November 15 , 2005 My First Blog was launched because I’d promised give my students a way to follow my Japan Fulbright adventure. Click HERE to see what my students saw in 2005.
November 17, 2015 Now that I’m returning to Japan after 10 years, a good starting point is to ask the question, “Why go to Japan?” There are two answers really. First, since I’d regretfully missed the opportunity to see Japan with my mother, now was the next best time to travel to the land of her parents and possibly to find some of her living relatives (see #1 below). The second answer... well, I’ll return to that later.
#1 Finding my mother’s grandparents. Kitaro and Kano Kobayakawa’s first son Kichitaro, born 1867, would one day inherit the family’s large estate, “as far as the eye can see” as cousin Futoshi once told me.
Their second son Jotaro (my grandfather) was born on March 15th, 1875, and Jotaro’s daughter Tamaki on the same day in 1919.
For years Kichitaro must have heard about the dream of his little brother and his wife Taka to start a business and raise a family in California. I've long wondered what shaped Jotaro's California dreams. Recently I discovered a few lines from a letter received by Sen Katayama from a friend who had gone earlier to the U.S: America is a "place where you could study even if you were poor.” Katayama took jobs as a school boy, servant, dishwasher, janitor until he completed his degree from Yale. He lived as a “school boy", liven-in servant mornings and evenings, attending school during the day. I imagine Jotaro's dreams being inspired by a similar letter from one of his friends.
Sen Katayama, who had landed a year earlier in San Francisco at the age of twenty-six, inspired by a letter from a friend who had gone to the United States earlier. America, his friend had written, was a place where you could study even if you were poor. Taking jobs as school boy, dishwasher, janitor, and servant, Katayama persevered until he finally obtained a degree in theology from Yale University's Divinity School. Life as a "school boy," working as a live-in servant helping with housework in the morning and evening while going to school during the day, offered the best opportunity for study, he later observed, but it was all too easy to become bored. "It is regrettable," he noted, "that the students who graduate are extremely rare."
When Kichitaro was 39, he sold a parcel of the family estate to finance his little brother’s American dream. Taka and Jotaro’s dream was actualized August of 1906 when my grandparents left the mountain town of Niimi, sailed 92 kilometers (57 miles) down the Takahashi River to Okayama City's sea port. From there they sailed on 400 miles to Yokahama harbor, a suburb of today’s Tokyo to book passage to America. Jotaro was 31 years old, his wife Taka, 23. My mother once told me: “One of my mother’s sisters came with her to America.” It’s not clear which sister, but once in Niimi, Okayama, I fould all of her siblings. (see Kobayakawa Family Tree.) On July 28. 1906 the three of them departed on a long journey at sea to land on the coast of California via Honolulu Hawaii.
Yokohama to Honolulu on the Hong Kong Maru departed July 28, 1906.
Yokohama to Honolulu 3,858 miles. Arriving at the waiting point in Honolulu, they remained for two months. Then they sailed 2,393 miles to San Francisco, made their way to the Port of San Pedro then on to establish a popular restaurant and night club 24 miles inland on Jackson Street in Little Tokyo (in downtown Los Angeles).
Their clientele loved singing along with the traditional Japanese samisen (a guitar-like stringed instrument) as the nightly source of entertainment. Never again would they return to Japan but one day both their daughter (first) and grandson (many years later) would return. This is their story.
Taka gave birth first to Minoru on March 31st, 1910.
Jotaro and Taka’s daughter, Tamaki Patricia Ishihara, my mother, would be born in Los Angeles, California, March 15, 1919, would attend Stevenson Junior High beginning in 1931, and graduate from Roosevelt High School in 1936. The Ishihara family was well established in their new California home but that would abruptly change in 1942.
Pearl Harbor and anti-Japanese activity beginning in 1900.
On February 19, 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 imprisoning 120,000 Japanese Americans on the west coast. Jotaro and Tamaki were forced from their home on Jackson Street into the temporary Santa Anita detention camp then transferred to Poston Internment Camp #IV in Arizona for the duration of WWII.
