The Japanese American Experience in San Luis Obispo during the Interwar Years
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The Japanese American Experience in San Luis Obispo during the Interwar Years Robert Scott Baxter 1 Accepted: 29 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In the early twentieth century, the Kurokawa family moved to San Luis Obispo, California. Japanese immigrants, they established themselves in the community, operating a downtown vegetable market for several decades. Years later, archaeologists uncovered a pit filled with detritus the family left behind. The presence of numerous Japanese tablewares and food and beverage containers demonstrate continued ties with their homeland and the perpetuation of traditional dietary practices. Intermixed with these were European American goods indicating the incremental integration of American consumer patterns of the time. These artifacts provides a rare opportunity for archaeological investigation of a Pre-War, urban Japanese American family. Keywords Japanese . San Luis Obispo . Ceramics . Whale Oil . Beer
The Kurokawa Family The Kurokawa family were a first (Issei) and second-generation (Nisei) Japanese family who resided in San Luis Obispo from the 1910s until WWII. The family was composed of husband and wife Hisato and Isano and their son Paul. Hisato (Tom or T. H.) Kurokawa was born in Kobe, Japan on January 3, 1886 or 1887. He emigrated to the US via Hawaii on the S.S. China in July 1906 (US Immigration Office 1906:30). Isano (Mary) (nee Shinkawa) was born in Japan circa 1893 (US Federal Census 1930). There she found employment as a teacher (Contreras 2006). She emigrated to the US in 1913. On November 4th of that same year she and Hisato were married in San Francisco. They eventually made their way down to San Luis Obispo where their only child, Paul Hiroto Kurokawa, was born in 1915. The photo in Fig. 1 shows the Kurokawas circa 1925. Dressed in western attire they present a typical middle-class American family of the 1920s. * Robert Scott Baxter [email protected]
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Pacific Legacy, Inc., 4919 Windplay Drive, Suite 200, P.O. Box 639, Plymouth, CA 94762, USA
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
Fig. 1. Hisato, Isano, and Paul Kurokawa circa 1925 (Calisphere 2017, used by permission of Dawn Kamiya)
During the first four decades of the twentieth century, San Luis Obispo County had a thriving Japanese migrant population. Many worked in the fruit and vegetable industry either farming and/or selling produce. In the town of San Luis Obispo, Japanese immigrants formed something of an encapsulated community centered around the Watanabe’s fruit and vegetable store at the intersection of South and Higuera Streets. The Kurokawas operated a vegetable store at 887 Palm St. in what was the old San Luis Obispo Chinatown (US Federal Census 1920, 1930). On May 4, 1915, Hisato signed a lease for the property. He leased the property from S. R. Call, and one I. Nakamura was listed as a co-signer on the lease, although the agreement specified that it was being recorded at “the request of T.H. [Hisato] Kurokawa.” T
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