was the Pacific Electric Railway station at the foot of the Huntington Beach pier.

 LEFT: The Santa Ana Register provided an update at the bottom of their front page about the "expulsion" of Japanese Americans from Orange County. By May 17, 1942, all persons with Japanese ancestry--whole or partial--were gone. (Santa Ana Register, May 18, 1942)

   On May 18, 1942, the Santa Ana Register reported a total of 1,543 from Orange County were now at "a concentration camp near Parker Dam, Arizona, as a result of expulsion of all persons of Japanese ancestry under Army orders."

   "We left from the Huntington Beach Pacific Electric station, but we left on a bus. It was a PE bus," recalled Henry Kanegae in his 1966 oral history with Richard Curtiss for California State College, Fullerton.  He and his family farmed about 45 acres near Talbert (Fountain Valley).

   Kanegae was 25 at the time he left for the Colorado River Relocation Center (Poston), in Arizona. His wife, two small daughters, and his parents, were part of the Kanegae family group that gathered in Huntington Beach, before their journey to Arizona.  He told his interviewer in 1966 that his children "wouldn't eat or sleep the first two or three days" when they got to Poston.  He found baby food at a small market in the camp and made soup with it so his daughters would be comforted and sleep.  

   Kanegae was interviewed again--at age 75 in 1992--by Dean Takahashi with the Los Angeles Times ("Half a Century Later, Relocation Pain Persists", February 16, 1992).  Then retired from farming and living in Santa Ana, Kanegae vividly remembered the blowing sand of Poston "hit like it was coming from a fire hose, making all kinds of noise. All we saw was dust."

LEFT: New arrivals at the Colorado River Relocation Center, Poston, Arizona, filling mattress cloth with straw left in piles near the barracks. The barracks behind them were built by the Army with green lumber and black tar paper.  The green lumber dried rapidly, shrinking and opening cracks through which blew the endless dust of Poston. (Photo snip, National Archives and Records Administration, Colorado River Relocation Center, Poston, Arizona, May 21, 1942)

   Kanegae's interviewer in 1966 asked if the federal government provided them with food or supplies for the journey on the day they left Orange County.  Since no one knew for certain where they were going, it was hard to know how long their journey might take.  Kanegae did not recall provisions for food for his bus during what turned out to be a minimum nine-hour journey, but remembered a group of women who showed up at the Pacific Electric station in Huntington Beach.

   "No, the government did not (provide food), but there was a group of--I believe they were Baptist--ladies who were from the western portion of the county that had coffee and donuts for us," recalled Kanegae, born in the peatlands of present-day Fountain Valley and a lifelong resident of Orange County.  "And after I arrived at camp, I wrote them a letter thanking them for it."

    The temperatures in Orange County were rising in mid May, the Santa Ana Register reporting on "mid-summer heat" of 88 degrees by noon.  The buses leaving for Arizona had no air conditioning and it got hotter as the day progressed.  The barracks that would be their living quarters in Arizona had no cooling systems, the dark tar paper walls only absorbing more heat.  As people arrived in the Sonoron desert--where average heat in May is in the mid to high 90 degrees--the temperatures were well above 100 degrees.

RIGHT: In early 1942, a group of University of California social scientists began studying the forced removal and confinement of Japanese Americans. In a report published in 1946, The Spoilage, there are details about camp conditions, atmosphere, social relations, and the inconsistency of policy or management among the different camps. This excerpt describes the scene at the "intake" for Poston, Arizona. (The Spoilage, University of California Press, Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Richard S. Nishimoto, 1946)

   After the day-long journey, some fainted from the heat, lack of water and food, and pure exhaustion.  Volunteers handed out salt tablets, ice, and wet towels.  The Spoilage notes, "at long tables sit interviewers suggesting enlistment in the War Relocation Work Corps.  Men and women, still sweating, holding onto children and bundles try to think."

   A Poston project director is reported as saying, "he thought the people looked lost.  He once found a woman standing, holding her 4-day-old baby and sent her to rest in his room."  An associate project director recalled seeing "an elderly mother who had been in a hospital some years propped on her baggage gasping and being fanned by two daughters, while her son went around trying to get a bed set up for her. The old lady later died." 

LEFT: Men incarcerated in one of the Department of Justice prison camps in Santa Fe, New Mexico, heard about the conditions at Poston and appealed to the Consulate of Spain.  By July 1942, it was reported at least four had died from heat. Spain acted as the neutral country under the Geneva Convention for prisoners of Japanese ancestry classified as non-citizen enemy aliens (Issei were not allowed to become U.S. citizens until 1952). In this instance, prisoners appealed to the Spanish Consulate on behalf of their families incarcerated at Poston, rather than themselves.  The Consulate requested of the U.S. government an opportunity to inspect the relocation centers as a result. (Letter to Hon. Francisco De Amat, Consul of Spain, from Japanese detainees at U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Station, Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 9, 1942)

   Upon arrival at Poston-- as well as the other camps--each adult was required to answer questions about their occupation, in order to fill camp jobs.  Then, fingerprinting.  Then off to another barrack to stand in line for a housing assignment.  Then, registration, again, and a physical examination.  Only after all this, were families loaded into trucks and driven to their barrack to take stock of their new "home".