Tommie would be released from Poston in 1945 to work as a short order chef at a restaurant in Denver Colorado. There she'd meet and marry the coffee boy Chello Manzanares. Their son Toby would arrive October 1, 1947.
This blog is the journal of how these east-west branches of our family were united, Ishihara, Kobayakawa, Manzanares.
In preparation for my first Japanese geneaology research trip, I called a former student Matthew Mori, being half Japanese and fluent in the language, I asked for suggestions.
Tracing my Japanese Geneaology Step 1
Matthew knew exactly what I had to do to trace the Japanese side of my family tree. He told me how the Japanese are very keen on protecting private records, including geneaology.” You have to document that you're part of the family before any official Japanese records can be released. He said: “Take your birth certificate, any parental family birth/death certificates and any documentation you can find to build the evidence for your connection to families in Japan. Take more than you think you will need.” This key advise was to prove essential to my geneaological journey between Niimi and Tokyo Japan.
For this first quest I remembered the three things my mother told me about Jotaro and Taka, my Japanese grandparents: 1. "Your grandfather lived in Niimi, a village in way up in the mountains of Okayama", where 2. he went to Ueno Elementary School, and 3. Jotaro’s grandfather was a Samurai." These 3 notes and my document collection birth/death certificates are all I had when I boarded a flight from LAX to Narita International Airport (near Tokyo).
I had taken a group of advanced science students to Nara Japan in November of 2006 where we met Akiko Murakami. She spent the day with us at the Nara Museum and has kept in touch since then. So when I returned in 2015 Akiko and Yoshio, her father arranged for my Home Stay with the Tanaka family in Asuka Village, a short train ride from Nara. My goal was to make this my base of operations and take short trips from there to Okayama, Niimi, and Hiroshima, which I did with just an overnight bag.
Home Stays, as compared to hotel stays, I've learned are the best way of learning about Japan. You get to stay with a Japanese family where over breakfast and dinner with the family you learn so much more than just staying in a hotel.
[Insert Tanaka Family photo here] I sat for dinner that night with all three generations of the Tanaka family. I learned that 30% of all Japanese families live in 3 generation households. That number is 9.8% in the U.S.
Tracing my Japanese Geneaology Step 2.
Chart out what you already know (see Figure 1 below).
Figure 1. This is all I'd learned from my mother about her Ishihara family.
This is what I took to Japan.
市役所, Shiyakusho, the Japanese word for City Hall, is the first word you'll need on the fascinating quest to find your Japanese Ancestors (pronounced shee yak sho,
City Hall is where all your family records are held.
"The Ishihara family did not have a son but the Kobayakawa family had many sons, including the second eldest, Jotaro. Adopting Jotaro allowed the Ishihara family to and carry on the Ishihara family name. In this way it came to pass that Jotaro Kobayakawa became Jotaro Ishihara. Jotaro met Taka in Okayama (a large prefecture with many "little villages”), one was Niimi Town where Taka lived. She My mother described her mother Taka as a "thin woman, not what you call real good looking. But sister was really good looking, I was surprised." (See Figure 2 below)
Figure 2. Michi Kobayakawa
I was handed this photo of Michie Kobayakawa (my mother's first cousin)
on my last trip to Niimi, Japan. But how does one find ancestors in a distant land who are unaware of their American families?
I would later learn that Tottori, the prefecture next to Okayama, was Jotaro's birth place, just over the mountain. He must have walked over the mountains to Niimi where he met Taka Kobayakawa. On my upcoming research trip to Niimi, I hope to learn how they met, where they married, and how as a couple they decided to relocate to California.
Jotaro Kobayakawa and Taka were possibly married by the time the he was officially adopted into the Ishihara family. I hope also to learn more about the Ishihara Family. Were they in Niimi or Totori and why Jotaro left after having been adopted into the Ishihara family?
Figure 3
...
In August of 1906 my Japanese grandparents Jotaro and Taka Ishihara, departed from Yokohama on Tokyo Bay... this is a photo of the Japan they were leaving as they headed towards California.
