Maida Family History

Preface

Anytime that someone write a historical piece, it will have information that attempts to be factual, but relies on the accuracy of the sources. In this case, my sources were my mother, my Aunt Meriko, a few written documents, and my own memory. In a few cases, the sources disagree, at which point I had to decide what seemed most reasonable, so I take full responsibility for what is written here. I want to acknowledge and thank both my mother, Asako Tokuno and her older sister, Meriko Maida for both providing much of the information here.

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My earliest memories are of my grandparents’ house in Richmond, California, with the yellow mountains of the Coast range placed quietly in the background. In those days their lower slopes were only slightly dotted with homes and there was no freeway running people from the Bay Area to other parts outside. The mornings there were foggy and cold all year round, just like San Francisco without the romance. This was Richmond, home of oil refineries and nurseries. My grandfather operated one of those nurseries; greenhouses filled with carnations.

My mother’s early memories, then, were similar to mine, more rural and more filled with conversations in Japanese. She was born on September 4, 1923, the second of three daughters of Torayoshi and Kane Mayeda. Kane was not truly an Issei as her own parents were Issei. She had come to the United States with her mother, Matsue Mayeda, in 1912 at the age of 14. Her father, Kumakichi, had preceded both of them in the late 1890s and was one of the true pioneers of the nursery industry that arose in northern California at the beginning of the century.

Mayeda Kumakichi (b. July 16, 1859) came from Wakayama prefecture (or, as it is known in Japan, Wakayama-ken, Ken meaning prefecture), south of Osaka. The specific village of his birth is not known. He was a very proper man, who looked with disdain upon men who had succumbed to the temptations of city life. His own father, Yasubei, had been such a one and had squandered whatever profits his family had been able to make, meaning that Kumakichi had to struggle to keep his family clothed and fed. The shoyu and miso business Yasubei had started, his own hedonism had ended. Kumakichi had to take his wife and young daughter from town to town searching for a way to settle into a livelihood of some kind.

In 1899, Japan was at war with Taiwan and Kumakichi was eligible to be drafted into the army. If not that, he would need to surrender to whatever fate a transient life would bring him -- the Japanese thought poorly of anyone who wandered too much – when he learned he could go to America. An enterprising group of brothers, of the Domoto family, heralded from Wakayama and were looking for capable men to help them start the nursery industry in California. Although he was no longer a young man, Kumakichi booked passage on a steamer, leaving his wife and his young daughter, Kane, behind in Higashi Tottori, near Wakayama City. He took with him his nephew, Eiichi, whom he had adopted and on whom he was counting to help him set up a business of some kind in America. They spent some time in Oakland learning the nursery business, before Kumakichi decided that they needed a way to make a lot of money quickly. They went to Fresno, working in the vineyards there for awhile. They worked very hard and saved very carefully until they had enough money to begin a small nursery of their own.

By 1905 he bought property in Richmond, California-- not only his own place, but two lots next door to each other located in the Alta Punta tract of the city. Kumakichi took the first lot for himself.  It was two and a half acres of undeveloped land.  The second lot to the west was for Eiichi. The down payment for the two parcels of land was $10.00. Together they financed the building of the first set of greenhouses, 6 of them, along with a large house. By 1906, he was able to cable his wife and tell her it was time to come to America. Unfortunately, just before his family was preparing to leave, the famous earthquake and fire that struck the Bay Area caused a financial catastrophe. He told grandmother to stay in Japan for a while longer even though he had already not seen them for six years. It would be six more years before they could finally come to America.

The nursery business was just beginning in the small town of Richmond, which began as a small port and train stop between the metropolises of Sacramento and San Francisco. Richmond was where a number of Japanese immigrants had settled to begin the nursery industry. No doubt Kumakichi chose Richmond because it was not far from where the Domoto brothers were, but a stronger reason was that he had some relatives, the Hondas and the Nabetas, living there already and involved in their own nurseries. They were very helpful in teaching him the basic horticulture of starting young rose bushes from cuttings and encouraging them to grow into large bushes. Those bushes would then produce the beauty that would put dollars into their pockets. With his own hands, he helped build a house and a nursery at Felton Avenue (the name was later changed to Wall Avenue).

The house was very large, built in a sort of late-Victorian style of architecture common to that area. I never understood why it was so big because only five people lived in it. When it was first built there were stairs going to the main entrance on the second floor. Entering the parlor, one looked up at an elegantly high ceiling with chandelier-like lamps hanging down. A hallway went back to an interior stairwell that went down to the kitchen and dining room. On both sides of the hallway were the bathroom (first door on the right), a study (first door on the left) and the bedrooms, of which there were three. Downstairs, there was also a large living room-like area, which once was used as the Japanese school for the local Japanese community. The kitchen was on a slightly split level, with a door that entered on the street side of the house into a utility area. This also served as an enclosed breezeway to the bath-house where the furo, old style Japanese bath, was located.

