NEBRASKA CITY – Flatwater Free Press reporter Blake Ursch discusses the move of a building to the Legacy of the Plains Museum that is helping tell the story of Japanese-American families who settled to farm and live in Nebraska.
The 90-year-old Japanese Scottsbluff Hall moved to the museum site on Oregon Trail near Scottsbluff National Monument.
Ursch also highlights the immigration that covered the structure of the railroad beyond World War II.
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Saving history: Japanese immigrants have made Nebraska their home. A granddaughter makes us remember.
By Blake Ursch
free water press
It is no small thing to maintain the heritage of a people.
It’s about collecting even the smallest non-public stories —a grandfather and his neighbors digging a basement by hand, a couple’s hasty marriage in a seaport— and capturing them in the broad frame of the story. It’s about years of researching, collecting artifacts, and building relationships. It implies, above all, an honest confidence in the ability of the beyond to tell the present.
And sometimes it’s about uprooting a 90-year-old building, banging it into a truck and transporting it from Scottsbluff to Gering.
On December 10, 2019, structure teams moved an indescribable structure with white sides from 1705 Avenue C in Scottsbluff to their new home at the Legacy of the Plains Museum on the Oregon Trail at the foot of Scottsbluff National Monument.
Built in 1928, the building is the ultimate visual reminder of a generation of Japanese immigrants who, in the early twentieth century, settled in western Nebraska, building a network in the state that endures to this day. For decades, the structure, known as the Japanese Hall, served as a gathering place for Japanese-American families in the area. It has hosted Japanese language classes, dances, services, theatrical performances, the medium of a network.
In its next life, the construction will serve as a permanent installation for the Legacy of the Plains Museum. It will feature exhibits that tell the story of Nebraska’s Japanese network: what brought them here and how they became members of a network and built their own, despite the demanding situations of American life.
“I think it’s vital to show the help that many Japanese Americans have received,” said Vickie Sakurada Schaepler, coordinator of the Japanese Hall and Hitale Project at the Legacy of the Plains Museum and the driving force behind the Japanese Hall preservation effort. “I don’t need this story to be lost. I don’t need other people to know that there were Japanese immigrants who came to our state, and that other people helped them and helped them live and thrive here.
Many initially turned to paintings on the railroad.
In 1882, in reaction to a wave of anti-Chinese fanaticism that followed heavy immigration, the gold rush, and the structure of the first transcontinental railroad, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese immigration.
Japanese immigrants, encouraged by the Meiji Restoration, an era of political and social updating that saw the adoption of Western values, began to upgrade the Chinese as railroad workers and coal miners. Many came here hoping to earn money to send to their families, with the company’s goal of returning to Japan one day.
In Japanese communities in North and South America today, this first of the immigrants is known as issei, or “first generation. “
They started on the west coast (California, Oregon, Washington) and eventually moved east, some settling down to grow sugar beets in the upper plains when work on the railroad was finished. By 1900, at least 700 Japanese had reached the Missouri River in Nebraska, according to “A History of the Japanese in Nebraska,” through the Rev. Hiram Kano, a guy who would gain fame in his selected state.
As the years passed and Japanese immigration increased, so did racial animosity, echoing what had happened to Chinese immigrants decades earlier. In 1907, the United States and Japan signed the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” in which Japan agreed to restrict emigration. of aspiring staff to the United States, while the United States agreed to allow immigration of the wives, youth, and relatives of the many Japanese men already living here.
This agreement led to an influx of “photographic brides,” Japanese women who agreed to marry Japanese men in the United States through a circle of relatives agreement, which paired the couple with the help of photographs. The couples married from afar through powers of attorney, with a photograph replacing the groom, Kano wrote.
Such ceremonies were valid in Japan, giving the new bride access to the travel documents she needed to meet her husband on U. S. docks. There, the groom waited with an officiant to carry out a rite of the moment in the place of the Port.
