Metropolitan Seattle

South Park

 

 

While the geographic center of South Park is the intersection of 14^th Avenue South and Cloverdale, for practical purposes it is that part of Seattle that lies across the Duwamish River from Boeing Field. The Sunnydale community, located a few miles south toward Burien, is related.

The area’s first inhabitants were the Hwadaomish, a Salish word meaning “People of the River.”[1] Now known as the Duwamish, these Native American people had a regular winter village along Elliott Bay’s southern tide flats (midden sites include one near the Port of Seattle’s Terminal 105), and another upstream near Renton.[2]

In September 1850, the United States government opened up the Oregon Territory to settlement under the Oregon Donation Land Act. This was done by granting 320 acres of land to any single man and 640 acres to any married couple who filed proper paperwork and agreed to live on the property for several years. This encouraged failed California prospectors like John Holgate to stake claims in the Duwamish River Valley. Unfortunately, Holgate failed to properly file his claim, and in September 1851, Eli Mapel staked a legal claim that included most of modern South Park. Two years later Mapel was joined by Daniel and Adam Schneider.[3]

These settlers’ motivation for settling along the Duwamish River ox-bow was the same as the Indians: the bottom land was easily worked and the river and Elliott Bay provided fish, clams, and easy water transportation. Given Puget Sound’s damp weather, even roads improved using logs (“corduroy”) or logs split in half (“puncheon”) quickly turned into blue clay quagmires. Although trolley cars and electric trains subsequently reduced the problem, privately-owned steamboats and ferries remained a major source of transportation into the 1930s.[4]

These early settlers sold provisions to sawmills and ships. In 1853 a local farmer named Luther Collins claimed his crops (probably potatoes, beets, turnips, and cabbages) were worth $5,000, and in October 1855 he advertised apple, pear, peach and cherry trees for sale at $12.50 per hundred.[5] That said, Collins probably made more money from his ferry, which charged fifty cents each to transport a man and his horse across the river.[6]

During the Indian War of 1855-1856, hostile Indians burned most settler structures in King County. (At the time, King County spread from the Cascades to the Pacific, and included parts of modern Kitsap and Jefferson Counties.) The King County seat at Seattle was spared partly because of the presence of the gunboat USS Decatur and mostly because seven hundred local Indians led by see-Yahtlh, the man for whom Seattle is named, did not join the attack. Following the war, treaties arranged for the removal of most regional Indians unto reservations where disease and despair soon decimated their numbers, and today there are just a few hundred people who claim Hwadaomish ancestry.[7]

With the Indians relocated, the settlers abandoned their blockhouses and rebuilt their houses and barns. (Seattle’s oldest surviving structure is a post-Indian War house located in West Seattle.)[8] They also replanted their crops, and by 1860, Duwamish River farms were annually producing 1,395 bushels of wheat, 920 bushels of oats, 773 bushels of peas, and 14,282 bushels of potatoes.[9]

In 1856, Duwamish River settlers built a schoolhouse. The instructor was John Wesley Maple. (A son of Jacob Mapel, John Wesley Maple had Americanized his family name to Maple.)[10]  In 1884, Maple also donated land for the construction of a Methodist church and in 1890 he paid for the construction of a community hall.[11]

Developers were not far behind the farmers. The bluffs west of South Park, for example, were platted for view lots.[12] Unfortunately the area didn’t develop as hoped, so during the 1890s most landowners began selling their shoreline property to flour mills and breweries. To protect the new businesses from seasonal floods, during the 1910s the Corps of Engineers straightened the river into flood resistant channels. Although the Port of Seattle’s Duwamish Waterway did not enter full operations until 1920, additional industrial operations (most notably the Boeing Airplane Company) began moving into the reclaimed land as early as 1917.[13]

In July 1895, some canal builders started digging a southern route to Lake Washington. Their cut went through Beacon Hill, roughly along the line of the Spokane Street interchange. While the project went into receivership in 1897, several hundred acres of tide flats were reclaimed using the dirt that was removed.[14] The land that wasn’t occupied by factories and breweries was leased to Italian immigrants and used to grow vegetables and berries. (While leases averaged about $1,000 a year in 1910, payment wasn’t due until the end of the year. Therefore a man could get into the business for as little as $75.)[15]

About the same time, Japanese immigrants began settling south of South Park, both along the Duwamish River toward Renton and over the Highline ridge toward Burien. Pioneers included Arizumi, who settled near Sunnydale in 1906, and Uhachi Tamesa, who joined Arizumi in Sunnydale in October 1908.[16]

Once they had established themselves on farms or chicken ranches, men whose families had not come with them to America often sent home for wives and children. If unmarried, then they probably had their parents arrange marriages for them. The way this was done was that suitable parties in America and Japan exchanged photographs, and then agreed to marriage by correspondence. Sometimes men returned to Japan to marry the women. Such trips were called kankodan, or “sight-seeing tours.” Usually, though, the women came to America never having seen their future husband.  Such women were usually ill-prepared for the transition, and in some cases Americanized men rushed the women from the boat to a dressmaker and a shoe store to rid them of their kimonos.[17]