The furo was built of wood with a concrete floor above a wood furnace. I will always remember using that bath. It had an elevated dressing room next to it where we would put our pajamas and leave our clothes. My grandfather would build a fire each night so we could bathe. It was usually too hot for me, so my grandmother would run some cold water into it. The idea was not to wash in the bath, but to get your skin really hot, then you had to go onto the cement floor outside of the bath to wash, rinsing the soap off before you got back into the furo for one last warming before getting dressed again.

Next to the bath was a hanabeya, the flower house where the gathered blossoms would be trimmed, cleaned, and bundled for the florists. Garrisoned around the perimeter of the lot were the flowers inside all of the greenhouses, glass translucent through the whitewash my grandfather threw on the windows to keep the plants from getting sunburned. On one row of greenhouses was the boiler room with its smell of oil and old wood. I spent a few nights sleeping in the hot place above the boiler where you had to climb a ladder to get into the bed.

In 1912 it was declared illegal for Japanese aliens to own property or land, so Kumakichi had to use the guise of a family corporation to continue to own his own house and nursery. By that time, he did indeed have a family with him. He named the new company the “Felton Nursery Company” after the street on which they lived and to minimize the fact that this was a Japanese owned and operated business. This was a legal method that many Issei used to retain the rights to the land they had earned for their families. The original Webb-Haney Act that prevented their direct ownership was motivated by nothing less than overt racism.

Once his business had stabilized, Kumakichi was able to send for his wife and daughter with some confidence that he could provide for them. Together, Matsue and Kane made the long voyage across the Pacific to Richmond. They had no trouble finding western style clothes to wear, as they were becoming more and common among the Japanese by this time, so they looked contemporary as they wandered about the deck of the ship. They entered the United States at Angel Island as thousands of other immigrants before them had done. Unlike many other women, who were picture brides, they knew the men who were meeting them there. As happy as they were to see Kumakichi and Eiichi again the strangeness of this new place and all the hakujin (white) faces surrounding them was disconcerting. Too, Kane had not seen her father since she was a baby, so it was with a mixture of joy and uncertainty that she gazed upon his face again.

It was also wonderful to be able to move right into their own house, even though much work had to be done to make it a home. Two bachelors had lived it in, so the house was pretty messy when the women arrived. Kane (b. Jan. 2, 1898) had already finished her formal schooling in Japan, but neither she nor her mother spoke much English. The only good thing about their delay in coming to America was that she was able to finish her formal schooling in Japan. At first, Kumakichi had her go to a tutor so she could learn the language of their new home, but the demands of work around the house soon ended that plan. The nursery business needed a lot of labor and that labor needed their food to be cooked and their clothes to be washed. Matsue could not do all of it by herself, so they reluctantly stopped sending Kane to the tutor, so she could help her mother with all of the work.

Belying her sensitive nature, Kane was somewhat austere looking. She had a long face with sad eyes and seldom smiled for photographs. I remember her smiling a lot happy, but that was because she tended to be happy when her grandson was around. She was lean and tall for an Issei, being a bit taller than 5 feet. She always wore her hair in a bun. In her later years she wore glasses.

Kane had very few friends so she spent a lot of time by herself, reading Japanese books and magazines. She also found some outlet in poems that she wrote for herself in the elaborate cursive style of Japanese calligraphy. A few of these poems survived well past her death, but no one could read them. It must be in the soft and sad lines of the writing itself that we can try to understand the feelings of this sensitive young woman so far from home and all the familiar things of Wakayama prefecture. She occasionally got to be with one neighbor girl, Sakai Shizue, who was much older. They did not see each other often for there was a lot of work to be done just to support their struggling families.

Two years later, Kumakichi decided it was time to find a bride for Eiichi. Nishijima Yu, came to him from Kumakichi’s home village of Yuasa. This gave Kane someone close to her age living right next door. They would often go to the nearby hills to pick fern fronds, warabi, in the spring. This was a food they used to eat in Japan. Of course, Yu had to spend most of her time with her new husband. They had five children:  Minoru (Mickey), b. 1915; Ben, b. 1917; Harry, b. 1918; Maria, b. 1920; Chiyo, b. 1922, and Elsie, b. 1925. They established their own nursery right next door to Kumakichi’s and it flourished. Unfortunately, Eiichi began to drink too much, a habit about which Kumakichi was severe in his criticism. The pressure on him was beginning to build. He may have found America too difficult a place to live, but he had no where else to go. Two days after Christmas in 1925, Eiichi locked himself in the boiler room and got so drunk that he failed to see that the boiler was about to explode. It was a fatal act and a tragedy that is still dabbed with a faint taint of mystery.

