When Prince Asaka and Princess Nobuko of Japan came to Monterey on Nov. 20, 1925, their arrival had been kept secret.
It was a courtesy the Japanese Consul of San Francisco, and the local Japanese community, had asked of the press. A Nov. 21 article in the Peninsula Daily Herald noted, “The silence was asked for because it was feared political enemies of the Japanese, many of whom are living in the United States, would attack the party en route to its stops.”
The royal couple – Nobuko’s brother was the Emperor of Japan – had just spent three years studying in France, and had arrived in New York nine days earlier. They made a few stops on their way out West, including Washington, D.C., where on Nov. 15 they had been among President Calvin Coolidge’s guests on the Mayflower, the presidential yacht.
The couple and their entourage, who had been assigned nine U.S. Secret Service agents to provide security during their visit, arrived at Del Monte station at 8:25pm. They were welcomed by the consul and members of the Japanese community, and after detectives from San Francisco, state police and Monterey’s police chief joined the security detail, the royal party was whisked off to Del Monte Lodge in Pebble Beach.
The next morning, Asaka and Nobuko went golfing, and per the Herald, “Princess Nobuko is said to wield clubs so skillfully that on more than one occasion she has bested the Prince.”
Following golf, the local Japanese community hosted a picnic for the royal couple at Point Lobos; Japanese residents from across the Central Coast were invited, and more than 200 showed to the party.
After the royal entourage dined on grilled rockfish, local Japanese fishermen took the couple out fishing, which was followed by an abalone diving exhibition from two well-known Monterey divers.
Before leaving for San Francisco the next morning, Prince Asaka and Princess Nobuko gave their hosts, the Monterey Japanese Association, a gift of $100 to show their appreciation for the warm hospitality – the picnic and scenery had been a hit.
That money, along with a few other donations from local families, paid for the construction of a hall for the Japanese Association in downtown Monterey. A building permit was secured by the following March and the building was dedicated in May 1926.
That two-story, ivory-hued hall still stands today, at 424 Adams St., just across from Jacks Park, and it turns 100 next year.
Since 1941, it’s been owned by the local chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), and once stood as a touchstone for the local Japanese community during their struggle for civil rights, both before and after World War II.
It’s a building with a story to tell – several stories, in fact. In 2020, local historian Tim Thomas, who’s been volunteering for JACL for several years, finished installing a small museum in the basement that highlights the history of the Japanese of the Monterey Peninsula, a subject Thomas published a book about in 2011.
Those stories – of hard-working immigrants carving out a life here, of racism, xenophobia and residents getting rounded up into internment camps, and how the community responded – still resonate today.
And as the JACL Hall turns 100, a series of events have been planned through next May, the anniversary of its dedication. The first of those events, the first-ever Abalone Festival, happened in late July, and it packed every seat in the hall on its opening day. Next is a picnic at Point Lobos in November that will recreate the royal outing from 1925.
But the anniversary comes just as JACL, a national nonprofit, faces questions about its own existence: What is the role of an organization, forged in the civil rights struggle for Japanese Americans, now that fascism has taken hold in the U.S., and the federal government is bringing back internment camps?
If humanity is forever doomed to repeat its past mistakes, does history ultimately teach us anything?
ON A MORNING IN JULY, Thomas opens the door into JACL’s basement, home to the JACL Heritage Museum he finished installing five years ago.
Thomas lights up when he enters the space. Collecting these artifacts has been a major part of his life’s work.
When he comes upon a small, unsightly wooden chair made from the cut limbs of an old oak tree – the bark is still on the knotted limbs – Thomas’ tone shifts.
“State Parks is going to take it back,” Thomas says of the chair, which was made by Japanese immigrant Ichiro Noda in 1905, when he was hired by businessman Harry Greene to make some “mementos” from branches of the famed Vizcaino-Serra Oak, which had recently died. The tree, which stood not far from Fisherman’s Wharf, was where Sebastian Vizcaino and Junipero Serra reportedly held mass when arriving – Vizcaino in 1602, Serra in 1720.
Noda only made three chairs out of the oak, and the other two have been lost. “Ichiro was very proud of those chairs,” Thomas says wistfully. “He talked about them all his life.”