Women who came to America without having seen their husbands-to-be were called “picture brides.”[18] Many years later, a picture bride named Chiyo Hisayasu recalled the shock that awaited her in turn-of-the-century South Park:[19]

 

 

For drinking water and washing dishes and clothes, Mrs. Hisayasu used water directly from the river. The roof leaked, so she covered the bedding with raincoats. Every day, everyone rose about 6:00 a.m. The men then went to work in the fields for an hour while she cooked. Breakfast consisted of miso soup, pickles, and rice.[†] Lunch was vegetables and pickles. Dinner was curry rice, stew, or sukiyaki. On Sundays, the men only worked a half day, which they celebrated by eating a dinner consisting of rice hash or red bean rice.[20]

Mrs. Hisayasu’s life didn’t get much easier over time, either. In 1992, her son Howard recalled:[21]

 

 

Farther up the river, Pete Hanada’s parents started farming near Riverton:[22]

 

 

While some South Park farmers sold poultry or greenhouse flowers at Pike Place Market, most sold cauliflower, lettuce, radishes, onions, celery, and spinach to Western Avenue commission merchants.[23] Said Pete Hanada’s brother Curly:[24]

 

 

Instead of farming, a few Issei, notably Yoshiichi Tanaka, Frank K. Yokota, and Masaichi Yokoyama raised hogs. These men fed their animals using garbage collected from Seattle restaurants. To collect the garbage, for which they paid restaurant owners about $10 per month per can, they got up about 2:00 a.m., harnessed their horses to their wagons, and then trundled throughout downtown Seattle. About 1918, motor trucks began replacing horse-drawn wagons. This made longer hauling profitable, and during the 1920s Bellevue hog farmers assisted by stricter sanitation codes ran the South Park Issei out of the hog farming industry.[25]

Toward reducing competition among the Issei while providing a united front against discriminatory land ownership laws, the South Park Issei organized a Japanese Association in 1918. Association leaders included Manzo Ito, K. Uno, Kiichi Hisayasu, Keitaro Mukasa, and Kikutaro Hashimoto.[26] Of this association, a Nisei named Sage Shiomi recalls:[27]

 

 

As part of this one-for-all atmosphere, the South Park Japanese Association organized a Seinen Kai, or Youth Club, in 1924. The club met at the Japanese Association Hall, which was  located in an old building behind Washington Machinery, at 1255 Cloverdale.[28] The reason, said Howard Hisayasu, was that the South Park parents wanted to promote good sportsmanship and abilities in their children.[29]

Club activities included rehearsing for the shibai, or Japanese plays so beloved by Issei parents. “The ‘shibai’ itself,” wrote Bellevue’s George Nomura in January 1933:[30]

 

 

Most children, however, greatly preferred the picnics (the Fourth of July and Labor Day were almost always celebrated with picnics), Halloween and Valentine’s Day socials, and Japanese movie nights.[‡] Sports were also popular. [31] While the favorite sport was baseball, judo was also taught from the late 1920s until the late 1930s, as was kendo from 1936 until 1941.[32]

In 1928, Mr. Morinaga was South Park’s judo club manager. The club secretary was Mr. Yamaji, and the treasurer was Mr. Ito. The first judo instructor was an Issei 3-dan named Shiraji. His assistants included Goro Mochizuki and other Seattle Dojo black belts.[33] When Mochizuki moved to Oregon in 1933, his replacement was an Issei 2-dan named John Shibata, who taught classes on Wednesday and Saturday nights.[34]

The South Park Seinen Kai usually had about forty members, most of whom were aged under fourteen years. Of these, maybe half did judo.[35] “You took judo because your parents wanted you to learn,” said former South Park judoka Toru Araki. Which he later regretted, saying, “Younger children don’t know why they want to do judo. Peers, friends, and parents push them too early. Judo is more intellectual than that.”[36] Agreed Howard Hisayasu, “I started judo training from age twelve and trained for eight years. The first three years I was too young to realize the seriousness of the art and took it as just another sport.”[37]

Parents also told boys that judo would be useful against school-yard bullies. In the words of  an older South Park Nisei named Kenji Ito:[38]

 

 

In school-yard judo, there were of course risks, not all of which were delicious. Recalled Howard Hisayasu:[39]

 

 

Usually men came from Seattle Dojo to teach classes in South Park. Whenever Seattle Dojo instructors were unavailable, then the older boys took turns teaching the younger ones.  Katashi Kosaka, who was promoted on Saturday, 7 Feb 1931, was South Park’s first black belt.[40] The next was eighteen-year old Toru Araki, who received his 1-dan ranking in November 1934.[41] Other leading South Park judoka included Tadashi Katayama, Tadashi Kato, Hideyoshi Nagaoka, and Hiroshi Yabu.

