Dear Mr. Elliot

  Among the touching artifacts archived relating to Japanese American incarceration during World War II are those relating to the interaction with teachers.   

LEFT: A letter posted from the Poston Arizona Relocation Center, May 1942, from Wintersburg goldfish farmer Harley Asari to Ray Elliott, then vice principal at Huntington Beach High School. (Image, M. Urashima) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

   The teachers knew their students, had watched them grow up, and knew their parents. In farm country, everyone knew each other's families and their histories. The virtual lifeline provided to the incarcerated by teachers helped keep Issei and Nisei connected with the outside world and focused on better days ahead.  

   In Orange County, we know of Anita Shepardson, Remembering Ma Shep, http://historicwintersburg.blogspot.com/2012/02/remembering-ma-shep-on-first-floor-of.html, and Georgia Day Robertson, Orange County author and educator Georgia Day Robertson: Moved to write by her time in Poston, http://historicwintersburg.blogspot.com/2012/03/part-three-of-our-interview-series.html

   Add to that list Ray Elliott and teachers at Huntington Beach High School.

Huntington Beach High School
   Most of the Japanese community in Wintersburg, Talbert and the surrounding area attended Huntington Beach High School.  
  
   Known in its early years as  the "School on Wheels," Huntington Beach High School struggled in its early years to find a home.  First opening in Los Alamitos in 1903, the high school moved to Garden Grove in 1904, and then to Wintersburg in 1905.  Classes in Wintersburg were held in the armory building at the intersection of present-day Warner Avenue and Gothard Avenue.

   Writing in the mid 1950s about the school's history in Wintersburg, Raymond M. Elliott wrote, "although the enrollment was very small, Mr. Solomon introduced basketball. He induced the six boys in the school to participate in this sport and succeeded in defeating every other school with which the team competed."  

   Elliott started as a mathematics and history teacher at the high school in 1923, and was promoted to vice principal in 1929 and principal in 1945. (Note: the letters are addressed to "Mr. Elliot"; school records indicate it was "Elliott.")

RIGHT: The Sycamore Hall armory building was moved from Talbert (Fountain Valley) to Wintersburg and served as the Huntington Beach Union High School in 1905.  In 1904--the year the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission was founded--meetings were held in the armory to discuss building churches in Wintersburg.  Attendees at meetings in the building sat on celery crates. (Photo, Santa Ana Public Library)

    

   The high school was on the move again in 1906, settling into the basement of Huntington Beach's Methodist Auditorium until moving to their permanent home on Main Street in 1908.   Students from the rural countryside made their way to school in the back of a two-ton truck purchased by the HBUHSD, which also picked up students arriving by "electric car" from Newport Beach and Balboa.

   Huntington Beach High School rosters would include names of families known in Wintersburg, Talbert and Huntington Beach:  Asari,  Furuta, Kitajima, Masuda,  Tanamachi, Tashima, Tatsukawa.

The Asari family    

   Tsurumatsu "T.M." Asari is reported in oral histories as being the first Japanese to arrive in Orange County.  He is one of two Japanese in Wintersburg-Huntington Beach area to have bought land prior to the Alien Land Law of 1913, the other being Charles Mitsuji "C.M." Furuta.   

   T.M. Asari owned his property by at least 1903, as there is a record of discussion in the City of Huntington Beach archives between Asari, as a landowner, and the Talbert Drainage District on January 1, 1904.  His property was on the north side of Wintersburg (now Warner) Avenue.  In addition to farming, Asari ran the Asari Market, later owned by the Tashima family.  

   Asari helped new Japanese immigrants establish themselves, hosting the Smeltzer Japanese Association meetings in the second floor of his market.  He also encouraged civic pride efforts, such as the Smeltzer Flying Company (The Smeltzer Flying Company, http://historicwintersburg.blogspot.com/2012/04/smeltzer-flying-company-members-of.html)

   Asari also was one of Wintersburg's three goldfish farmers.  As a teenager, Harley Asari--born in Wintersburg in 1912--was already helping his father with the business (Goldfish on Wintersburg Avenue, http://historicwintersburg.blogspot.com/2012/02/goldfish-on-wintersburg-avenue.html).   

