NikkeiWest--Northern California Japanese American Newspaper

By John Sammon—Photos, now faded black and white, come up on the screen, a family in their best Sunday clothes posing proudly, members of an amateur baseball team looking earnest, joyful children playing in a front yard, a store bustling with activity, a farmer standing in his field.

All gone.

A way of life vanished, because of race prejudice, the hysterical rationalizations of war danger, the imagined threat of economic agricultural competition, and a sign that as late as 1963 at a gas station on the edge of Lompoc still greeted visitors with a qualifying slogan.

“No Japs Allowed!”

“These are painful stories that have not been told by survivors even to their own grandchildren,” explained author John McReynolds. “But they were told to me.”

McReynolds’ new book, “Vanished Lompoc’s Japanese,” recounts the extinction of the Japanese American community in Lompoc in 1942, at the time a small rural farming town located in Santa Barbara County. McReynolds, a retired newspaper writer in Lompoc, interviewed a total 80 people, 50 of them Japanese American survivors, about their experiences.

McReynolds, who also studied old newspapers, said the exhausting effort to compile information for the book was a step-by-step process.

“A lot of the interviewing was done by phone, but I had no list to go on,” he said. “I would talk to someone and they would tell me, go talk to so-and-so. I went from one person to the next.”

One elderly survivor, Dolly Fukawa, died just weeks after McReynolds interviewed her.

With a current population of just over 40,000, Lompoc was smaller and more rural at the outbreak of World War II, when the president authorized the forced relocation to internment camps of 110,000 Japanese Americans in California because the government considered them a threat.

Before a gathering of 50 people at the Japanese American National Museum of San Jose on Oct. 15, McReynolds said an organized campaign of violence and harassment was initiated against Japanese immigrant residents in Lompoc, called Issei, and their first-generation American born (Nisei) children. People were threatened, rocks thrown at night through windows, a building mysteriously firebombed, farms vandalized, jobs denied, and exclusionary clauses added to lease agreements.

“These today would be called acts of grass-roots terrorism,” McReynolds said.

The terror campaign was 98 percent successful. In 1940, there were approximately 100 Japanese American families living in Lompoc. At war’s end, the few who attempted to return still faced racial abuse. By 1948, only two remained.

McReynolds said there are hundreds of other communities where the same story could be told.

In addition to racism, using World War II as an excuse, farmers of Japanese ancestry who for 40 years had grown vegetables and other crops and who had made Lompoc a rich source of agricultural production, were targeted by white competitors.

“Once the Japanese American farmers were gone, farm organizations in the area said, ‘we won’t hire ‘em if they come back,’” McReynolds said. “There were votes taken to make sure of it.”

One of the main instigators apparently was a farmer named Tom Parks, who had a ranch between Lompoc and the neighboring community of Buelton, 25 miles to the east.

“Of the survivors, none had anything good to say about Parks, and I think he was shunned by most of the old families in town,” McReynolds added.

The Guadeloupe Produce Co. in Lompoc had long been considered an economic engine of the area’s agricultural production, but there was resentment in the white community because of its financial success. Japanese farmers had pioneered vegetable growing while their white counterparts were still growing beans, mustard and soy. The company was targeted by the FBI as a “spy ring” because of its Japanese American farmers.

“Everyone was arrested in February 1942,” McReynolds said.

Of those arrested, 80 percent were male heads of families.

The top echelons of government were involved in the conspiracy. McReynolds displayed a map commissioned by Santa Barbara County District Attorney Percy Heckendorf with the cooperation of California State Attorney General Earl Warren, in which Issei Japanese who had leased properties in Lompoc were targeted. Their holdings were colored a vivid red to indicate potential subversion and danger.

Warren later became governor of California.

“Warren always declined to talk about his role in this,” McReynolds added.

Of two children pictured in a photo who were ousted from Lompoc with their families, May Murakami went on to became a renowned marathon runner, while her brother George became chief engineer of the space shuttle. In another photo, the Iwamoto Market was shown in the days before the war packed with customers. The next photo, after Dec. 7, 1941, shows it boarded up and empty.

“It was later sold for use as a theater and burned down in 1953,” McReynolds said.

In some cases even street names were changed from Japanese-sounding to Anglo titles.

In the audience were some of the survivors, like Suzuki Miyagishima, who contributed four chapters to the book after taking a memoir-writing class, and her sisters Yayoi and Midori (Midori is pictured on the book’s cover).

Aki Iwata of San Jose told the gathering life was not easy for a farm boy. Iwata had grown up during the depression in the town of San Juan Capistrano.

“It was hard for me to meet girls because I smelled like onions in the summer and celery in the winter,” he said.

Iwata was later stationed near Lompoc at a United States Disciplinary Barracks, a maximum security prison for service personnel, during the Korean War. The community is near the present-day site of Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Margaret Cooper (maiden name Emmy Nakamura) of Santa Maria, who as a young girl was living in Mountain View on Dec. 7, 1941, recounted the pain of seeing her family’s rights stripped away.

“We were told we couldn’t travel out of the area and they froze our bank account,” she recalled. “We were under house arrest. I pledged allegiance to this country. This was my country, and we had done no wrong. We asked, ‘why were Germans and Italians not taken away?’ They were white. We were easier to spot.”

Cooper, who said she has tried to forget and live her life without bitterness, read a poem for the gathering written by her mother, who passed away recently at the age of 107. The poem commemorated a son who died as a boy in one of the internment camps and was titled “Kenny.”

Lompoc today is described as being “diverse,” including some residents of Japanese heritage. It is still an agricultural area with large farming outfits growing vegetables, beans and other crops, and a new cash bonanza, wine grapes. The downtown reportedly has colorful murals memorializing life in Lompoc, but none of them depict its vanished Japantown.

McReynolds, who credited retired Lompoc resident George Yoshitake for urging him to write the book, signed copies afterward for visitors. Published by Press Box Productions, he said he hopes the book will be read so that tragedies like that at Lompoc won’t happen again.

“I also hope survivors come forward and tell their stories before they’re gone,” he said.

The book Vanished Lompoc’s Japanese may be ordered at www.vanishedlompocsjapanese.com. The Japanese American Museum of San Jose is located at 535 North Fifth St. and regularly schedules exhibits, events and lecture appearances.

For more information go to www.jamsj.org or call (408) 294-3138.