By Michelle Shen

(This is part of our ongoing series, Lost Kinjo– a look at the more than 40 Japanese communities that disappeared after World War II. It is supported by funding from the California Public Library Civil Liberties Project and the Takahashi Family Foundation.) 

Narrator: This is Watsonville, a small town nestled in the Bay Area, once home to a thriving community of Japanese Americans until 1942, when many of them were rounded up and placed in concentration camps. Only a fraction of them returned after the war, many of them facing persistent racism and discrimination in the Golden State. These are their stories, told from the perspectives of their relatives and descendants.

Marcia Hashimoto: I came to Watsonville in 1970 when I married Mas, and my husband, Mas, was born in Watsonville, raised in Watsonville. This is his hometown that he really adored, loved. His home on Union Street in Watsonville, it was in the Japantown area. There was quite a big population in Watsonville pre-war because Watsonville did have labor for immigrants. Many Japanese felt that perhaps there was a better life in America.

Kenny Kusumoto: Hey, I’m Kenny Kusumoto. My family’s been here, I think they came in 1932. My family, we were farmers in Japan, so they kind of followed that, and this area was very renowned for the farming industry.

Narrator: Kenny Kusumoto is president of the Watsonville Buddhist Temple, first constructed in 1906 as Japanese laborers began moving into this fertile area. It became a social and spiritual center among Japanese Americans who began raising their families there. 

Kusumoto: The Issei were coming here, they were getting married, probably in the early 1900s, and they started having families. 1914 was the first Japanese graduate from Watsonville High School, then there was probably, up to 1920, just a handful. By 1930, the numbers were going up to like 9 or 10, and I think the class of 1938 was 45. By 1943, it was zero. ‘44, zero. ‘45, zero because they were all incarcerated.

Narrator: Mas Hashimoto and the parents of Kenny Kusumoto were among those who were incarcerated in camps.

Kusumoto: I didn’t really know they were encamped until I was in junior high school. They didn’t talk about it, and what they talked about was in bits and pieces. They would say it was very hot. There was very little privacy. My sister was born in 1942 and my brother in ‘43. Young kids in that kind of environment was very, very challenging. It was like an embarrassment.

Victor Kimura: My name is Victor Masato Kimura. My name is Victor because my father knew at the time that I was born that the United States was going to be “victorious” over Japan.

Narrator: Victor’s parents were sent to a concentration camp in Poston, Arizona, and even after they were released from the camp, they weren’t allowed to immediately return to their home in Watsonville.

Kimura: So my father decided that he would go to a place called Tooele, Utah, which is about 23–26 miles west of Salt Lake City, where they had a munitions depot. His job, in order to provide for the family, was to load ammunition for the United States Army. I was born at the military hospital at Tooele, Utah. Probably November or December of 1945, my family returned back to Watsonville, California, so we were part of the 33% who came back. Japanese people who came back from camps mostly were ashamed. They didn’t want to talk about it. And I think they were ashamed because it was like if you have a parent who suddenly tells you one day, “We don’t trust you, we’re sending you away someplace.”

Hashimoto: You would see, you know, all along the stores and everywhere, the barber shops and whatever, you would see signs that said, “No J*ps allowed.”

Narrator: Two of Mas’s brothers worked in the military intelligence services decoding messages from the Axis powers. One of them, who trained in Minnesota, chose to stay there after the war.

Hashimoto: He said to Mas and his other brothers and to his mom, “When the war ends, I’m not coming back to Watsonville because I don’t think the West Coast welcomes Japanese, Japanese Americans, because that’s where we were taken, from the West Coast.”

Kimura: Probably for the first two years of my life, I remember rocks being thrown through windows, rocks wrapped with paper that said, “J*ps, go home. What are you doing here?” So it was a pretty tenuous situation for my parents and for me, because I’d be sitting in the front living room, and all of a sudden there would be a rock thrown through the window. 

Hashimoto: People didn’t, they were kind of afraid to come back to a racist environment. 

Kimura: All I can talk about is how difficult it was for me as a young student to go to first, grammar school, then to high school. I’ll give you an example of one of my classes in high school. In my orientation class, despite the fact that I got the highest grades, the teacher sat me right in front of her desk in the front row, mostly because I think she hated me. I didn’t realize the extent of that hate until I got my first grade, which was an F. Everybody knows that orientation is a slam dunk. It’s really hard to get a bad grade out of your orientation class. She flunked me in orientation, and I got nothing but A’s and B’s on all my tests. She single-handedly, with that F, virtually destroyed my grade point average. She knocked it down to the point where I was a tenth of a point below 3.1, which meant I could not be eligible for a California State scholarship.

Narrator: Only about a third of the Japanese Americans who lived in Watsonville returned after the war, but those who came back banded together around familiar cultural touchstones, such as the Watsonville Buddhist Temple.

Kusumoto: When they came back from the war, that was a social center. Westview Presbyterian Church also, it was a social center and an area where people could feel comfortable without facing, you know, discrimination.

Kimura: I do remember my parents taking me to various grocery stores, like the Hamashtas or Pajaro Valley fish market. I always got my hair cut at the Japanese barber, but they tried to go to as many Japanese-owned stores in Watsonville as they possibly could, mostly because they were never sure when they went into a store where the person there, if they were not Japanese American, would welcome them to come in and buy something.

Hashimoto: If stores would not sell to the Japanese, Japanese Americans returning in Watsonville, there were a few people like Dr. Marshall and Opal Marshall, his wife, that would take the orders of the Japanese, Japanese American families and go to the store and purchase whatever they needed and then bring it back to them. That kind of kindness was present to a degree in Watsonville, and so I think that’s why there might have been a bigger population that returned to Watsonville, even though maybe it was just a third of what it could have been.

Kimura: My parents were very fortunate in that they had a White neighbor who agreed to buy the house from my parents for a dollar. Then, when my parents came back, finally, in 1945, that neighbor sold them back the house for a dollar.

Narrator: While only a small percentage of Japanese Americans returned to Watsonville, the history of a once-burgeoning community still remains in the Watsonville Buddhist Temple and Presbyterian Church. Mas Hashimoto’s old home, once a noodle shop in Watsonville’s Japantown, still stands here today, a testament to the struggles and triumphs of the community in this town.

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