March 1942 and rumors

   Ellen McCarty mentions the Asari family and local goldfish farms in her 1999 Waves of Time column for the Huntington Beach Independent.  

   "On March 27, 1942, General DeWitt ordered all Japanese to be removed from Orange County.  The German and Italian immigrants were allowed to stay.  By the end of the week, all Japanese who had registered at Huntington Beach were loaded onto buses and sent to the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona under military escort," writes McCarty.

Left: Letter from Attorney General Frances Biddle to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, stating many of the dangers cited in General John L. De Witt's final report on Japanese evacuation were "chimeric," April 12, 1944. (Image, Densho.org)

   One of the rumors reported in a California State University-Fullerton oral history conducted forty-four years ago in 1968 with Lee Chamness, Jr. relates to the local goldfish farmers.  Chamness was the son of a Huntington Beach city councilman who resigned office to become the town civilian defense coordinator and assisted the FBI arrest local Japanese, including those in Wintersburg. 

   "...during the outbreak of the war (Wintersburg) had a tremendous goldfish farm with ponds on the ground, and they were all covered with a netting," Chamness--10-years-old in 1942--told his interviewer, John Sprout.  His interview reflected childhood memories of adult conversations, rife with rumors of the time.

   "As it happened, all this netting that was covering these ponds were radio antennas," said Chamness.  "They had a communication setup with Japan that was unbeatable. They could really talk."

 "Two major fisheries owned by Japanese residents, Asari and the Orange County Fish Hatchery, were seized and searched," reported columnist McCarty decades later.  "Nothing suspicious was found, but the owners and many other Japanese lost their property and businesses during the war..."

   It is important to note that all three of Wintersburg's Japanese goldfish farmers returned after World War II confinement and none were ever charged or convicted of any wrongdoing. No Japanese American was ever convicted of acts against the United States, per Congressional findings of the 1980s.

ABOVE: An architectural rendering of the first Huntington Beach High School building on Main Street in 1908. (Image, Los Angeles Herald, April 5, 1908)

Finishing high school 

   By the time of evacuation in 1942, T.M. Asari was 71 years old and had been a U.S. resident for 42 years--over half his life.  Harley Asari, a Nisei, was 30 years old and would have known Ray Elliott from his high school years.  On a 1920 "Huntington Beach - Newport oil fields" map, there also is a notation of an Elliott owning land immediately adjacent to the Asari family on Wintersburg Avenue.

ABOVE: Harley Asari (#10), Toshiko Furuta (#31), and Lily Kikuchi (#33), the 6th and 7th grade of Oceanview Grammar School, Wintersburg (Warner) Avenue and Beach Boulevard, circa 1927.  (Photo courtesy of Douglas McIntosh) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

    Ray Elliott had become vice principal of Huntington Beach High School and watched his Japanese American students--who he had known on an almost daily basis--leave for internment.  Huntington Beach High School administration and teachers worked with students so they could graduate.  

    
   Yoshiyuki Tashima, a Huntington Beach High School senior, recalled in his 1974 oral history interview with Pat Tashima for CSU Fullerton that his family had to evacuate one month before his high school graduation.  He "wrote to the principal of Huntington Beach High School (then McClelland G. Jones) to inquire about my graduating with the class, and he wrote back saying all I had to do was complete one course, and that was civics, and they asked me to write a paper on the relocation camp."

  

   "So I wrote that and turned it in and they gave me a passing grade," said Tashima, whose family owned the market in Wintersburg once owned by the Asari family.  "So I was able to get my diploma with my graduating class."

   Tashima also kept in touch with his family's neighbors, the Renfros, who he had known since second grade and considered "my second parents."  His friend and classmate Ed Renfro--a 1942 Huntington Beach High School graduate--went on to become a well-known artist and children's book illustrator, after serving in the air force in Germany during World War II.