Kane took her brother’s death to heart, even though he was not truly her brother he was the only person she had ever had as a peer in this new country of hers. By the time of his death, she had the solace of her own children. On May 27, 1918, she had wed Muraki Torayoshi, who assumed his wife’s name, as was the ancient custom of Japan. He was formally “adopted” by his new father in law by having his name entered on the family register in Yuasa, thus did he and Kane become married, even though they were 5000 miles apart.

Torayoshi was born into the Muraki family of Kebara in Wakayama-ken on April 10, 1890. He was the fourth son of a large family, so he stood to inherit nothing from his father, including his name. He had to find a means of making a living, so despite his leanings toward the night life, this debonair young man pursued the unlikely profession of teaching. He attended normal school through a program in which the government subsidized his education in return for a seven year commitment to teach. As he dealt with what was a growing bureaucracy in the early twentieth century Japanese school system, he became increasingly disillusioned. When his commitment was over, he left the profession forever. Still, he was single and his work had given him the opportunity to meet intelligent young ladies of similar interest. His old photographs include at least one of a lovely young woman who could have been a fellow teacher. In his writing are the kanji for “Lover” above that photograph. Thus, it is not at all clear whether his disaffection with teaching was, as he put it, a problem with the school system or a problem with his romantic life. All we know for certain is that he stopped teaching and now needed to find some other career.

It was true that many people in southern Japan, especially young men, were seeking their fortunes in America. He heard about a call for a husband from a former resident of his village, Mayeda Kumakichi. Taking a look at Kane’s picture, he decided it was time to stop sowing his wild oats and settle down in America. For her part, Kane had no problem marrying the handsome gentleman in the picture her father showed to her.

He was a dapper looking fellow, sometimes sporting a small mustache. He was not tall, being about 5 foot four inches. But he had a wiry strength that helped him in the nursery work to which he was going to devote his life and in fighting the big fish he wrestled out of the lakes and streams of northern California and Nevada. His eyes were the kind that you knew could pierce right into you if he wanted to look that deeply into you, but were otherwise kindly and careful.

Torayoshi and Kane were together from the day he docked in San Francisco Bay and nine months later, their first of three daughters, Meriko was born (February 26, 1920). My mother, Asako arrived in 1923 (September 4) and Junko in 1926 (March 26). The spelling of their name, Maida, was a concession to the post office, which kept putting the wrong mail in the different mailboxes of the Mayeda extended family. To make it easier for the mail carriers, they decided to spell their names differently.

Shortly after his arrival, Torayoshi had begun to try to learn English, going to the same tutor from whom Kane had tried to learn English some years before. One day as he rode his bicycle to a lesson, a hakujin (white) man threw an apple at him, calling him a “God Damn Jap,” and knocking him to the ground. It was not an isolated incident, as racism was prevalent in California in those days, but the proud Torayoshi turned it into a point of resolution:  he was not going to learn the language of such barbarians. It was not this one event that turned Torayoshi’s heart against America, after all he had named his eldest child after the land. He was a proud and well-educated man and he had seen how he and other Japanese were being treated. He became increasingly uncomfortable in this land where he was shown such little respect. Fortunately, not everyone was a racist and Torayoshi was able to develop a solid business relationship with the old Mechanics Bank, who not only kept a faithful account of his finances, but was later very supportive and helpful in preserving his property during World War II. Kumakichi did not trust banks and kept his money in a secret stash in the house.

It was his loyalty to his family that kept him there, despite his distaste for the place. Perhaps it was in recognition of this loyalty that his father in law was willing to move out of his own house to make it easier for Torayoshi to stay. Torayoshi, despite being the son of a farmer, had tasted enough of the city life to acquire the kinds of habits and styles of which Kumakichi disapproved, even as he had disapproved of it in his own father and his adopted son. It disgusted him to no end to realize that he had surrounded himself with men so unlike himself, but to make his wife and daughter happy, he rented another piece of land and started a separate nursery on it.

This move did not keep him or Matsue from their grand-daughters. As with most men, Kumakichi did not spend a lot of time with little girls. He was a quiet man anyway, not given to talking a lot. Still, he was able to express his affection for the children in his own way. Matsue, on the other hand was more demonstrative. She was a very kindly woman and generous to a fault, often spoiling the girls’ appetites with treats of soda, big cans of chi-chi boro (sweet little milk crackers), or Japanese candy. When she was not buying them treats herself, she would give them nickels to spend at the Italian store nearby. A nickel bought a lot of sweets in 1928.

