Quick Take
Longtime Santa Cruz resident Jill Yamashita laments the board of supervisors’ Aug. 5 choice not to preserve the Redman-Hirahara House outside Watsonville on the National Register of Historic Places. The house, she writes, was the first home owned by Japanese Americans in Santa Cruz County and has a storied history before and after World War II, when the owners were sent to internment camps. Losing the house is an erasure of minority history, she writes.
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I am saddened, disheartened and disappointed by the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors’ decision to demolish one of the last remaining Victorian farmhouses designed by William Weeks and a home of significance to our Japanese American history.
Voting to delist the Redman-Hirahara house from the National Register of Historic Places, which the supervisors did in a 4-1 vote on Aug. 5, essentially means allowing it to be destroyed.
This historic home was not only designed by the same architect who built part of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, but it was also the first home ever owned in our community by Japanese American citizens. You see, Japanese Americans were not allowed to own land because of their ancestry, even before World War II.
In 1940, the Hirahara family bought the home just outside Watsonville and had it for two years before they – along with more than 1,300 Santa Cruzans – were sent to internment camps. This was just after Pearl Harbor. They were sent for being of Japanese ancestry.
The Hirahara family was sent to a camp in Arkansas, and when they got out of the camps in 1945, they had a home to go to because their neighbors had taken care of their home for them while they were interned.
Not all families were as lucky.
Some had nothing to go home to. The Hirahara family built rooms in the carriage barn for families with nowhere to go after the camps.
It is sad that the supervisors don’t care about erasing this historical home and the stories of our Japanese American families. It’s sad no one has found a better solution.
It is personal to me because my father spent the first three years of his life in an internment camp in Arizona, along with my grandparents and aunt. They faced major discrimination after getting out of the camps, but were the nicest people you would ever be lucky enough to have met.
They’re all dead now so all I have are memories. I am one of the invisible minority.
What’s that?
It’s growing up Asian American. It’s knowing you are acceptable as long as you act invisible, don’t make waves or trouble for your family or community. So, when politicians make a move to erase a historical farmhouse of such stature that has socio-cultural significance to me, it’s disappointing.
It is so typical these days to just erase Asian American history as if it didn’t even happen. When the Chinese built the railroads, no pictures were taken of them. They were “invisible.” We have photos of the Caucasian men working, but none of the Chinese being blown off cliffs in the Sierras using Chinese dynamite to create tunnels.
The demolition of the Victorian farmhouse, the last of its kind, is like erasing both the historical reminder of that lovely Victorian farmhouse that William Weeks designed for a beet farmer named James Redman, who died in 1921, and erasing Japanese American history.
I still hope that one day it might be restored.
To tear it down means there is no hope.
Jill Yamashita is a retired speech language pathologist, a fourth-generation Californian, a history buff and a good daughter, sister and mom. She lives in Live Oak.