RIGHT: Civilian Exclusion Order No. 61, which was issued for the region of Orange County including Wintersburg Village and Huntington Beach, provided a list of what each family was allowed to bring with them. Belongings were to be labeled with the identification number they had been provided during registration the prior week at the Civil Control Station.  Prior to departure, families tried to find homes for their pets, who were not allowed to come with them. A teacher in northern California allowed her students bring their pets to school so other students could volunteer to take them in. (Excerpt, Civilian Exclusion Order No. 61)

   The space allotted to each family in a barrack was a 20 by 25-foot barren room, dust blowing inside through the knotholes and growing cracks of the green lumber drying rapidly in the desert heat. The four family "apartments" in each barrack would be divided by hanging cloth partitions.

   For each person, there was one Army cot, one blanket, and one piece of cloth for a mattress.  That meant one more task at the end of a never-ending day: find a pile of straw left by the camp administration and fill the mattress cloth, or, go without a mattress that night. And, only then, try to sleep.  Listening to the collective silence.  Wondering why they were there.

ABOVE: Luggage and bags with family identification tags at the interpretive center at the Manzanar National Historic Site tell the story of what people were allowed to take with them.  And, how much was left behind. (Photo, Exhibit at the Manzanar National Historic Site interpretive center, Owens Valley, California. M. Urashima, July 2015) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

MOVING DAY, MARCH 23 - AUGUST 11, 2017 - In conjunction with the exhibition Instructions to All Persons: Reflections on Executive Order 9066, the Japanese American National Museum presents Moving Day, an outdoor public art installation in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. The work consists of a series of projections of the Civilian Exclusion Orders that were publicly posted during World War II to inform persons of Japanese ancestry of their impending forced removal and incarceration, a series of dialogues and events grappling with the legacy of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans. Learn more at http://www.janm.org/exhibits/instructions-to-all/movingday/

© All rights reserved.  No part of the Historic Wintersburg blog may be reproduced or duplicated without prior written permission from the author and publisher, M. Adams Urashima. 

Day of Remembrance: February 19, 2016, the 74th Anniversary of Executive Order 9066

LIFE BEFORE 1942: A collage of moments in Wintersburg Village and Huntington Beach, (top left) the Furuta family outside their bungalow on Wintersburg Road, circa 1926; (top right) Raymond Furuta breaking track records at Huntington Beach High School, 1932; (center left) Yukiko Yajima Furuta in her new home in Wintersburg Village, 1913; (center right) Yukiko Yajima Furuta and Masuko Yajima Akiyama, sisters, at the Cole Ranch in Wintersburg Village, circa 1914; (bottom left) at the beach, circa 1930s; (right) in a new-fangled automobile outside the Wintersburg Mission, circa 1913-1915. (Photographs courtesy of the Furuta family). © All rights reserved.

    February 19 is the annual Day of Remembrance of the authorization of Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which mandated the forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast.  Each person was assigned an identification number and provided a tag, which followed them through detention centers to confinement centers across the country.  Allowed one piece of luggage per person, the loss of home, property, personal mementos and essential civil liberties was a profound moment in American history.

   The majority were American citizens. Most, like Charles Furuta, had been in America for four decades.  He had returned once to Japan in 1912 to meet and marry his wife, Yukiko.  They had returned to build their life in Wintersburg Village, raising their children and supporting the community with volunteer work at the Wintersburg Mission and Japanese Association.  They had contributed to the rebuilding of the Huntington Beach pier after it was destroyed by a storm in 1912.  They had watched the flight of aviator Koha Takeishi from Dominguez field in Los Angeles to a farm pasture in Wintersburg in 1913.  

   The Furuta farm had become a lush garden, with goldfish ponds and flowers.  The Wintersburg Mission had expanded, with a new Church building in 1934 during the Great Depression.  The congregation of the Mission had grown, with many coming to attend services and activities from around Orange County.  The Wintersburg Mission supported four Language Schools by 1942, in Garden Grove, Talbert (Fountain Valley), Costa Mesa and Laguna Beach.

 Left: At the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, California, luggage representing the one bag per person allowed into confinement. (Photo, M. Urashima, 2015) © All rights reserved.