The three little girls grew fast, speaking Japanese when they were little so that Meriko knew no English when she began to attend Stege Elementary School in Richmond. At the same time they went to the American public school, they also attended a Japanese school, reluctantly, on Saturdays, first in their own living room, then later in small framed schoolhouse down the street. As with most of their peers, they did so because their parents wanted them to be literate in the language of Japan, since many still wanted to return there once their fortune was made. Although the younger girls hated it, they learned their lessons, but nothing like they learned English, the language all their hakujin friends spoke. Soon they brought it home, where Kane and Torayoshi could understand very little. When the girls argued among themselves, their mother would scold them in frustration: “At least argue in Japanese, so I can understand what you are saying to each other.”

One thing about the Japanese school was that they were with children who looked like them. At Stege, they saw almost no one in their class who was a Nisei. Still, none of the sisters remembers being teased or picked upon because of their race. It is impossible to tell if this was simply because of the luck of living in a decent neighborhood, because they were female and less subject to racism, or because the student body was composed of a lot of other immigrant children of Italian, Polish, or Greek ancestry. They do remember having to walk to school each day across broad avenues, come rain or cold. The girls would not walk together, but with their cousins or friends, kids their own age.

On school days, the first thing the girls would do when they got home was to go searching for their parents, whether they were in the house or tending to the flowers and say "tada-ima"  (literally "just now"—but indicating "I'm home!").  Kane would either come back with them to the house to prepare a snack or tell them to get something to eat, after which, the girls were on their own. Often this meant getting into mischief, except for Meriko who had her responsibilities. The younger girls and their cousins would go to the ditch down the street in the spring, with empty cans or bottles and hunt pollywogs. They would bring them home and put them upstairs in the bathtub. Kane would not say anything, just that sometime later the pollywogs wouldn't be in the tub and it didn't matter because by then they were into something else, like making mud pies and playing tea party. There is a photograph of the girls making mud pies somewhere in our collection. In other words, they were fairly typical little girls.

Their father appreciated the American school system, often attending meetings or conferences involving education. He knew that his daughters had much to gain from being in these schools, so he did all he could to support the schools and even dreamed that at least one of his daughters would one day attend that increasingly prestigious university just to their south in Berkeley.

Everyday life centered around the nursery business. They grew roses and carnations. Throughout the year there was always much to do and like almost all of the Issei, Torayoshi was an ambitious young man. He would go to San Francisco every morning by way of the Berkeley - San Francisco ferry, which operated prior to the building of the Bay Bridge. There he would make the rounds in the Flower Market, pocketing the cash for savings. When he returned he would supervise whatever tasks needed to be done. This could include the whitewashing of the greenhouses. It could include the tending of the young plants, which needed lots of water, fertilizer and pesticides. It might involve repairing a broken window, making new planter boxes, or fixing the boiler. Each day, though, brought new blossoms to harvest. Kane and the girls picked them, making sure to keep the stems long and unbroken. It was hard work. Kane and Torayoshi would always be somewhere working, if not in the hanabeya, then in the hothouses. Things slowed a bit during the winter months, and everyone would spend more time in the house. There were still blossoms to sell, but fewer other chores. They would complete the flower gathering and bunching early in the day and have more time to relax.

On some days, Torayoshi would use part of his earnings to buy special groceries. These usually consisted of Japanese or Asian  food that could not be found in Richmond:  tofu, natto, or char siu, among other items. Kane would shop at the nearby Italian grocery for the common items, such as rice, milk, and sugar. She formed a strong friendship with Mrs. Soldati who, with her husband, owned and operated the store. Another source of food was a Japanese grocery truck that would come to the house twice a week. These trucks had special shelves and boxes to hold vegetables, fruits, meats, fish, and any item that had been special ordered the week before. In those days, too, milk and bakery items were delivered to houses, just as they were everywhere else in the country. There was never a lack of good food in the house, that seems certain.

Kane had learned how to cook basic staples of the Japanese diet from her mother. When she married, she found that her husband had gourmet tastes acquired from his city life in Osaka where he went to college. Torayoshi expected his wife to delight his palate with tasty Japanese dishes. She learned how to cook a lot of them from reading recipes in Japanese magazines. Perhaps she also got tips from Yu or other friends and relatives, to include learning how to prepare a full turkey dinner at Thanksgiving. When Torayoshi started to host “Goh” tournaments at his home, he wanted to treat his friends by having his wife prepare a banquet. She dreaded these days, for she would dutifully labor over all this food and be worn out at the end of the day while the men stayed up to the wee hours, smoking, drinking beer or sake, and playing Goh. Of course, Kane would have to rise early the next morning to clean up the mess.