Above the chair is a placard with text describing the chair’s significance, and below it are two photos – one of the chair being displayed at the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco, the other a shot of Noda pictured in uniform with the Pacific Grove Grammar School’s football team, which he was recruited to play for. “As far as I know, he was the first Japanese to play American football,” Thomas says.
Now 71, Thomas grew up on the Peninsula’s waterfront, exploring old cannery sites as a kid. He went to an experimental high school in Pacific Grove where he says he was essentially in charge of his own education. “It was unusual,” he says. “It wasn’t good for everybody, but it was good for me.”
Thomas attended Monterey Peninsula College for awhile (but didn’t graduate), then got a job at the Monterey Bay Aquarium when it first opened, helping with exhibits and mail.
He later worked for the Monterey History and Art Association for 16 years, and designed many of the exhibits in MHAA's former maritime museum in the Stanton Center at Custom House Plaza, which he had to remove in 2017 to make way for a Salvador Dali museum.
Thomas spent about a year trying to find a new home for all the maritime artifacts in that museum, and the JACL Hall became one of them. It was a beautiful coincidence, as the local JACL chapter’s board had for years expressed a desire for a museum showcasing Japanese history on the Monterey Peninsula.
It’s been an unorthodox path to becoming the foremost expert on the history of Monterey’s waterfront and fisheries, which is how Thomas first came to be involved with JACL in 2008 – he was chasing Monterey’s fishing history, which is inextricably linked to Japanese immigrants.
He immersed himself into that world, and leaning a lot on the work of David Yamada and JACL’s book The Japanese of the Monterey Peninsula, Thomas, in partnership with JACL, published an “Images of America” book in 2011, The Japanese on the Monterey Peninsula. It is filled with historical photos that brings the history to life and puts faces and scenery alongside names and notable facts.
But it wasn’t until 2013, while he was digging through files in the JACL Hall, that Thomas made a discovery that – for a historical treasure hunter – was akin to discovering gold.
JAPANESE IMMIGRATION TO THE MONTEREY PENINSULA was sparked by Otosaburo Noda, who in 1895 was working for the Pacific Improvement Company as a lumberjack, clearing trees to make way for the settlement of Pebble Beach.
As he scanned the local coastline, Noda was astonished by the abundance of abalone. He wrote a letter to the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to inform them there were carpets of abalone – a beloved seafood in Japan – to be found off the Monterey Peninsula.
In 1897, Gennosuke Kodani, a recent university graduate who had studied marine biology, came to the Peninsula to investigate, and by the end of the year he was renting land at Point Lobos to start an abalone business.
Alexander M. Allan bought the land at Point Lobos in 1898 from the Carmel Land & Coal Company, and Kodani and Allan entered into a business partnership, with Kodani providing expertise and contacts in the abalone industry, and Allan providing the capital.
They formed the Point Lobos Canning Company, and Kodani recruited abalone divers from his native Chiba prefecture in Japan, who mostly came over to work on a temporary basis.
Noda, meanwhile, started leasing land on Monterey’s waterfront in 1898 to start a fishing colony, and in 1902, he and a partner opened the first cannery on Cannery Row.
The nascent abalone fishery – and other fishing opportunities – helped inspire a greater stream of Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s, doing the jobs that needed doing: cleaners, shoe repair, barber, a hotel, restaurants, grocers, the list goes on.
From the early part of the century until World War II, there was a Nihon-machi – Japantown – in downtown Monterey near Del Monte Avenue and Alvarado Street. Just on the property where the Monterey Sports Center now sits, there were more than a half-dozen Japanese-owned businesses, as well as homes and apartments.
It was right by the wharf, and for the kids, right by Jacks Park, where Japanese and white kids played together, unconcerned about race. Baseball was big in the Japanese community, and some of the second-generation Japanese youth – Nisei – had dreams of going pro, and even got to see Joe Dimaggio when the San Francisco Seals played some exhibition games at Jacks Park in the 1930s.
Some Japanese immigrants on the Peninsula were also pioneers in local agriculture, particularly Kumahiko Miyamoto, who came here in 1900 and initially worked for the Devendorf Development Company, alongside other Japanese, cutting pines and oaks and squaring off lots and roads to make way for the development of Carmel.
While still working for Devendorf, Miyamoto started farming vegetables in Carmel Valley in 1907 at the current location of the Barnyard shopping center, delivering his produce fresh to local grocers from the flatbed of his hand-cranked Model-B Ford. Miyamoto was the first to grow artichokes in Carmel Valley.
