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.  

Seventy years ago

Fountain Valley resident Masuo "Mas" Masuda holds a photo of his brother, Kazuo "Kaz" Masuda.  Kaz Masuda was a member of the "Go For Broke" 442nd, killed in Italy during WWII.  Both Mas and Kaz attended Huntington Beach High School--both on the football team--and the Masuda family were congregants of the Wintersburg Mission.  Both were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.  The Masuda family was first confined in Rohwer, Arkansas, then later at Gila River in Arizona. (Photo courtesy of Orange County Register)

      This week marks the 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which forcibly removed Japanese-Americans from the West Coast into confinement at ten major camps---Tule Lake, Minadoka, Heart Mountain, Grenada, Topaz, Rohwer, Jerome, Gila River, Poston, Manzanar---and a numerous small detention centers, military and immigration centers.  The majority---although not all---of the residents of Wintersburg Village, Huntington Beach, and Orange County were sent to the Colorado River Relocation Center at Poston, Arizona.

   Of Poston, Wintersburg-born Yoshiyuki Tashima recalls in his 1974 oral history interview with Pat Tashima for CSU Fullerton, "Well, if you like dust, it's a great place. If you like hot weather, it's a great place. If you like rattlesnakes, it's a great place."

   Tashima had attended Ocean View Grammer School and was a student at Huntington Beach High School when his family was forced to leave California for incarceration at Poston. 

   "...I wrote to the principal of Huntington Beach High School 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," remembers Tashima.  "So I wrote that and turned it in and they gave me a passing grade. So I was able to get my diploma with my graduating class."  

   Tashima later served in the U.S. Army, "Well, I thought it was my duty; after all, I was born in this country and ninety percent of the other Japanese American kids felt the same way."

  On this Day of Remembrance anniversary of Executive Order 9066, we remember some of the alumni from Huntington Beach High School, all U.S.-born citizens, incarcerated during World War II due to their ancestry.

"Former (Wintersburg) resident, Takayuki Tashima, volunteered from the Poston Relocation Center and is topping beets in the fields near Milliken, Colorado." (UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

"Kiyoko Tatsukawa, former high school student from Huntington Beach, California, and a graduate of the spring 1943 class in Nurse's Aid at the Poston Hospital. Pretty Kiyoko is shown demonstrating her most charming bed-side manner, before administering medicine to the fortunate patient." (UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

"Harley Asari, left, relocatee from the Poston, Arizona Relocation Center, and Kenneth Jimbo, a voluntary evacuee from Huntington, California, shown at their work at the U.S. Foundry at Denver. They are among approximately 25 Japanese-Americans employed at the foundry, which applies strategic materials to war plants which are producing large quantities of materials for the armed forces. Asari is a former resident of Huntington Beach, California, where he ran a gold fish hatchery before evacuation. He was evacuated directly from Huntington Beach to Poston." (UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

The full interview with Yoshiyuki Tashima, conducted by Pat Tashima for California State University - Fullerton, can be viewed at http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft809nb3zk;NAAN=13030&chunk.id=d0e119&toc.id=&toc.depth=1&brand=calisphere&anchor.id=p1#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.  

Goldfish on Wintersburg Avenue

*Updated May 2016*

    One of the 1982 oral histories recalling Wintersburg Village’s past was conducted with Clarence Iwao Nishizu (by Professor Emeritus Arthur A. Hansen as part of the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project). 

    Clarence Nishizu's accounts of Wintersburg Village are remarkably detailed and revealing of his gentle sense of humor. He recalls an incident involving the Asari Goldfish Hatchery, which was located at 8741 Wintersburg Avenue (now Warner Avenue).

    Nishizu remembers Tsurumatsu "T.M." Asari opened a goldfish hatchery in Wintersburg Village in 1924, after World War I.  Asari was a successful farmer, who also farmed acres of sugar beets and alfalfa. He was both a founder of the Wintersburg Mission---signing the founding "prospectus" document in 1904---as well as Orange County's first Buddhist Church, which once met above the Tashima market in Wintersburg Village.

RIGHT: An image of the Tashima Co. market on the north side of Wintersburg Avenue, near the Southern Pacific Railroad line in Wintersburg Village, circa 1910s.  The market was first opened by goldfish and sugar beet farmer Tsurumatsu Asari, documented as the first Japanese Issei to arrive in what is now Huntington Beach, California. (Photograph courtesy of Eugene Tashima) © All rights reserved.

    Asari had "...made enough money to purchase forty acres in Wintersburg Village, where he started farming vegetables. His son Harley has told me that at the time his family moved to Wintersburg, the area was full of tules and open fields."
 
    Asari had opened one of two markets in Wintersburg Village in the first decade of 1900 (the other being the McIntosh meat market off Nichols Lane). Asari's market was a feed-and-seed market with pool hall, later owned by the Tashima family, on the north side of Wintersburg Avenue, near the Southern Pacific Railroad line.

   He famously brandished a pistol in September, 1910, sending five shots after "bandits" who stole ten dollars from the market's pool hall, making the news in the Los Angeles Herald.  Tsurumatsu's son, Harley, worked with him at the goldfish hatchery.

Something lively jumping up and down
    "I recall an incident that occurred years ago that involved the Asari fish. One evening I was driving on Stanton Boulevard, now Beach Boulevard. About a mile south of Stanton, where there was a bend in the highway, I noticed that many cars had stopped on the road. Soon I could see thousands of something lively jumping up and down on the pavement," relays Nishizu. "The cars had stopped because nobody wanted to run over the beautiful goldfish strewn all over the road. I stopped my car and went to find out what happened."