Once a year, the Japanese American families living in the area would hold a large festival to celebrate. They would invite a man from Los Angeles who could show recent Japanese movies. He would spend the night in the Wall Street house and show the movies in the Japanese School as a fund raiser. There the classroom was big enough to accommodate a projector, a screen and a good sized audience of the Issei and the young Nisei, who might not have been able to understand all of the words, but welcomed the entertainment just the same.

So my mother grew up in a fairly traditional household by Japanese standards, living with her grandparents nearby and with a father who was pretty much the lord of the manor. Her elder sister took the brunt of the responsibility for the chores and her younger sister was the “baby,” so that left Asako with some room to define herself. Perhaps for that reason, she was the most gregarious and academically successful of the sisters. She was able to go the University of California at Berkeley. She was also the prettiest and the first to marry.

Asako took her name from the morning of her birth. In Japanese, “Asa” refers to the morning sun, the rising sun, which is symbolic of the whole of Japan, “the Land of the Rising Sun.”  The morning of September 4, 1923, was very beautiful, so her father decided to name his second daughter, “Asako” daughter of the rising sun. She was a very cheerful child, partly because that was her nature and partly because she was free of the burdens placed on Meriko. She used to ask her grandfather to sit for long stretches at a time, while she practiced drawing his portrait over and over in various poses. Like many Nisei children, she started school being unable to speak English well, but she picked it up very quickly, so by the first grade, she was in a group of five children who were placed in the most advanced reading group. They got to read to the class whenever the teacher, Miss Camerlo, had to meet with the principal.

Although she started school with one other Nisei, Sachiko Honda, Sachiko dropped behind and Asako was the only Japanese-American in her class. This troubled her much less than did the fact that she had to get eyeglasses in the second grade. This was because she was complaining about bright light hurting her eyes, so the doctor first fitted her with dark glasses. Very conspicuous. Worse yet, she had to come to school in the middle of the day, walking in while class was in session. As she walked in the door, Mrs. Doney, acting very sensitively simply took her on her lap and said, “Oh, can I take a look and see how dark the glasses are?” 

There is one part of this story I will let my mother tell in her own words:

“I used to have a doll--name of "Dolly Dimples" which I dearly loved. She had a porcelain face, which back then, had no protection from the sun and I don't know if anyone warned me about it, she eventually suffered cracks all over her face. She also lost her left arm, but I still loved her and used to sew clothes for her and made sure that I closed up the left side so that the dresses would fit without sagging. I would make sox for her and little bonnets, all by hand, so that she had quite a wardrobe. Once, when we were at the dentist's in Oakland and had gone to dinner at papa's favorite restaurant, the "Miju-Low", our car was stolen and my doll was in the back seat and I must have cried all the way home (in a taxi?  Police car?). Happily our car was found and returned and my doll was still in the back seat!!”

As she got older, in her pre-teens, Asako became something of a flirt. She did a lot of primping, putting "spit curls" in her hair. Asako, her cousin Elsie, and Junko would play hide and seek with the only available boy in the neighborhood, Saburo. She would conspire with him, hiding together and then "coming in" separately and yelling "free", so no one was the wiser.  The girls loved to tease Saburo to let them ride his two-wheeler bike, with small wheels, which allowed their short legs to touch the ground.

In 1926, Torayoshi departed for Chicago, where he was to remain for two years trying to be an innovative entrepreneur. He had the idea of shipping California flowers to a store in Chicago by train. He was able to convince some of the other nurseries to form a business they called the California Flower Company. Torayoshi was able to rent a space at 1300 West Randolph Street in Chicago and for two years, he struggled to make his idea a successful one. He became increasingly frustrated at the lack of freshness in the flowers and learned that the train operators would off load the flowers for later delivery if the ice was melting too fast. The flowers had a lower priority than the produce and other food-stuffs that were more profitable in the mid-west. In 1928, defeated, but not discouraged, he had to return to Richmond.

In 1935 Matsue died suddenly. At this point, Kumakichi, needing a woman’s care,  moved back into the Wall Street house. He was 76 years old and not in the best of health, suffering from urinary tract problems. He was no longer able to do much work for his own nursery and could not help his son-in-law very much, but he wanted to live out his days in the house he built and with his dear daughter and grand-daughters.

Two years later saw another great change in the household as Meriko was sent to Japan. She had graduated from high school and her father thought it a wise move to learn about Japanese culture and arts. This was his way of assuring that she would learn the types of skills that would make her marriageable. She attended the Kokawa Girls’ High School, which was a school intended to train young women in the ways of being a good wife. Too, there might have been opportunities to meet eligible bachelors there. Unfortunately, this was all for naught as she met no young men to marry in Japan during the two years she was there.

