Guadalupe native Tetsu Furukawa, now 88, grew up playing baseball on the local grammar school diamond. In February of 1942, at age 14, Furukawa was told he had to leave to town.
“My parents got two suitcases for each kid,” he recalled. “When we went to camp, I opened my suitcase, and right on the top there was a baseball glove there. At that time, when we’re going to evacuate, we’re not thinking about baseball. Good old mama. It was one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me.”
Furukawa was incarcerated along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans by writ of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. They had 48 hours to sell everything they had; were allowed to take with them only what they could carry; and were bused to camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.
He was evacuated from Guadalupe with his family and moved to an internment camp in Gila River, Ariz. There he cleared a baseball diamond in the desert with his friends and started a league—as Furukawa tells it, to keep them out of trouble.
That sandy, self-built baseball diamond turned out to be much more. They called it Zenimura, after their coach, Kenichi Zenimura, who before internment had played for the Oakland A’s.
At Gila River, Furukawa and his friends formed an all-star squad. Eventually, they had a chance to play the Arizona state high school champions at Zenimura Field—the Tucson Badgers, who hadn’t lost in three years.
The Badgers put away four runs in the first inning; then Gila River, with Furukawa pitching, clawed their way to a tie. The game went to 10 innings before Gila River swatted one toward left field and brought in a runner from third.
They had unseated the state champs. A rematch was never played because the government deemed the Gila River team a security risk.
Furukawa never forgot. “For us kids, baseball saved our lives,” he said.
When his parents moved to the United States in 1906, the Fuji Athletic Club in San Francisco was three years old. By 1910, according to the Smithsonian, the Japanese Pacific Coast Baseball League was playing in 10 cities.
That league was built around Issei players—the first Japanese in the U.S., who had settled on the West Coast to work as fishermen and farmers. In the Santa Maria Valley, they farmed sugar beets for Union Sugar, then they became “truck farmers,” leasing land to grow broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce.
That’s what Furukawa’s father did—he leased a ranch in the 1930s with an old schoolhouse into which he moved his family of seven. He built a barn on the corner and put up two lampposts—one in the front, lit when visitors would stop by, and one in the back, to illuminate the yard that led to the outhouse and bath.
“When the visitors came, the young ones would go and flip the light switch on,” Furukawa explained. “And then when they left, we would turn the light off.”
After Pearl Harbor, the FBI came—they thought the lampposts were signaling to Japanese submarines off the coast. They arrested Tetsu’s father, who was separated from the family and sent to Wyoming.
More ugly things happened. A jewelry store owner, also Japanese, was the proprietor of the big clock next to what’s now the American Legion. “It did wonders for the town, because back in those days not many people had watches,” Furukawa said.
The night of Pearl Harbor, he remembers, “some Caucasian guys got their .30-06 and shot at the clock. Those are stupid, insane things to do. Why shoot at the clock? The clock is a valuable thing. But things like that did happen.”
It was hard after the war, too. The Japanese who returned to Guadalupe had no land, no possessions, and no homes to return to. Furukawa’s younger brothers slept in the Buddhist temple looking for work.
“My brother told me—three white guys that they knew, from day one, grammar school and all that? They got out on the street facing the temple and pointed their BB guns and pow! pow! pow!—they shot the Buddhist church,” Furukawa said.
It was unfair, he said, because the Japanese were hardworking people—nothing more, nothing less. “They were farmers and shopkeepers and things like that,” he explained.
These days, outside of the cemetery, Guadalupe is not so full of Japanese-Americans.
“You see all these crews in the morning—the harvesting crews?” Furukawa asked. “They’re Latinos. If it was not for the Latinos who are helping to harvest the crops here in California and the Santa Maria Valley—” he paused, his voice getting low. “Well, hell. Things would come to a standstill.
“You always have to start from the bottom,” he added.
Staff Writer Sean McNulty can be reached at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 10-17, 2015.
