By John Sammon

Jim Morita a concentration camp survivor of World War II was old enough at the time to see the impact imprisonment made on the inmates. The heartbreak among the older prisoners was evident.
“I could see it on their faces the older prisoners the adults,” Morita recalled. “Like those in their 50’s. They suffered. Teenagers in the camp like me, we hadn’t lost as much. We had a ‘to hell with it attitude.’”
In 1942 the U.S. Government shamefully locked up Japanese Americans, loyal U.S. citizens, because of their race.
The older prisoners were devastated the most. They lost everything they had worked to build, their businesses, property, possessions and freedom. All they had left were their lives.
Some lost those too. Unable to deal with it some committed suicide, while other prisoners already in delicate health at the start succumbed from the brutal experience.
Though he didn’t witness it firsthand Morita was close by. His brother Don saw it, the murder of a prisoner by a camp guard who panicked and overreacted, a prisoner killed for no reason at all. The crime was never investigated and remains unpunished to this day.
In fact at the time American society hardly took notice of the incident. The Los Angeles Times appeared to blame the trouble solely on the prisoners with a mocking headline that read, “The Japanese are Celebrating Pearl Harbor.”
Morita would agree the only justice left in the case is to tell people of it so they will know, so it’s not forgotten.
Morita was a prisoner at Manzanar a camp located in a remote part of Northeastern California. Deliberately mislabeled by the government a “War Relocation Center,” it was in reality a concentration camp for prisoners including children, the elderly and pregnant women whose only crime as American citizens was—-they looked Japanese.
Manzanar was one of 10 such camps located in remote areas of the U.S. Southwest. Numerous smaller prisons for Japanese and Japanese Americans were run by the U.S. Dept. of Justice (DOJ).
Manzanar was noted as a camp for imagined troublemakers. Those who protested their illegal imprisonment, who refused to sign a loyalty oath (they felt they were already loyal), or who offended in some way their captors.
It was apparently an example in the government’s eyes of having all the rotten apples in one barrel so to speak.
There was fear among the prisoners.
“We had thought we were going to be sent to a camp in Rohwer, Arkansas,” Morita said. “When my mother (Masano Morita) heard that we were going to Manzanar instead, she became hysterical. We had heard that people were dying there.”
How the prisoners reacted to their incarceration could differ widely. Some who appeared to disagree with their imprisonment were seen by the timid souls in the camp to be trouble makers, those who because of their defiance could get the more compliant prisoners into trouble also. The government system accomplished what any police state wants. Get some of the prisoners to act as government cronies (informers) and turn the prisoners against each other—-divide and conquer, keep the prisoners docile, submissive.
It was another step toward isolation, dehumanization.
Tensions increased at the camp. On Dec. 6, 1942, almost a year to the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the situation boiled over.
A camp prisoner Fred Tayama was attacked by a group of prisoners for allegedly espousing a pro-government War Relocation Authority (WRA) viewpoint. Harry Ueno was arrested for the crime and held in the camp jail. Ueno was popular with the prisoners. They demanded his release.
A crowd formed near the camp police station where Ueno and two other prisoners were being held.
Soldiers responding to the scene formed a rank in front of the police station and carried a variety of weapons, rifles, pistols, shotguns and machine guns, two of them heavy tripod mounted weapons.
The soldiers donned gas masks.
When an MP officer ordered the crowd to disperse and they did not the soldiers threw tear-gas and vomit-gas bombs into the crowd. The crowd reacted in panic, running in all directions, some toward the soldiers. An MP sergeant yelled “Remember Pearl Harbor, hold your line!”
The soldiers opened fired without orders to do so, three bursts of submachine gun fire and three shotgun blasts. Among the prisoners 10 suffered gunshot wounds and two were killed, Henry Ito a 17-year-old from Los Angeles and James Kanegawa, 21 from Tacoma.
According to Densho Encyclopedia in its historical description of the event a few members of the crowd had taunted and threw stones at the MPs before they opened fire.
“Some in the crowd were just spectators,” Morita said. “My brother (Don Morita) saw it and ran away. He came screaming and running into the barracks. The next day the authorities declared martial law.”
Morita said he was about one mile away in the prison barracks when it happened and didn’t hear the shooting.
A rumor unproven to this day is that one of the prisoners in the camp jail was a Japanese American a former enlisted U.S. military man who had been helping the government and was being kept in the jail away from the prisoners for his own safety.
“The rumor we heard was that this Japanese American sergeant had adopted an English sounding name and had been in World War 1 with Sergeant Alvin York,” Morita said.
York was one of the most decorated soldiers of World War 1 including winning the Congressional Medal of Honor the nation’s highest award.