By her late teens, Asako had a chance to dabble in some romantic attachments. Torayoshi had hired some young men who were housed and brought up by a Mr. Takahashi of Half Moon Bay:  Bill Ogo and Mits Komatsu. They had a friend named Sam Sato and as young men will do, no doubt they told him about the pretty young women living in the house were they worked. Sam would come driving up from Half Moon Bay at all hours of the day or night and he was handsome, had a nice personality. The Maida sisters socialized with all of them because these men weren't ordinary hired hands. They were wards of Mr. Takahashi, a good friend of Torayoshi's.  Sam's dad used to share his poetry with Kane and come to visit her a lot.

In 1941, before Asako graduated high school she asked her father if she could go the graduation dance with Sam and he wouldn't let her for some reason she never understood. (Yes, in those days, young women asked their fathers for permission to date and obeyed their father’s wishes.) Still Sam sent her a graduation present in the mail:  a pen.

Meriko returned to the United States in 1939 and resumed helping her mother with the housekeeping and the cooking. This seemed normal now with Asako finishing high school and getting ready to go to Cal. Junko was in the middle of her high school years. This quiet period of their lives was too brief, for soon after she returned history was to intervene in the fortunes of not only the Maida family, but for all the Japanese Americans living in the Bay Area. On December 7, Kane and Meriko were in the hanabeya, picking and sorting carnations, listening to the radio. The pleasant music being played was interrupted by the news bulletin that the naval fleet at Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese. Both women were shocked and fearful as to what might happen to them. The attack had a more immediate impact for the Maida family than for the Tokuno family, since they lived within an area that was declared a high security zone almost from the day of the Pearl Harbor attack. The United States feared an attack on the West Coast by the forces of Imperial Japan, who had seemed to have so little trouble bombing Hawai`i. Defense positions began to sprout like plants. In fact Meriko noted that a lot of trees seemed to grow suddenly on the hills above Richmond, moving every day, much to the amusement of the girls. What was not amusing, though, was that some of their neighbors began to suspect them of being spies for the Japanese.

Like many Issei mothers, Kane worried about the possibility of the family being imprisoned and separated, as some rumors had it. It was true that some Issei had been arrested as suspected leaders. Anyone with a military background or having been a community leader was likely to be taken away, at least for questioning and regardless of their citizenship. Torayoshi was also gravely concerned, not only at the possibility of imprisonment, but over the possibility of mobs coming to beat or kill them. Secretly, he built a shelter in an old oil tank he had buried in the ground, lining the inside of it with plywood. He stocked it with food and supplies in case they needed to hide there. Fortunately, they never used it. He also took the precaution of getting rid of anything that could raise suspicion. They had already been ordered to turn in any guns, radios, or cameras—items that could be used for spying--to the authorities. They also burned pictures of any relatives who were soldiers, Japanese flags, recordings of Japanese patriotic songs, and any books that could implicate them. The most difficult thing to do was to burn the Buddhist altar containing the tablets of the Maida ancestors. It was a nearly sacrilegious act made necessary by the exigency of the pre-war hysteria. It was all for nothing. In March they received the order to leave their homes.

The formal order gave them little enough time to get their possessions together, but a February radio report had them very panicked. It had told them that they had to get out of Richmond immediately and go to an area well away from the coast. Kumakichi, Torayoshi, Kane, and Junko went to Montarra, not far from Half Moon Bay, that night to stay with their friends, the Takahashis. Half Moon Bay was actually closer to the Coast, but further from any defense installations and in a less populated area, so they felt somewhat safer. Meanwhile the older girls stayed behind with the two hired men, Mits and Bill, to try to maintain the nursery. A neighboring swain, Sam Yagyu, also was there to help. He had a crush on Asako anyway, so this gave him an opportunity to press an advantage. It did not last, by the end of February, Meriko and Asako went to Half Moon Bay and left the nursery in the hands of the men.

The report proved to be false, but the family stayed in Half Moon Bay until March when the formal evacuation order was finally issued. Junko had to leave her high school and Asako had to get a leave of absence from the University of California at Berkeley, where she had been a freshman. Torayoshi desperately tried to find someone trustworthy to lease the nursery until they could return. In April, he turned the house and property over to one Arthur Ciailanti, but there was not much he could do to assure that he would take very good care of the house and flowers.

This is where the family’s long standing relationship with the Mechanics Bank saved the legacy that Kumakichi had first established and Torayoshi had shrewdly preserved. They were willing to use the rent paid toward the continued mortgage payments. It was not an easy task as various lessors came and went. By the middle of 1943, the lease was transferred to the firm of Bennett, Hickman, and Willoughby. They represented a group of researchers from the University of California who planned to use the nursery for some agricultural experiments. It seems their plans never reached fruition. By fall, 1943, the lease had passed into the hands of Lewis Quan and he sub-leased it to Wesley Fang. Mr. Fang used his lease to try to get out the draft by claiming he was producing food there.