Toru Araki says that when the local youths taught the classes, the rituals of judo were performed without much enthusiasm. Structurally, everyone bowed at the beginning of class, the designated teacher showed a technique, answered a few questions, and then set everyone to practicing. “I think I would have learned quicker and faster,” said Araki decades later, “if we’d had someone who understood the whole approach of teaching. The teachers were all very young. As they got older, they got better. It’s so much easier to teach as you get older. I haven’t been to a dojo lately, but in our day we felt there wasn’t much theory of judo. There wasn’t much explanation of why a waza [technique] works, or how it is applied in different positions in time.”[42]

South Park judoka made their contest debut on Sunday, 18 Nov 1928. Though they didn’t win much, the community was still proud.  “The glory of the triumph,” crowed Kenji Ito, “serves not only to reward us for our persistent practice, but to further inspire us in the hope that the cherished dream of augmenting our prestige to the hegemony of the entire continent might be realized in the not far distant future.”[43] (Ito was on the University of Washington debate team, and fancied himself quite a public speaker. Translated into English, what he meant to say was that he hoped that success in sport would help Japanese Americans achieve equal rights under United States law. As it turned out, Ito was about twenty-five years premature in his hopes.)

South Park Dojo started hosting its own regional tournaments in December 1931. These tournaments were held on Sunday afternoons, and often lasted well past midnight. No one starved, however, as refreshments – rice balls, soda pop, etc. -- were sold by the South Park Girls Club.[44] And the parents gossiped and had a good time. While tournaments were deadly serious for the players, for the parents, they were simply a time to get together with friends.[45]

During the mid-1930s, South Park judoka sometimes gave judo demonstrations during Cleveland High School talent shows. Recalled Howard Hisayasu:[46]

 

 

While Masato Tamura, Kaimon Kudo, Susumu Nitta, and other Northwest stars waged some classic battles during South Park tournaments, South Park judoka rarely won trophies except in the junior divisions. For example, on 4 Jul 1933, Hideyoshi Nagaoka and Toru Araki won judo uniforms at a Seattle tournament, and on Sunday, 10 Mar 1935, Hiroshi Yabu won first place while Tadashi Kato took third.[47]

Mostly this was because few South Park judoka were in a big hurry to get promoted. Howard Hisayasu, for instance, always wore a white belt rather than a brown belt. The way he saw it, that meant that opponents wouldn’t take him as seriously during tournaments, which in turn made it easier for him to win. The trick to winning, he added, was not in grabbing hard and then trying to toss the other fellow as if he were a crate of cabbages. Instead, the trick was to hold the opponent’s lapels as lightly as possible until just before you started the throw. That way he never knew what hit him.[48] That said, parents coveted those promotions, and when Hisayasu finally earned his black belt, his mother kept the promotion certificate with her important papers until just before her death.[49]

During the late 1930s, the South Park Dojo went into a decline from which it never recovered. The reason was that as its players grew up, they either moved away or got jobs or went to college. Thus they no longer had time for regular judo training. About the same time, however, some Seattle kendoka began teaching classes at South Park, so younger Nisei of the late 1930s often did kendo rather than judo.[50]

That their sons were never the best tournament players in the Northwest never bothered the South Park parents. The reason was that winning trophies was never a primary mission for the South Park Dojo. Instead, wrote Minoru Tamesa: [51]

 

 

Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested Kiichi Hisayasu and several other community leaders. “Even till this day,” said son Howard fifty years later, “I cannot see the reason for such action as my father was a decent man who was admired by the community and raised his children to respect the country and laws.”[52]

Wartime hysteria was the reason, as in March 1942, Nisei Kenji Ito was arrested for the crime of having too enthusiastically argued the Japanese side of the war in China for local newspapers and debating clubs. Somewhat to Ito’s surprise, he was acquitted of the charges. Still, too much should not be made of this since release from jail only meant transfer to a relocation camp.[53]

While the Japanese Americans were gone, South Park changed forever. Before the war and relocation, recalled a South Park farmer named Agnes Ianniciello:[54]

 

 

The reason for the change involved the wartime expansion of the Boeing Airplane Company and its subcontractors. Before the end of the war, the Hisayasu family farm, for example, was purchased and put under a Boeing plant.  To house the thousands of new employees, low-income housing also started gobbling up what had been leasehold farmland.[55] Finally, Filipinos took over what leasehold farming remained. Recalled Rufino Ordonio:[56]

 

 

Thus, when South Park’s Japanese Americans returned home after the war, they often found their former farms occupied by someone else. This forced them to find homes and jobs elsewhere, and by the time the US government returned the South Park Japanese Association Hall to its owners in 1946, there were no longer enough second or third generation Japanese American children to support South Park youth activities.

Although Toru Araki helped reestablish the Seattle Dojo in 1947, few South Park judoka continued with judo following the war. That didn’t mean they quit thinking about judo, however, or trying to apply its principles to their lives. Howard Hisayasu, for example, found that his prewar judo training gave him the confidence to confront the prejudice and bigotry he met during and after the war.[57] And, added Araki in May 1997, “I wish I had lots of time to devote to teaching the philosophy of judo. It keeps your mind alert.”[58]