“We had heard that the prisoner had been York’s right-hand man,” Morita added. “I was 15 when this happened. I was in the camp from 1942 to 1945.”
Morita had been born in Fresno and moved in 1929 with his parents to Florin, today a neighborhood in Sacramento.
“I went to a segregated school,” Morita said, “all Japanese (American). My dad (Kamekichi Morita) immigrated from Japan to Hawaii and later married my mother (Masano). It was a picture wedding (marriage based on a photo, the bride at first sight unseen).”
Morita’s father made a living as a barber.
“Both my parents were born in Japan in the Hiroshima area, that’s where there were poor farmers,” Morita noted.
When the government ordered the arrest and deportation of Japanese Americans to prison camps Morita was a sophomore at Elk Grove High School.
“I couldn’t graduate,” he said.
Morita said several years ago he met Bob Matsumoto a former advertising executive and Sacramento artist who designed an iconic logo (poster) to memorialize the suffering endured by the prisoners—three strands of barbed wire colored red, white and blue against a black background.
“Bob Matsumoto, his grandfather was a friend of my dad’s,” Morita said. “His dad was my baseball coach. I didn’t know Bob until I read an article (2017) about his 9066 artwork.”
Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the arrest and imprisonment of 115,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans living along the west coast. Matsumoto’s artwork including the barbed wire poster has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and copies of the symbol adorn posters and tee shirts sold at the Japanese American National Museum (100 N. Central Ave., Los Angeles).
Matsumoto and his family like Morita had been imprisoned at Manzanar.
Morita said to pass time in the camp the prisoners formed their own baseball teams. They played on a diamond carved out on bare ground originally created as a fire break.
“I used to pitch,” Morita said. “I was on a team the Red Sox, and the Solons. They were named after the Sacramento Solons (a minor league team that moved to Hawaii in 1961 and became the Hawaii Islanders).”
Morita said the camp had 17 teams. Some were named for the communities from which the player-prisoners had come, for example the San Pedro Yogore (means dirt in Japanese) and the San Fernando Aces.
“They were a good team,” Morita said of the Aces.
Morita said he was old enough to be well aware that what the government was doing to the prisoners was a great wrong. He recalled that in one case a Caucasian man promised to take care of property owned by a Japanese American so the man could take back possession of his property when he returned from the camp. Instead he forced the man to sell his property at an outrageously low price.
“There was another case,” Morita said. “A man promised to hold a prisoner’s property for him, but this time when the man returned from the camp there was money in the bank for him, the place was kept up, the property returned. So there were honest people out there.”
During his imprisonment in 1944 Morita was briefly released from Manzanar to pick sugar beets and potatoes on a farm in Pocatello Idaho because of a shortage of farm labor workers. One day Morita was walking when he came upon two white service men who threatened him.
“One said, ‘you’re a Jap!’” Morita said. “He took off his jacket as if to fight. I thought if you come at me I’m going to give you a kick. Just then a police patrol car came by and the policeman saw what was happening. That saved my butt.”
Upon release from Manzanar another incident happened.
“I was in Fresno shopping with someone and we were going home,” Morita said. “There was a crease in my vehicle. Somebody had taken a shot at it.”
After the war and freedom Morita was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1953 and served doing occupation duty on the island of Okinawa. After the service he met and married his wife Dorothy and the couple had two adopted children, Dana and David. Today he has four granddaughters (Dorothy passed in 2008).
Morita’s four brothers all served in the military including Don in the U.S. Army, Eugene in the Air Force, Ken in the Army and John in the U.S. Navy.
His son David entered the U.S. Marines and also served on Okinawa.
Morita made his living after the war as a gardener and then a barber. Today he lives in the Central Valley town of Lodi. He is 97.
“I still go a couple mornings a week to cut hair at the Eucalyptus Barber Shop,” Morita said. “I still play golf. I used to play 18 holes, but now I play nine holes walking.”
His schedule was temporarily suspended recently from a hip replacement surgery.
Asked how he managed to live so long, Morita said he gave up smoking in 1966 and does not drink alcohol.
“I also love to take a hot bath,” he said. “Soaking in a hot tub, that’s what they do in Japan.”
Morita said when he and his parents were released from Manzanar they had to start again from scratch.
“We didn’t have anywhere to go,” he said. “We moved to Ivanhoe (near Visalia) and lived in a barn with a dirt floor. We were picking grapes doing farm labor. Later we could find a way to kid about it we could laugh at it. But at the time it wasn’t funny.
I was an 18-year-old. I said to myself, I don’t have a future.”
However, Morita indicated that with the history of racism, of being imprisoned, uprooted and with all the pain, some good happened. People knuckled down, achieved new careers and lives, and eventually pursued professions, many of them formerly unavailable to the Japanese Americans of the past.