    
   Kiyoko Tatsukawa, another Huntington Beach High School student, continued her studies at Poston and became a nurse's aid in the Poston Hospital in 1943.   The War Relocation Authority photographed her smiling in a nurse's uniform.

LEFT: Kiyoko Tatuskawa at Poston Arizona Relocation Center (Photo, War Relocation Authority) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

   Aiko Tanamachi Endo remembered in her 1983 interview for the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project, that all the Japanese American children in her Seal Beach community attended Huntington Beach High School.  Endo had to evacuate in her junior year.

   "...It was an enjoyable three years...high school was very pleasant because my parents encouraged us to participate in whatever activities we were interested in," Endo told her interviewer.  " After school, they had a girls' athletic association. I participated in and lettered in every sport, including basketball, baseball, and hockey. I had swimming in gym...I played on the tennis team. My brother also stayed after school for football and baseball but he broke his collarbone playing football, so my parents wouldn't let him play football any longer. Instead he helped with the coaching."

   Endo remembers one of her Huntington Beach High School teachers wanted to personally intervene to stop her evacuation.

   "...I can remember when we found out that we had to evacuate, how our Latin and algebra teacher, Miss Margaret Bliss--she was a dear soul--just thought it was terrible that we had to evacuate. So she said, 'I'm going to find out if I can keep you girls with me,'" Endo recalled.  Bliss was noted as a University of Minnesota graduate who had begun teaching at the high school in 1927.

   "There was another friend, Toyoko Kitajima, a Nisei, also. We both had about the same classes and we were both in her algebra and her Latin classes, so (Margaret Bliss) said, 'You girls shouldn't have to leave. I'm going to find out if I can keep you with me. I'll be responsible for you,'" continued Endo.  "She was a dear. We realized there was just no way. I told her I was sure that there was no way she could keep us." 

   Endo finished high school in the Poston Arizona Relocation Center. 

ABOVE: Another letter from Harley Asari to Ray Elliott, from the Poston Arizona Relocation Center in February 1943.  By then, Ray Elliott had provided his home address to Harley Asari.  In 1944, Harley was permitted to leave Poston on work furlough in Colorado. (Image M. Urashima. Courtesy  DK Enterprise, www.dickkeiser.com) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

   The Asaris returned to their property and goldfish farm in Wintersburg after the war.  Like the Furutas and the Akiyamas, the Asaris found their ponds in poor condition, filled with weeds and silt.  They started over and recovered the ponds, operating a hatchery business well after Wintersburg was annexed into Huntington Beach in 1957-1958.
   Ray Elliott went on to become principal of Huntington Beach High School, then superintendent of the Huntington Beach Union High School District, and helped advocate for the creation of Orange Coast College.

   The contents of the letters from Harley Asari to Ray Elliott are unknown.  What we do know is that Elliott was among the educators that represented comfort and support for those far from their Orange County home.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------

 A note of thanks

When Dick Keiser of Silverdale, Washington, heard the story behind the envelope (left)---that it was one of Historic Wintersburg's goldfish farmers writing from internment to a Huntington Beach High School principal ---he generously donated the envelope to Historic Wintersburg.   This artifact is now back home in Huntington Beach, awaiting future historical exhibition. (Image, M. Urashima) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Special thanks to Dick Keiser, DK Enterprise, Silverdale, Washington.


© 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.  

Orange County author and educator Georgia Day Robertson: Moved to write by her time in Poston

LEFT: Georgia Day Robertson, was in her nineties and living in Costa Mesa at the time she was located by California State University, Fullerton's Oral History Program.  She was 100 years old at the time her manuscript was published. (Photo, Poston Internment Camp Biographies)

   Georgia Day Robertson was a woman ahead of her time.  Her childhood was spent in rural Iowa, where the expectation might have been for her to become a farmer's wife.  Instead, she pursued a Bachelor of Science degree--working her way through school--bobbed her hair before it was fashionable, and embarked on a mission to China to teach at a boarding school for girls.  It was there she met her husband, John A.T. Robertson, continuing to work in China until conflicts in Manchuria forced them to leave.