   "Apparently Harley Asari was hauling the goldfish on his Dodge pickup truck, whose rear loading space was covered on the top and screened on the side, when he was involved in an accident," continues Nishizu. "Harley was a young lad then who was conscientiously helping his father, and I felt very sorry that the accident had happened to him. I wanted to pick up the goldfish and retrieve them for him, but the fish were too elusive..."

LEFT: Flooding in 1938 at the Asari goldfish hatchery---located off Wintersburg Avenue (now Warner Avenue)---made the news in Huntington Beach. Once again, passersby tried to capture "elusive" goldfish. The photograph provides a glimpse of rural Wintersburg Village. (Huntington Beach News, March 10, 1938)

    The Asari Goldfish Hatchery survived more than one upheaval. Huntington Beach historian Jerry Person recalls in in his 2003 Huntington Beach Independent column, Water, water everywhere, that "Harley Asari's goldfish hatchery lost several thousand valuable goldfish" when the Santa Ana River flooded in 1938.

And then, World War II
    There is a photograph in the University of California Berkley Bancroft Library collection of Harley Asari--who, like all Wintersburg Village and Huntington Beach residents of Japanese ancestry--was incarcerated during WWII. The Asari family was evacuated to the Colorado River Relocation Center, known as Poston, in Arizona, living in the same barrack camp as the Furuta, Kowta, Tashima, and Akiyama families. 

   The photograph shows Harley working with another man at a Denver, Colorado foundry for the war effort in 1944. This photograph also was used in the War Relocation Authority's, New Neighbors Among Us, a propaganda-style publication which reported on the progress of "relocated" Japanese Americans.

RIGHT: Harley Asari (left) on work furlough from the Colorado River Relocation Center, Arizona, working at the Denver, Colorado foundry in 1944 during World War II. An Ocean View Grammar School alumni and Huntington Beach High School graduate, native Californian, and American citizen, Harley---like many faced with incarceration---decided to pursue a work furlough instead of living in confinement. Work furlough still required permission from the U.S. government, and working and living conditions were still restricted, but income potential was better. (Photo, War Relocation Authority, University of California Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

After the war
    Wintersburg Village ultimately was annexed into the City of Huntington Beach in 1957. The Huntington Beach City Council minutes of March 7, 1960, record a business license approval for the Asari Goldfish Hatchery, Inc., 8741 Wintersburg Avenue, "for the business of Raising Tropical Fish, Goldfish and Distributing Pet Supplies."

    The Japanese American National Museum's collection includes a photograph of "Mr. Asari and son inspecting their fish", see http://www.janm.org/collections/item/96.267.153/.

    There were three Japanese American goldfish farmers in Wintersburg Village, including Tsurumatsu Asari, Charles Furuta (whose C.M. Furuta Gold Fish Farm included the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission complex at Warner Avenue and Nichols Lane), and the goldfish ponds of Henry Kiyomi Akiyama. Akiyama started the first goldfish pond with his brother-in-law Charles Furuta at the Furuta farm, then tried ponds at the Cole Ranch (in the location of the present-day Ocean View High School).

LEFT: The Cole Ranch, where today's Ocean View High School is located, off Warner Avenue and Gothard Street in north Huntington Beach. Charles Furuta and Henry Akiyama stand near the ranch house. They both had worked for the Cole family and leased farm land from them, living on the ranch for a while.  The Cole Ranch property also is documented as the location of a Tongva village.  The "universe effigy", a Tongva right-of-passage artifact on display in the Bowers Museum, was found while plowing the land at the Cole Ranch, possibly at the time Charles Furuta and Henry Akiyama worked on the ranch. (Photograph, October 13, 1914. Courtesy of the Furuta family) © All rights reserved.


    Akiyama arrived in Southern California in 1904 at the age of 16 and by the 1920s was raising fish full time, starting first on the Furuta farm. He became Charles and Yukiko Furuta's brother-in-law, marrying Yukiko's sister, Masuko.

    Joseph Akiyama---Henry Akiyama's son---recalls in an 1989 Los Angeles Times' article, Koi's Town: County's Akiyamas Have Been Raising 'Living Jewels' Since the 1920s, seeing his father "loading an old pickup truck with barrels of goldfish and driving up to Los Angeles to sell his swimming rainbows door to door at pet shops."

    The Akiyamas last goldfish hatchery was the Pacific Goldfish Farm on Golden West Street in Westminster. At one time, the Akiyamas owned the West's largest goldfish farm at the site of the present-day Westminster Mall (off the 405 Freeway, near Golden West Street and Bolsa Avenue).

   Goldfish farmer Charles Furuta arrived in the United States in 1900 and purchased his property in Wintersburg Village in 1908, with the assistance of Reverend Barnabus Terasawa, donating a portion of the land to the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission.

   The Furuta family left their goldfish ponds in someones' care when they were evacuated to the Colorado River Relocation Center during World War II. By the time they returned home from incarceration in 1945, the goldfish ponds were filled with silt. The Furuta family transitioned to flower farming, focusing on reviving the water lilies from the goldfish ponds, along with sweet peas, both popular with local wholesale florists. 

   The Furuta farm---known today as Historic Wintersburg---is the sole remaining pre-Alien Land Law of 1913, Japanese-owned property in the region, designated a National Treasure at the end of 2015.

    More of the history of the goldfish farmers of Wintersburg Village is included in Historic Wintersburg in Huntington Beach (History Press, 2014).
 
Editor's note: Readers may be interested in Goldfish on Wintersburg Avenue Part 2: The Living Jewels of the Furuta Gold Fish Farm, http://historicwintersburg.blogspot.com/2012/11/goldfish-on-wintersburg-avenue-part-2.html

The oral history of Clarence Iwao Nishizu was jointly sponsored by the Japanese American Council of the Bowers Museum Foundation- Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County, and the Japanese American Project of the California State University, Fullerton, Oral History Program). 
 
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.