Japanese also came to dominate the local gardening industry, as Yamada writes, “During the 1920s, virtually all the gardeners were Japanese… It was the production of the Model-T Ford that enabled them to venture farther out for work and to take jobs at the Gatsby-like estates in Pebble Beach.”
And while the conventional history is that Italian Americans dominated the local fishing industry, before World War II more than half of the fish markets on Fisherman’s Wharf, eight of them, were Japanese.
Though local Japanese still faced discrimination with certain laws – Japanese immigrants were not allowed to own land, for one, and the Immigration Act of 1924 was essentially a Japanese Exclusion Act – they generally got along quite well.
Then came Pearl Harbor.
BETWEEN APRIL 27 AND JULY 4, 1942, 3,586 Japanese Americans from Monterey County and surrounding areas were detained at the Salinas Rodeo Grounds, which had been converted into a temporary internment camp, the “Salinas Assembly Center.”
Ultimately, the detainees – 120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up, mostly from the West Coast – were headed to one of the Justice Department’s 10 War Relocation Authority camps, aka internment or concentration camps.
Among them was Ryuzo Hayase, who ran a bait-and-tackle and curio shop on Fisherman’s Wharf with his family. Hayase was whisked off by the FBI, his family later learned, because he was a Buddhist priest. Setsuji Kodama, who ran Owl Cleaners with his wife Fujiko and was also president of Monterey’s Japanese Association, was taken by the FBI.
The upheaval for the more than 1,500 Japanese Americans living in Monterey County at that time is hard to fathom. Many lost close to everything, and others felt lucky to sell their belongings for pennies on the dollar – Roy Hattori, a Monterey-born abalone diver, was only able to get $300 for his family’s diving boat and gear.
Most of the eligible American-born Japanese men either volunteered or were drafted into the military, and most of them were assigned to a nearly all-Japanese American unit, the 442nd, that became the most decorated unit in military history. They fought in eight campaigns, made two beachhead assaults, captured a submarine and liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, even as some still had their own family members detained in internment camps back home.
Back in America, meanwhile, residents devoured newspapers every day for the latest updates on the war.
On April 23, 1945 the headline on page one of the Monterey Peninsula Herald read, “Soviet-Yank Juncture Imminent.” On page 5 of that paper is a large ad announcing “Organization to Discourage Return of Japanese to the Pacific Coast,” and below it are articles of incorporation for the Monterey Bay Council on Japanese Relations. The ad includes a piece to cut out to apply for membership, along with $1 in dues, to a P.O. box in Salinas.
No members of the group listed their names in the ad, but it was known that its leader was Edward Seifert, president of the Salinas Grower-Shipper Association.
And that came after Austin E. Anson, the Salinas Grower-Shipper managing secretary, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work and they stayed to take over…
We don’t want them back when the war ends, either.”
LETTERS POURED IN TO THE HERALD IMMEDIATELY, with more than one coming from the writer Toni Jackson, who was Ed Ricketts’ common-law wife and sometimes took his name.
Most readers were outraged – expressed in the polite words of the time – and some criticized the Herald for running the ad. Among them was Edward Weston of Carmel, who denounced the decision to run the ad “with every ounce of decency in me.”
Ed Ricketts, for his part, wrote a lengthy letter that sarcastically praised the ad because it “re-emphasizes the essential success of Hitler as a teacher.”
On May 1, Mollie Sumida, an American citizen and Monterey High grad, wrote in to the Herald from a relocation camp in Poston, Arizona.
“I want to thank the people of Monterey who wrote to the Herald to defend us,” Sumida wrote. “I know as long as there are people like that left in this country, all the Nisei boys did not die in vain, and what they fought for will live on.”
Upon reading Sumida’s letter, Jackson was inspired to write a petition. She quoted the War Department’s own words, praising bravery of the Japanese American men who fought in the war, that their relatives returning home from camps should be treated like loyal and law-abiding citizens.
The petition ends with, “We, the undersigned, then believe that it is the privilege and responsibility of this community to cooperate with the national government by insuring the democratic way of life to all members of the community.”
On May 11, 1945, the petition ran in a full-page ad in the Herald, with a bold headline up top: “The Democratic Way of Life For All.” Below the petition were more than 440 names. Among them were Robinson and Una Jeffers, and John Steinbeck.