   After her husband's early death, Robertson brought her two young sons, Angus and David, with her to Southern California while she pursued a master's degree in economic history at the University of Southern California (USC).  She eventually moved her family to Southern California as their permanent residence in 1933.

Teaching, selling eggs and short stories

   "When we came to California, we lived in Midway City... it was in August, after Roosevelt had gotten inaugurated, in August of 1933," remembered Robertson.  "People were still talking about the earthquake, you know; it had happened in March. Then the next eight years—from 1933 to 1941—by selling short stories and teaching at a Santa Ana... evening high school and raising chickens and selling eggs, I was able to make enough money to pay the rent and keep food on the table for all of us, and buy a bit of meat for the cat. I bought two gallons of gas a week to drive to market in Santa Ana."

ABOVE: Damage on Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach after March 1933 earthquake. (Photo, Santa Ana Public Library)

   Robertson recalls Midway City had a population of about a thousand people.  "When they opened the oil fields in Huntington Beach... they had to move a lot of houses out.  So they moved them to Midway City, and that's what started Midway City."

Memories of Orange County's Japanese

    Robertson continued raising her boys as a single parent in Midway City and by 1941 was pursuing a doctorate degree at USC.  She remembers the local Japanese American community.

   "They were ranchers (farmers) and they had their little wayside road stands, where we went and bought vegetables," described Robertson.  "...My son Dave's two best friends were Nisei...and we had very close contact with them. There was a Nisei family that lived right in Midway City that had a fish farm, goldfish for aquariums. They were nice people, lovely people."

   By 1942, Robertson was looking for another teaching job at the California Teacher Association's Placement Bureau in Los Angeles.  "Would you be willing to teach Japanese?" she was asked.  Robertson replied, "Why not?" And, she was told about the Poston, Arizona Relocation Center.

ABOVE: Signpost to Poston, Arizona Relocation Center.  The Colorado River Indian Reservation Tribal Council opposed the use of their land for a relocation center, but were overruled by the Army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Most of Orange County's Japanese community were interned at Poston.  (Photo, National Archives)

Life at Poston

   Robertson's first impression of Poston was bleak.  "Bulldozers had scraped off mesquite, everything off the desert, before the barracks were built. When I went there, there was nothing but these black tar paper buildings...When I saw these Issei there sitting with idle hands, just sitting, sitting, sitting and looking down at the ground. Oh, the things I saw! It didn't take long for me to decide that this was a shameful thing, a tragedy, just a tragedy."

   Robertson became head of the mathematics department for all three high schools at Poston (camps I, II, and III).   The internees at Poston included families from Huntington Beach and Wintersburg, as well as most of Orange County's Japanese community.  Her teachers included Nisei (American born citizens), who she ended up counseling.  It was during this time, Robertson heard the personal stories of internees.

   "At least I could listen to them. They would tell their stories," Robertson explains.  "They were having a hard time handling the situation, because they knew their fathers had never done anything wrong, and there was no reason why they had to put them in prison camps. They just couldn't take it, you know."

   Robertson also describes the teaching conditions at Poston's schools.  "... I'll never forget that first morning when I went into the classroom—bare barracks and no seats even, and a little table for the teacher and a little chair and, back up on the wall, her own little blackboard. And that's all there was in the room. No textbooks, no seats. The kids came in carrying their little stools their fathers had made for them out of mesquite." 

A tone of perserverance

   Like many of the teachers who visited or worked at Poston (see Remembering Ma Shep, February 14, 2012 post, http://historicwintersburg.blogspot.com/2012/02/remembering-ma-shep-on-first-floor-of.html), Robertson acknowledged what was happening to her students and set a tone of perseverance that would be remembered.