   By February 19, 1942, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, it had become clear that life would change.  Families sold farm equipment for pennies on the dollar. Neighbors were asked to watch over the rare Japanese-owned properties, like the Furuta and Masuda farms in Orange County.  The Furuta and Akiyama families packed their personal belongings and stored them with Henry Akiyama's employees at the Pacific Gold Fish Farm in Westminster.

   And, then they waited. In Orange County, Japanese Americans were asked to voluntarily present themselves at various departure points on specific dates to meet the buses that would take them to confinement.  

   In Huntington Beach, the ladies from the Baptist church brought coffee and donuts, trying to offer some comfort at the Pacific Electric Railway station near the pier, one of the departure points.  Friends made lunch for the Furuta family at their house and then accompanied them to the Language School in Garden Grove where they met their bus to the Colorado River Relocation Center (Poston), Arizona.  Charles Furuta had already been taken by the FBI, first to the Huntington Beach jail, then to the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, and then to Lordsburg, New Mexico.

   By May 1942, Orange County's Japanese American population was gone.  The trip from Huntington Beach to Arizona would have been a full day of travel, arriving to an unfinished confinement camp, unfurnished barracks, in the bleak desert for an unknown amount of time.  

   In Poston, it was over 100-degrees.  The wind was blowing sand across the freshly graded desert and into the barracks, which had been quickly constructed with green lumber.  There was no insulation and daylight streamed through the black, tar paper walls.  The first thing to do upon arrival: fill an empty mattress with straw and carry it back to the assigned barrack, a place to lay down. Exhausted. Uncertain of the future. And, putting on a positive face for the children.

FEBRUARY 20, 2016: Historic Wintersburg will join sister organizations, survivors of confinement, descendants of those confined in World War II, for the Day of Remembrance at the Japanese American National Museum.  More information at http://www.janm.org/events/collab/ 

All rights reserved.  No part of the Historic Wintersburg blog may be reproduced or duplicated without prior written permission from the author and publisher, M. Adams Urashima.

Remembering Ma Shep

~Updated March 3 2021~

   On the first floor of the Fullerton College Library is a collection of Japanese dolls donated by Anita Shepardson, a math teacher at Fullerton Union High School and Fullerton College from 1916 to 1945.  

   The dolls are part of the Japanese tradition dating back to circa 1625 of Hinamatsuri, a Girls' Day festival celebrated each March 3.  Fullerton College notes the Anita Shepardson hina (doll) collection is "in remembrance of an instructor who dedicated her life to her students and worked to promote understanding between two cultures."

LEFT: One of the many events Shepardson hosted in her Fullerton home, a March 1937 tea for Hinamatsuri. (Santa Ana Register, March 1, 1937)

   To many, Anita Shepardson was known as Ma Shep.

   Clarence Iwao Nishizu, a congregant of Wintersburg Japanese Church, says Shepardson was called Ma Shep "because she had the charm and love of a mother to all of us."  When the Santa Ana River flooded in 1938 and many of the Japanese families lost their homes, Nishizu says Ma Shep opened her home to them.  Shepardson became a good friend to the Nishizu family.

Going above and beyond for her students

   Shepardson started the Japanese Club for her Nisei students at Fullerton High School and Fullerton College, encouraging traditional Japanese arts and culture.  She took her students on field trips to places like the Sierra Madre Flower Garden and Huntington Library.  She helped them with the customs and manners that would help them succeed.  Ma Shep also provided her personal spiritual opinions, prompting students to attend church.

   Shepardson wrote a play for her students, The Emperor's Doll, and invited the Los Angeles Times and other local media to attend their performance.  In turn, the her students presented Fullerton College with cherry trees and a Japanese garden.

RIGHT: Shepardson chaired a Fullerton International Relations council meeting in 1935, focused on commercial and cultural exchanges between California and Japan. Students from the Japanese Club that Shepardson initiated at Fullerton College helped host the dinner, wearing traditional Japanese attire and hand-painting place cards.  In addition to the Consul General of Japan Tomokazu Hori (who had been feted at a banquet in Huntington Beach in April 1935), and president of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce Gongora Nakamura, Seattle-born Kay Sugahara was a featured guest speaker. Sugahara was a 1932 UCLA graduate, organizer of the Nisei Festival in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, had helped establish the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in Orange County, and, in 1935, was president of the JACL in Los Angeles. He and his family were confined at Amache (Colorado) during WWII.  He later built Fairfield-Maxwell Ltd., a worldwide ship-owning business. His obituary in 1988 noted he continued to work on international relationships between the U.S. and Asia, something he held in common with Shepardson. (Santa Ana Register, December 4, 1935)

   Shepardson had to have been aware of those in Orange County who held anti-Japanese sentiment.  She probably heard reports about families who had night visits from Orange County's Ku Klux Klan.  It would have been hard to ignore Sacramento Bee publisher V.S. McClatchy's testimony, On the Japanese Problem, before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization during its hearings in California in July 1920.  

