22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY AUGUST 21-27, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com board had for years expressed a desire for a museum showcasing Japanese history on the Monterey Peninsula. It’s been an unorthodox path to becoming the foremost expert on the history of Monterey’s waterfront and fisheries, which is how Thomas first came to be involved with JACL in 2008—he was chasing Monterey’s fishing history, which is inextricably linked to Japanese immigrants. He immersed himself into that world, and leaning a lot on the work of David Yamada and JACL’s book The Japanese of the Monterey Peninsula, Thomas, in partnership with JACL, published an “Images of America” book in 2011, The Japanese on the Monterey Peninsula. It is filled with historical photos that brings the history to life and puts faces and scenery alongside names and notable facts. But it wasn’t until 2013, while he was digging through files in the JACL Hall, that Thomas made a discovery that—for a historical treasure hunter— was akin to discovering gold. Japanese immigration to the Monterey Peninsula was sparked by Otosaburo Noda, who in 1895 was working for the Pacific Improvement Company as a lumberjack, clearing trees to make way for the settlement of Pebble Beach. As he scanned the local coastline, Noda was astonished by the abundance of abalone. He wrote a letter to the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to inform them there were carpets of abalone—a beloved seafood in Japan—to be found off the Monterey Peninsula. In 1897, Gennosuke Kodani, a recent university graduate who had studied marine biology, came to the Peninsula to investigate, and by the end of the year he was renting land at Point Lobos to start an abalone business. Alexander M. Allan bought the land at Point Lobos in 1898 from the Carmel Land & Coal Company, and Kodani and Allan entered into a business partnership, with Kodani providing expertise and contacts in the abalone industry, and Allan providing the capital. They formed the Point Lobos Canning Company, and Kodani recruited abalone divers from his native Chiba prefecture in Japan, who mostly came over to work on a temporary basis. Noda, meanwhile, started leasing land on Monterey’s waterfront in 1898 to start a fishing colony, and in 1902, he and a partner opened the first cannery on Cannery Row. The nascent abalone fishery—and other fishing opportunities—helped inspire a greater stream of Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s, doing the jobs that needed doing: cleaners, shoe repair, barber, a hotel, restaurants, grocers, the list goes on. From the early part of the century until World War II, there was a Nihonmachi—Japantown—in downtown Monterey near Del Monte Avenue and Alvarado Street. Just on the property where the Monterey Sports Center now sits, there were more than a half-dozen Japanese-owned businesses, as well as homes and apartments. It was right by the wharf, and for the kids, right by Jacks Park, where Japanese and white kids played together, unconcerned about race. Baseball was big in the Japanese community, and some of the second-generation Japanese youth—Nisei—had dreams of going pro, and even got to see Joe Dimaggio when the San Francisco Seals played some exhibition games at Jacks Park in the 1930s. Some Japanese immigrants on the Peninsula were also pioneers in local agriculture, particularly Kumahiko Miyamoto, who came here in 1900 and initially worked for the Devendorf Development Company, alongside other Japanese, cutting pines and oaks and squaring off lots and roads to make way for the development of Carmel. While still working for Devendorf, Miyamoto started farming vegetables in Carmel Valley in 1907 at the current location of the Barnyard shopping center, delivering his produce fresh to local grocers from the flatbed of his hand-cranked Model-B Ford. Miyamoto was the first to grow artichokes in Carmel Valley. Japanese also came to dominate the local gardening industry, as Yamada writes, “During the 1920s, virtually all the gardeners were Japanese…It was the production of the Model-T Ford that enabled them to venture farther out for work and to take jobs at the Gatsby-like estates in Pebble Beach.” And while the conventional history is that Italian Americans dominated the local fishing industry, before World War II more than half of the fish markets on Fisherman’s Wharf, eight of them, were Japanese. Though local Japanese still faced discrimination with certain laws—Japanese immigrants were not allowed to own land, for one, and the Immigration Act of 1924 was essentially a Japanese Exclusion Act—they generally got along quite well. Then came Pearl Harbor. Between April 27 and July 4, 1942, 3,586 Japanese Americans from Monterey County and surrounding areas were detained at the Salinas Rodeo Grounds, which had been converted into a temporary internment camp, the “Salinas Assembly Center.” Ultimately, the detainees—120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up, mostly from the West Coast— were headed to one of the Justice Department’s 10 War Relocation Authority camps, aka internment or concentration camps. Among them was Ryuzo Hayase, who ran a bait-and-tackle and curio shop on Fisherman’s Wharf with his family. Hayase was whisked off by the FBI, his family later learned, because he was a Buddhist priest. Setsuji Kodama, who ran Owl Cleaners with his wife Fujiko and was also president of Monterey’s Japanese Association, was taken by the FBI. The upheaval for the more than 1,500 Japanese Americans living in Monterey County at that time is hard to fathom. Many lost close to everything, and others felt lucky to sell their belongings for pennies on the dollar— Roy Hattori, a Monterey-born abalone diver, was only able to get $300 for his family’s diving boat and gear. Most of the eligible American-born Japanese men either volunteered or were drafted into the military, and most of them were assigned to a nearly all-Japanese American unit, the 442nd, that became the most decorated unit in military history. They fought in eight campaigns, made two beachhead assaults, captured a submarine and liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, even as some still had their own family members detained in internment camps back home. Back in America, meanwhile, residents devoured newspapers every day for the latest updates on the war. On April 23, 1945 the headline on page one of the Monterey Peninsula Herald read, “Soviet-Yank Juncture Imminent.” On page 5 of that paper is a large ad announcing “Organization to Discourage Return of Japanese to the Pacific Coast,” and below it are articles of incorporation for the Monterey Bay Council on Japanese Relations. The ad includes a piece to cut out to apply for membership, along with $1 in dues, to a P.O. box in Salinas. No members of the group listed their names in the ad, but it was known that its leader was Edward Seifert, president of the Salinas GrowerShipper Association. And that came after Austin E. Anson, the Salinas Grower-Shipper managing secretary, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work and they stayed to take over… We don’t want them back when the war ends, either.” Letters poured in to the Herald immediately, with more than one coming from the writer Toni Jackson, who was Ed Ricketts’ common-law wife and sometimes took his name. Baseball was big for Japanese Americans, and in the late 1920s local Japanese residents formed the Minato Athletic Club, a traveling baseball team that played throughout the state. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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