   "I won't say I know how you feel, because that would be impossible, it wouldn't be true," Robertson told her students on the first day.  "I can't know how you feel. But I have a good idea. You're here and there's nothing you can do about it, and nothing I can do about it, so there's no reason to punish yourselves by not getting an education while you're here. So let's get down to business."

   Poston closed in November 1945.  Robertson's experiences at Poston left a deep impression on her.  The blog Poston Internment Camp Biographies remembers Robertson, "It was the postwar return to her native Iowa and the discovery that many Midwesterners had never heard of or refused to believe in the reality of the Evacuation that impelled her to put pen to paper in the service of civil liberties and social justice."

Moved to write

  With her Poston experiences fresh in her mind, Robertson set about writing a novel, Harvest of Hate.  It would be forty years before the novel was published. 

   Arthur A. Hansen, Emeritus Professor of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), conducted Robertson's oral history interview in 1979 when Robertson was 93 years old.  

   In 1972, Hansen had become aware of "a cache of documents in the university library's Special Collections" relating to the evacuation of Japanese Americans during World War II.  Most of the material had been donated by a "former teacher at Poston."  Among the items was "a large, boxed manuscript of an unpublished historical novel by the donor carrying the title 'Harvest of Hate.' "  

   For six years, attempts to find Robertson proved futile.  By chance in 1978, a letter arrived from Robertson's niece inquiring about the manuscript.  

   Robertson's niece, Dorsey Morris, told CSUF professors Robertson was alive and well, living in Costa Mesa.  

   Robertson's novel, Harvest of Hate, was published by CSUF in 1986, commemorating her 100th birthday.  The novel captures the shock, despair, and confusion felt by Southern California's Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor, the loss of property, life in internment, and the turmoil of returning at the end of the war.  

   Robertson's novel relays the debates among Japanese Issei and Nissei about the prospect of internment.

   "I just can't believe our government would force us out of our homes," states one of the book's Nisei characters, confident that U.S. citizenship offered protection.  "...Men who are working on ranches raising food the Army needs so badly, they couldn't be spared, and women and little children and babies and harmless, crippled old men... a lot of us are doing work important to the war effort, and I think the thing for us to do is go right on working..."

   In one of the book's forewords, Orange County resident and principal founder of the Japanese American Council of the Bowers Museum Foundation of Orange County, Hiroshi Kamei recalls, "I first met Mrs. Robertson in 1944 in the second semester of my junior year at Poston...I remember her then as a stately, proud woman with silver-white hair, who made a tremendous impression on me..."  

   Kamei writes he is "forever grateful" to Robertson, who made a personal appeal to her alma mater, Iowa State College, enabling Kamei to pursue a mathematics degree.  

   Robertson continued her contact with the local Japanese American community after the war.

   "In the late 1940s, while I was away at college... my family ran a farm and roadside vegetable stand in Garden Grove..." recalls Kamei.  "Mrs. Robertson, by then having resumed her teaching career in Orange County, frequently stopped at my mother's stand to chat."  Kamei writes in his book foreword in 1986, "I can think of no greater (100th) birthday gift for her than the publication of her novel."

 Georgia Day Robertson died on December 6, 1991 in Orange County at the age of 105 years.  

Historic Wintersburg author's note:  While Harvest of Hate is out of print, copies can be found through rare and used book sellers, and online sources.  The Harvest of Hate, by Georgia Day Robertson. Edited by Arthur A. Hansen. Oral History Program California State University, Fullerton, 1986. ISBN: 0-930046-08-0 KBF

The oral history interview was conducted for the Japanese American Project of the CSUF Oral History Program.  The full oral history interview with Georgia Day Robertson can be viewed at http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft0p30026h;NAAN=13030&chunk.id=d0e307&toc.id=&toc.depth=1&brand=calisphere&query=Japanese%20American%20Oral%20History%20Project&anchor.id=p35#X

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.