What really broke Torayoshi’s heart was having to sell the brand new Pontiac he had bought in 1941. In addition to fishing, his other love was sleek new cars. When it appeared that the best decision was to sell the Pontiac, he was able to get a good price for it, $940, some of which was used to pay off the original loan on the car, leaving a sizable balance of $504. This balance was to get through the times when the Bank was trying to act as their financial agent to pay the utility bills. Correspondence between the Bank and Meriko, who was acting as the writer for her father and grandfather, showed a number of complications involving late rent and how to handle the payment of various debts that had accrued. Somehow, their deed to the property survived all of these problems.

In May, they were ordered to report to the Tanforan racetrack. This was an “assembly center,” where all persons of Japanese descent living in the area would be collected before being assigned to places further east, away from the high security area. Each person could only bring as many belongings as they could carry with them, for example, two suitcases. Any place that had been only recently used for race horses was not going to be a comfortable place for humans and it wasn’t. Many of the dwellings were converted horse stalls and stunk of horse manure. The Maidas were more fortunate in getting a newly erected barrack. Still, these were so hastily built that the walls allowed the wind to blow right through them. Each family was given a bag and told that they needed to fill it with straw to use for a mattress. All of the other conditions were equally bad. The food was of such poor quality that it gave many people diarrhea and when they went to use the toilets, they had no privacy, because there were no doors on the stalls. Most of the women took blankets with them so they could put up a curtain before they used the toilet.

While they had stayed with the Takahashis in Half Moon Bay, Sam Sato was always around asking Asako to marry him, even though she kept telling him she just wanted to keep it on a friendly basis. He, too, had to go to Tanforan where he and his family wound up as next door neighbors. In the assembly center there were unlimited opportunities for the young people to meet and mingle. Asako did not want to limit her opportunities, so they "broke up" a relationship that never really started. Sam never quite accepted Asako’s rejection, but she just didn't relate to him that way and wasn't about to pretend. Asako wanted a chance to “play the field” in the segregated society, including lots of young Nisei men, at Tanforan.

They spent all summer in Tanforan before being moved to the major relocation center of Topaz, Utah, in September. It was a desert. The conditions there were about the same as Tanforan, but the feeling was more bleak since they knew they would be there much longer and winter was coming. The poor construction of the buildings was also more troubling because the wind blew cold and dust into the shacks. The dust got into everything, making people get up in the morning feeling like they had been eating sand in their sleep. In the winter, the cold was off-set by a pot bellied stove. In the summer, little could be done about the heat. Families learned to soak a blanket in water and put in the window to act as a cooler of sorts. The Maida family was all assigned to one room, in Block 30, so there was almost no privacy. They also all ate together in the mess hall.

Life was especially miserable for the Issei. Kumakichi still suffered from his urinary tract infection and had to be hospitalized for a time. Kane and Torayoshi had seen the life they had built so carefully torn apart and they had little to do in the camp but watch their daughters and hope for a better future. For an energetic and ambitious man like Torayoshi, this was like torture. He and some of the other Issei would listen to the short wave radio someone had smuggled into the camps for news of the war. Whatever was said about the Nisei’s loyalty to their native country, many of the Issei, once in camp, made no secret of their loyalties. Torayoshi had no reason to be overly fond of the way America had treated him, so he was rooting for Japan. Even though he was not going to do anything to sabotage his daughters’ native country, he sincerely believed that Japan’s reason for entering the war was justified. His agony over learning of the defeat of the Japanese Imperial Fleet at Midway was evident. My mother told me that he would pound his head, muttering in broken English “Mid-u-way, Mid-u-way” for weeks after the battle.

Torayoshi was able to find employment in the turkey farm that was part of the Topaz complex. When he wasn’t working or talking with his friends about news of the war, he would arrange games of Go or Shogi, a Japanese form of chess. Kane took classes in calligraphy and in poetry. Much of camp life revolved around such social activities. Although they had a few chores, such as cleaning and laundry to do, such work was far less than the constant demands of tending a nursery. Surely, Torayoshi was restless with the relative boredom of the camp. Besides, flowers smelled a lot better than turkeys.

What made the camp tolerable for the young adults, was the chance for a social life. Meriko worked as a waitress in the mess hall. Junko attended a high school in the camp and received her diploma there in 1944. Asako worked part time as a nurse’s aide and part time as a typist in the employment office.

As the tide of World War II turned in the allies’ favor and it became obvious that the Japanese Americans were no threat, it became easier for them to leave the camps. The infamous “loyalty oath” that gave rise to so many problems, was nothing more than the War Relocation Authority’s (WRA) sloppiness in trying to use a form that was not intended for its original purpose. The WRA needed a way to determine who was “safe” to allow out of the camps, so they used an existing loyalty form for this purpose. It created major problems in many of the relocation camps. As much as Torayoshi was loyal to Japan, he was willing to sign it to allow his daughters to leave the camp.

