Half of San Diego's fishing crews were Japanese by 1918. Two trains carried eleven hundred and fifty people out. All records sourced and cited.
Behind the Van Camp cannery, at the foot of Crosby Street, San Diego had a neighborhood standing on pilings over the bay.
The Journal of San Diego History describes it plainly. "In back of the cannery over the waters of the bay were the homes of many of the Nikkei who were involved in the tuna industry." Children grew up out there. Donald Estes names some of them: Osa Himaka, Masato Asakawa, Haruki Koba, a boy called Lefty Okomoto, watched over by older fishermen like Namiki San as they "lived, worked and played on the wharf over the bay."
On April 8, 1942, every Japanese resident of San Diego south of the San Dieguito River was required to be gone. They had six days of notice. Eleven hundred and fifty people left on trains, and the neighborhood over the water did not come back.
Three things are worth knowing before the story runs. By 1918 the federal government counted half of all fishing crews in San Diego as Japanese. The community had a Buddhist temple on Market Street that had been dedicated eleven years before the removal. And there is a detail about what the trains carried that says more than any number here.
The fishing started with one man and a different species.
Estes dates the arrival of Japanese fishermen in increasing numbers to about 1908, when Kikuchi Jiroichi began to catch abalone. Before that the Japanese presence in San Diego County was agricultural. By 1905 there were about thirty two Japanese owned or leased farms, and within a decade as many as two hundred and fifty Japanese were working in the county.
The shift to tuna was fast and it was total.
By 1918 the United States Department of Commerce estimated that fifty percent of all the crews in San Diego were Japanese. Not a share of the industry. Half of the men on the boats.
They also changed how the industry worked. A fishing captain named Steve Stagnaro described watching the Japanese method for albacore: they kept a bait tank on board, and two men were kept busy dumping fresh sea water into it to keep the bait alive. Live bait spread from there through the whole fleet.
The Van Camp cannery sat at the foot of Crosby Street, and it employed the fishermen's wives on piecework. The families lived behind it, on the water.
This is the part that has no equivalent anywhere in San Diego now. Not a waterfront neighborhood. A neighborhood on the waterfront's pilings, where the ground floor was the bay.
The institutions went up over twenty five years, and the record of them is specific.
The Japanese Association, the Nihonjin-kai, was founded in 1906 and legally incorporated in 1913. The Japanese Congregational Mission operated on 8th Street, teaching English along with religion. There was a store called Nippon Shokai at 5th and Island, and the Vegetable Growers Market at 400 6th.
The Buddhist Temple was formally founded in 1926. It began in the back of Kawamoto Kikuji's Frisco Cafe, then rented an upper room at the corner of 6th and Market in May of that year. In 1931 it acquired a permanent site at 2929 Market and was dedicated there.
Eleven years later it was locked.
The order came through registration. Japanese residents south of the San Dieguito River registered on April 2 and 3, 1942, and were given a deadline of noon on April 8.
On April 7 they left by train. Gerald Schlenker's account in the Journal of San Diego History puts the number at one thousand one hundred and fifty individuals, in three hundred and six family groups. They went to the Santa Anita race track.
They were permitted to bring only what they could carry themselves.
Here is the detail.
Two trains carried eleven hundred and fifty people out of San Diego. Between them they had three baggage cars.
Three baggage cars for three hundred and six households. Everything else, the boats, the gear, the furniture, the houses on the pilings, stayed where it was. Schlenker records that what did get sold went for what he calls ridiculously low prices, and that equipment simply disappeared.
The arithmetic of three baggage cars is the whole story of what a family kept.
Nothing of the houses. The pilings are gone, the cannery is gone, and the waterfront south of downtown was rebuilt several times over in the decades after.
The Buddhist Temple's congregation survived. The neighborhood over the water did not.
If you are looking at property in the blocks above that waterfront, this is part of what the ground under them has been. The current numbers are in the downtown market report, and the wider area is in Metro and Central.
What the photographs are. The two cannery pictures are San Diego, taken around 1918, and they show the industry, not the people this piece names. The two 1942 pictures are Santa Anita, which is where the eleven hundred and fifty from San Diego were sent, and they are not photographs of San Diego residents. No image of the San Diego departure, or of the houses standing over the water, has been found in a collection that permits publication.
The date. The removal order set a deadline of noon on April 8, 1942, and the trains left on April 7. Both dates are correct and they describe different things. This piece gives the deadline as the order's date and April 7 as the departure, because that is how the record reads.
What the neighborhood was called. These sources do not give the area over the water a neighborhood name, and they do not call it Barrio Logan. This piece locates it the way Estes does, behind the Van Camp cannery at the foot of Crosby Street, and does not apply a later name to it.
What happened to the boats. The tuna fleet's wartime fate is documented elsewhere and is not in the two articles this piece rests on. Rather than borrow it from a weaker source, this piece says only what Schlenker says: property sold at very low prices and equipment disappeared.
More San Diego history: stories from around the county, one place at a time.