Bellevue Needs To Make Strong Effort To Honor Eastside Japanese Heritage

Congratulations to the mayor of Bellevue for welcoming diversity with his proposal to rename Downtown Park for a civil-rights leader. But I would like to see Bellevue go further and commemorate a local ethnic heritage that some have tried to eradicate.

It's time for the Eastside and especially Bellevue to repudiate the racism that shattered our Japanese-American community just 50 years ago.

PIONEERS OF BELLEVUE

Eastsiders tend to forget that, before World War II, much of the older section of Bellevue was cleared and farmed by Japanese Americans. By hand they felled trees up to 200 feet tall and dynamited stumps as large as 5 feet in diameter, sometimes as many as 50 to an acre. Once they had cleared the forest, these pioneers turned Bellevue and the Gold Coast into a cornucopia of lettuce, peas, tomatoes, beans, and memorable strawberries.

Back at the turn of the century, Japanese immigrant farmers often lived in shacks abandoned by the Indians or in former stables or barns. While some later planted families firmly on the Eastside, many moved on to Seattle or even back to Japan where, one presumes, life was not so harsh.

A few of the Issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants, owned land they had bought before passage of the Alien Land Law of 1921; some purchased property in the name of their Nisei, second-generation, sons and daughters, who automatically acquired the U.S. citizenship denied their parents. Others leased the land they farmed. An old map shows extensive property under cultivation by Japanese Americans from Factoria north to Yarrow Cove, and from Lake Washington east almost to 148th Avenue N.E.; more than half was leased.

By war's onset, 55 families were farming 472 acres in Bellevue, plus a few in Kirkland and the Rose Hill area. As the 1940 census showed fewer than 1,200 people in all of Bellevue, Japanese Americans comprised a substantial portion of the population. Among the 1942 graduates of Bellevue High School, half the class - 10 students - were Japanese.

WAR, RUMORS OF SEDITION

In the summer of 1941 the weekly Bellevue American displayed on its front page a Japanese Association picnic featuring kiddie rides, ice cream and folk dances at the Japanese Community Clubhouse, near the present Bellevue Village.

"Four months later, three weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 46 Bellevue men and women of Japanese descent purchased nearly $2,000 in defense bonds as `a concrete way of showing their support for the land in which they live,' " writes Kirkland historian Lorraine McConaghy, in a master's-degree thesis about the Lake Washington Shipyard.

But from the war's onset, she reports, "the Eastside home front seethed with rumor about local Japanese-Americans and their parents. . . . There was talk that farmers in Houghton and Medina had seeded their 1942 vegetable crops in coded patterns that Japanese bomber pilots could read. In Bellevue, a joint committee of Japanese immigrants and American citizens formed and promised that the local community would work hand-in-hand with the FBI to unmask the dangerous spies and saboteurs lurking undercover within the Japanese-American community.

" `Though,' as the (Kirkland) East Side Journal pointed out, `no sabotage or other unloyalty among the East Side Japanese has yet been reported to the press,' by May of 1942, the last Japanese Americans left the Eastside bound for relocation camps, their property forfeit and their loyalty suspect. . . .

"Nearly 500 acres of land farmed by Bellevue evacuees was confiscated and placed under the direction of the Western Farm and Produce for the duration."

A prominent member of the community, McConaghy noted, "fulminated on the American's front page against the `hyphenated loyalties' of the Eastside's absent Japanese-American community, and outlined a 1930's Japanese plot of exporting its citizens to the United States to engage `in a deliberate program of Pacific conquest.' "

In 1943, ". . . Rumor that the Japanese were being brought back to the Eastside spread like wildfire. Within just a few hours, 500 residents of Bellevue signed a petition to demand that the United States government never permit the evacuees to return to the Eastside.

"At the war's close, the Japanese Exclusion League, an opportunistic racist group, sold hundreds of dollars in memberships in its Bellevue meetings."

The Eastside's Japanese Americans had little to come back to. Those few who still owned property found it in utter disrepair. As soon as wartime construction restrictions were lifted, homes and shops sprouted from former vegetable and berry fields.

RECOGNIZE CONTRIBUTIONS

From among the Eastside Issei's children, only about 20 families live in Bellevue today; some are in Seattle, and a few elsewhere in the area.

Their experience - of being torn from their homes, herded into bleak detention camps, and then, once they were free to return, finding themselves unwelcome - has left psychological wounds in the Nisei that will not heal. Today they view Japan-bashing with an alarm that seems out of proportion to those of us who have not shared their experience.

Even today, they feel a subtle hostility that now and then breaks through the surface. Just last week, a woman of Chinese ancestry reported some kids shouting "Go home, Jap!" at her as she walked through Bellevue Square, according to a newspaper account.

It's time to offer an official hand of friendship to citizens of Japanese descent and recognize their contribution to our heritage. This is especially important while the Nisei - United States citizens who were interned with their parents or who served in our wartime military - are still among us.

The persistent Issei pioneers who came back to Bellevue after the war bore names such as Tsushima, Mizokawa, Muromoto, Matsushita, Ito, Takeshita, Numoto, Yabuki.

Perhaps a Japanese garden dedicated simply to Bellevue's Issei could cover a multitude.