Junko was given a scholarship to the University of Rochester and her parents allowed her to make the trip back east as long as her two sisters went with her. In July of 1944, the three of them took the train to Chicago, staying one night at the YWCA. They then went on to Rochester, again to stay at the YWCA. They knew to go the WRA Office to find a place to live and jobs. They met Miwa Yanamoto, who was very helpful to them and became a life long friend. Meriko became a cook for the DePuy family, for whom Asako also did some baby-sitting. Asako also took a clerical position for a calendar factory. Shortly after that, she went to Minneapolis to marry Shiro Tokuno, my father. Junko, of course, went to college where she studied her violin, the instrument she played well enough to earn her scholarship. She also did some baby-sitting for a prominent family in Rochester.

When the war ended in 1945, Junko, homesick, dropped out of school and returned home, with Meriko, to Richmond. Their parents had already returned to salvage what they could of their house. It was a horrible mess as the most recent lessors, Mr. Quon and Mr. Fang had rented rooms to an unknown horde of dock-workers who had acted in the slovenly manner typical of young single men. They used the toilets as make-shift coolers for vegetables, so they had to dig holes for their feces, piling the toilet paper in a filthy pile next to the furo. A document in July of 1945 showed Mr. Quon’s intention to vacate the lease after July 15, 1045. In the interval after that date when no one was in the house, vandals had stolen all of the belongings out of the one room they had locked to safeguard the possessions they had had. The WRA tried to find some of the missing items, but could not find them all.

Torayoshi’s nephews, Ben and Harry had been able to buy a car and they used it to help him get around in the first few months after the war. It took an enormous amount of time, energy and money to get the place operating as a nursery again and to restore the house to decent condition. In an early effort to obtain some type of reparation, the Felton Nursery Co. sent an accounting of all the necessary repairs, damages and losses to the WRA. The total came to $5437.97, which was a small fortune in those days. The daughters all tried to do their share by finding jobs in the area. Meriko did housework for the more well to do families in the East Bay, working about 4 hours a day. Asako worked in San Francisco for a time before she went to Japan to join her husband in early 1947. Junko got a longer term position with the Social Security office, also in San Francisco. The whole family pitched in to try to offset their losses.

Some of the losses were irreplaceable. A valuable roll top deck was among the items stolen along with other furniture and storage chests. The chests contained some valuable items and a lot of memories. Asako lost all of the momentoes of her childhood and teen years. There were kimonos and other personal items that could not be replaced. Already noted was the need to burn all of the records of their ancestors, what amounted to a family shrine and archive typical of Japanese households. Similar records may still exist in Kainan among the surviving branches of the Muraki family, but no one knows what might have been lost in that sacrifice. No reparations would ever heal the wounds to the spirit caused by the whole evacuation.

But they were home. They could begin anew and soon, the old house would be filled with the sound of grandchildren and the greenhouses again filled with beautiful blossoms. It was like starting all over again. The deed of reconveyance shows that the property he had originally bought in 1905 now belonged to his family as the debt was paid I full as of August 24, 1945, just before their return. That meant all the effort they put into repairs was for a house and nursery that was completely their own. By the time I was old enough to remember the nursery and the house, it was almost as good as new. The old stairs leading to the second floor were torn down and the main entrance was now fashioned donwstairs, as I remember it. The carnations were thriving and business was prosperous. Torayoshi was even able to buy a new Buick in the early 50s to compensate for the loss of his Pontiac and he returned to all his old fishing spots in the Sierras and the Coast Range.

In the fall of 1947, Kumakichi died, just a month short of becoming a great grandfather. He and his wife are buried in Sunset View cemetery near the El Cerrito Plaza in the hills south of Richmond. In May, 1961, their daughter Kane was buried not far from them on a rise just below the mausoleum.

His daughters grown and his wife gone, Torayoshi returned to the country he had deserted 44 years before. His distaste for America now had an insufficient counterbalance in his surviving family. He could nothing for us at that point in our lives. He never applied for citizenship even when he was able to in 1950. He said they hadn’t wanted him then and he wasn’t going to take their offer now. In August, 1961, he boarded a plane for Japan, walking onto the tarmac and climbing up the ramp, waving with a grand flourish just before we lost sight of him in the passenger cabin. He returned to the United States only one more time, in 1974, to see his family and old friends. Aside from that visit, he stayed in Japan fishing to his heart’s content until he died in 1978 weak from pneumonia, but managing to live through his 88^th birthday and a visit from his first grandson in May. He died three days after I arrived there.