   Ma Shep never wavered.

LEFT: Shepardson was invited to speak to community organizations--such as the Santa Ana Y.W.C.A.meeting in September, 1938--after her "friendship tour" of Japan, as an invited guest of the Consulate of Japan. Japanese Americans in Orange County paid for her trip. (Santa Ana Register, September 28, 1938)

An invitation to tour Japan

   Reaching beyond her students, Shepardson was active with Fullerton's International Relations Club and the Japan America Society of Los Angeles.  In addition to her Hina doll collection, Shepardson collected Japanese fine art and woodblock prints.  Nishizu remembers, "often she served tea to guests at her home and had the Nisei students interpret classic dancing and perform other cultural arts and traditions like the tea ceremony."

    Fullerton College Library reports her interest and involvement with Southern California's Japanese Americans led to an invitation by the Japanese Consulate to tour Japan in 1938.  Orange County's Japanese American community paid her way. 

 

ABOVE: The United States sent to Japan 13,000 dolls in 1927 as a gesture of friendship to celebrate Hinamatsuri. Six million school children in Japan returned the favor in 1928, sending elaborate dolls for every U.S. state. The Santa Ana Register noted, "it was reported that the cost of each doll and her possessions was in the neighborhood of $200, all contributed by children of the empire." Two of the dolls were displayed in Orange County at the Congregational church in 1928 and Southern California embraced local celebrations of Hinamatsuri through the 1930s. A feature in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine reported on the girls' day festivities in the Japanese American fishing village at Terminal Island near San Pedro. The "Ma Shep" for the East San Pedro School was Mildred J. O'Barr Walizer, "whose death in 1933 was mourned by the entire island community." Like Ma Shep who traveled to Japan as a guest of the Consulate of Japan, Walizer was gifted a trip to Japan by supporters from the fishing village at Terminal Island as a cultural exchange. (Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, March 3 1935)

December 1941

   On December 7, 1941--the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor--Nishizu was delivering vegetables in Los Angeles. On his way back to Orange County, he was stopped by the police. 

   "I was really scared," recalls Nishizu, "Other Nisei shared my fear and accompanying depression. The general public viewed us with suspicion as if we had committed something wrong. Even the attitude of our next door Caucasian neighbor suddenly changed. We were disheartened as to our future. We were in a quandary."

   When a community meeting was called at the Farm Bureau in Santa Ana, Shepardson was there.  It was the last time Nishizu saw her.  He would be confined at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. 

   Shepardson traveled to the Poston, the Colorado River Relocation Center, numerous times to see her students and their families.  During his 1982 oral history interview, Nishizu worried that "as a lover of Japanese people, she must have suffered due to the prevailing anti-Japanese atmosphere in the country during the war years."

Her lamp was always lighted

   In the February 5, 2005, Los Angeles Times article, A Lifelong Lesson in Justice, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/feb/05/local/me-teachers5, Teresa Watanabe writes, "For more than 60 years, the students have not forgotten their teachers...one group of people in particular gave them hope: the teachers, most of them white, who volunteered to join them."

   The Japanese American National Museum honored in 2005 more than 200 educators who braved the tumultuous times and prison camp conditions.  Unfortunately, Shepardson was not there to re-connect with her students.  Ma Shep died in 1945.

   Nishizu  wished, "she could have lived just long enough to have welcomed all of her Japanese friends back from the camps at the end of the war and to have joined them in reminiscing..."

   Nishizu recited an excerpt from a Robert Browning poem in memory of Shepardson during his 1982 oral history, "God gives each man one light, like a lamp, then gives that lamp due measure of oil. Lamp lighted--hold high, wave wide its comforts for others to share." 

   "Anita Shepardson had a goodly portion of oil," remembers Nishizu, "Her lamp was always lighted. She held it high. She waved it wide. She shared its light."

RIGHT: A Japanese lantern and stones in front of Huntington Beach City Hall, a gift from Huntington Beach's Sister City Anjo, Japan. (Photo, M. Urashima, 2013) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The interview with Mr. Clarence Iwao Nishizu was conducted by CSU Fullerton history professor Arthur A. Hansen for the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project, jointly sponsored by the Japanese American Council of the Bowers Museum Foundation and the Japanese American Project of the California State University, Fullerton, Oral History Program.  Read the entire interview at http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb009n977b;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00003&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere

A Lifelong Lesson in Justice, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 2005, can be viewed at http://articles.latimes.com/2005/feb/05/local/me-teachers5

©  All rights reserved.  No part of the Historic Wintersburg blog may be reproduced or duplicated without prior written permission from the author and publisher, M. Adams Urashima.