Yamada, in his 1995 book, writes it was “one beacon of light… worth mentioning.” He continues, “To this day, members of the local Japanese community reflect on this ad and say, ‘It was a wonderful thing for the people here to do.’”
IN 2013, THOMAS WAS RIFLING THROUGH A FILE CABINET at JACL Hall when he came upon a rolled-up legal envelope dated May 9, 1945. Inside were all the petitions, signed. One, which Thomas says was signed in Ed Ricketts’ lab, has the signatures of both Ricketts and Steinbeck.
“It’s the only document that exists that has their two signatures together,” Thomas says.
The discovery was thrilling. There was only one surviving signatory left to celebrate it, Nancy Costello. In 2013, then 95, she told writer Geoffrey Dunn that when her husband Jimmy, a reporter for the Herald, had to report on Japanese Americans getting rounded up, “It was the worst assignment of his life. These were good people, loyal citizens. Jimmy was mortified by it. He knew it was wrong.”
The discovery of the petitions, and the story they tell, became the subject of a 2022 documentary sponsored by the Monterey Peninsula JACL titled, Enduring Democracy: The Monterey Petition that aired on PBS in June 2025.
Dunn was among those participating in the production, and at one part says, “Japanese American internment has been swept under the rug of history ever since it happened.”
He then adds that it was important for American kids to learn about: “If they don’t know about it, then they can’t understand how it can happen again.”
LARRY ODA WAS BORN IN 1945 in an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas. He wasn’t able to return to his family’s home in Monterey until 1946.
Oda currently serves as board president of the national JACL, and formerly served as president of the Monterey Peninsula chapter for seven years.
Sitting upstairs in the JACL Hall in July, Oda says that at the time of the convention, there were 120 JACL chapters nationwide, and it’s now down to about 100.
One reason, he says, is that when JACL was formed in 1930, it was to help Japanese immigrants navigate the legal process, and then after war, help them seek redress from the government for their unlawful incarceration.
The latter fight took more than 40 years, until then-President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which paid out $20,000 each to surviving internees and, among other things, was to “discourage the occurrence of similar injustices and violations of civil liberties in the future.”
Perhaps some members fell off after Oda says, but what’s surely happening is that members are passing away, and their ranks are not being replenished by younger generations.
“Early on, we had to fight for what we had,” Oda says. “Nowadays, with Japanese food, sushi, manga – it’s more accepted in the community.”
He says there was a bump in engagement after 9/11, when JACL got involved to caution people not to blame Middle Easterners like Japanese Americans were blamed by some for Pearl Harbor.
Now, Oda says, “They’re not worried about people banging on their door and taking them away.”
Then Oda stops himself. “Now, it seems like that’s happening. It’s similar to what was going on in Germany in the ’30s.”
Oda hopes today’s political atmosphere inspires a renewed interest in JACL, and potentially be a way to recruit new members. (JACL is open to everyone, not just people of Japanese descent.)
“They can see there’s some relevance in their lives, they can see the opportunity to make an influence, to help the cause,” Oda says of college students in particular. “We have an opportunity to give them some training, so they can make their voices heard… so they can attend any meeting and be a contributor, and take a leadership position.”
The national JACL has a projected budget deficit of about $500,000 for the current fiscal year, which Oda says it could make up for by recruiting 7,000 new members – doubling the current size of its membership – or by doubling the dues.
Either way, he concedes, “We need to put some thought into whether we want to sink or swim.”
Who knows what the country will look like come November, when JACL hosts a commemorative picnic at Point Lobos, or next May, when the JACL Hall building celebrates its centennial.
But when the sun does rise – as it always does – what kind of country America will be will in many ways be defined by the acts of courage and grace that stand against the darkness.
And when historians write about this moment years from now, the story they write will be ours.
JAPANESE AMERICAN CITIZENS LEAGUE HERITAGE MUSEUM is in the JACL Hall at 424 Adams St., Monterey. Tours are free, by appointment only. Contact Tim Thomas at (831) 521-3304 or timsardine@yahoo.com.
---
Correction - 8/26/25 4pm: This story has been corrected from its original version to reflect that Tim Thomas designed some of the exhibits at MHAA's former maritime museum, but not all the exhibits.