That’s how Takehiko Miyoshi and his wife Takeyo got married, said the couple’s grandson, John Miyoshi, a retired conservation director and board member of the Nebraska Community Foundation, who is the Japanese Hall’s assignment manager. Later, the couple established a thriving farm near Hershey.
“I think other people can be pretty resourceful when they want to,” Miyoshi said.
Many, like the Miyoshi family, have taken deep root in nebraska soil.
“Why should Japanese immigrants who came to America to make money be sent back. . . they don’t have to return to Japan, but they must remain permanently in the United States?” wrote Kano. lifestyle. They had learned enough English to cope with their daily lives. They felt comfortable here because it was no longer a foreign land.
The Issei married and gave birth to a momentary generation: the Nisei. These families established close ties with the neighbors of Scottsbluff and North Platte and, of course, with other Japanese-American families. They built social halls in Mitchell, North Platte and Scottsbluff. where they held theatrical productions and church services, prepared mochi (Japanese rice cakes) and played baseball, friendly places where they can gather and bond around their shared heritage.
But the Nisei, the new generation, would mature at a time of intense turmoil, especially for other people of Japanese descent living in the United States.
Legal discrimination is nothing new. In Nebraska and other states, foreign land legislation that intentionally discriminates against other people of Asian descent prevented foreign-born Issei from owning farmland.
But after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, things got worse. In February 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing the resettlement of other people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast to additional internment camps. interior.
He has descended everywhere.
In Nebraska, Japanese social halls have closed, Schaepler said. Friends pleaded with their Japanese neighbors to erect crosses to make the buildings look like churches and prevent vandalism.
Hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kano, a Nebraska farmer and Episcopalian priest who had come to the United States in 1916 to study agriculture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was arrested by North Platte police who questioned him about his circle of family ties. to the Japanese government. Considered a national security risk, he was imprisoned in an internment camp where he remained for about 3 years until his release in 1944.
Despite the increased institutional and social persecution of the war, many second-generation Nisei mobilized to enroll in the war effort. Ben Kuroki of Nebraska, born in Gothenburg in 1917, flew 58 bombing missions during the war, receiving 3 Distinguished Flying Crosses and Distinguished Service. Medal decades later.
Schaepler’s uncle, Shogi Sakurada, served in the U. S. Army’s 100th Infantry Battalion. It was composed mostly of Niesi infantrymen. maximum unit honored for length and duration of service in American history.
Decades later, in 2012, Schaepler attended a birthday party of life at the Japanese Salon in Scottsbluff. He saw the picture of his grandfather hanging on the wall. It hung black-and-white images of the original issei that helped build the corridor in 1928.
She decided: This room is too vital to lose.
“I asked my aunts and uncles about it, and they said, ‘Oh, yes. Grandpa talked about digging the basement by hand and transporting the earth with his carts and shoes,” Schaepler said. “They were talking about demolishing the building. The other people who took care of the construction were getting older and didn’t feel the need to take care of it. So, I was driving home and I had this idea: I’m going to save this room.
In recent decades, the Japanese-American network in western Nebraska has shrunk, Schaepler said. Reflecting major national trends, families have moved from rural communities to cities. Today, Schaepler, a member of the third generation of sansei, estimates that a few dozen descendants of the original issei are still in the region. Which makes preserving the stories of his parents and grandparents even more important, he said.
“We hope this will give more foundation to the network and provide the opportunity to combine other people of Japanese origin, and we’re already seeing some of that,” Miyoshi said. The museum, whether they’re in or out of state, or have family here or have lived here at some point, we hear from many of them who need to be a part of it. “
After a successful fundraising effort to move the building, COVID-19 is far behind schedule, Schaepler said. Meanwhile, Schaepler, Miyoshi and others involved in the task have focused on renovations to modernize the building. Lately they are making plans to open in the summer of 2023.
“It’s such a glorious task for me because I learned so much,” Schaepler said. “I’ve met a lot of other people who are interested in this story. “
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