“There was bad but some good came too,” Morita said.

By John Sammon

Shannon Mortimer has been instrumental in helping to grow women’s softball into the major sport it always had the potential to become. As a player and today a coach of young women of Japanese ancestry, she has seen the sport rise from an obscure past to an internationally recognized event.
Women’s softball has come a long way from the formation of its first team in 1895.
At the time it was considered merely a diversion….for women. Men often thought of women’s softball as irrelevant, even described it in insulting and sexist terms (deleted here), a game appropriate for women, demure, gentle, ladylike, a “soft sport” that could be ignored.
“There are two professional softball leagues for women in this country today and women’s softball has been evolving like crazy,” Mortimer said. “The fan base for the 2022 Women’s College World Series in softball exceeded that of the Men’s College World Series.”
One of the women’s professional leagues founded in 1997 formerly called “National Pro Fastpitch” was retitled “Women’s Professional Fastpitch” in 2022. A second professional women’s league under the title “Athletes Unlimited” brings together 56 of the world’s best women softball players for five weeks of competitions held in July and August at the Parkway Bank Sports Complex in Rosemont, Illinois.
Professional women players from around the world are drafted and placed on teams. The salaries for the best of them have become serious. Monica Abbott, a pitcher for the Tennessee Lady Volunteers who also competed in the 2008 and 2020 Olympic Games (she recently retired), signed a contract for $1 million.
“There is plenty of money to be made in professional women’s softball,” Mortimer noted.
Softball became an Olympic sport for the first time in 1996.
In fast pitch women’s softball (thrown underhand), the ball rockets across the plate with great speed. The distances are shorter than in men’s regular hardball.
“Because of this (distances) women’s softball is just as fast a game as men’s hardball,” Mortimer said. “Regular baseball (hardball) is farther back than softball. In softball the pitcher is 43 feet from the plate.”
In men’s hardball the distance is 60 feet 6 inches from mound to plate.
“The bases in regular baseball are 90 feet apart,” Mortimer added. “In softball they are 60 feet.”
Her grandmother was born in Japan in the Kagoshima area, making Mortimer a natural for one of her present roles, coaching a softball team composed of women players (amateur non-professionals) of Japanese descent who compete with players from other countries.
Baseball in Japan has for over a century been practically a national mania.
“Our professional athletes go to Japan to play and make more money,” Mortimer said.
Born in Antioch and growing up in Pittsburg, Mortimer today lives in Oakley. She inherited the love of baseball from her father Doug Cherry. He was a standout baseball player for St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California.
“He was a hardball pitcher and now plays softball,” Mortimer recalled. “I grew up around softball fields. My dad would take me to watch tournaments as a young girl.”
Attending Central Junior High (Pittsburg), Mortimer said the school didn’t have a softball team at the time so she began playing in the Pittsburg Little League and at local youth recreation leagues in the 1990’s.
“I ended up playing just about every position,” she said, “wherever the teams needed me.”
Mortimer said she learned from her coaches to exhibit a mental toughness in playing the sport.
“You sometimes fail more than you succeed,” she explained. “But you don’t let it (adversity) get to you. You learn to forget about it and move on.”
She also learned to deal with the potential pressure caused by fans.
“You tune out the fans yelling in the stands, you don’t pay attention to them. I think those are good habits,” Mortimer said.
Attending Los Medanos Junior College (Pittsburg), Mortimer took business classes planning to attend a four-year college. However, marriage to Michael Mortimer a police officer and the birth of their daughter Mikaela changed the plans.
Mortimer’s start in coaching began when she served as a coach for her daughter’s team in tee ball. Intended for small children, age four to six, instead of pitching the ball to a batter the ball is set on a stationary upright “tee,” like a pole, and hit from there. Mortimer said it’s a good way to teach young children the basics of the game.
She also coached at her former Pittsburg High School in 2003 and at the Delta Valley Middle School.
In total Mortimer has 25 years playing softball including the positions of pitcher and infielder.
As a coach she said she is competitive but not ruthless.
“I’m not one of those, you-have-to-win-no-matter-what-the-cost coaches,” Mortimer said. “There is nothing wrong with teaching competiveness, but it’s not the only thing (includes good sportsmanship too).”
Mortimer said coaching and the game of softball have changed radically over the years.
“Today you break things down you teach the mechanics of the game and the fundamentals,” she said. “There is more athleticism and more training (for example lifting weights).”
In 2010 Mortimer took a position coaching softball for the All American Sports Academy in Tracy, California, an elite training and coaching facility for female softball players. Mortimer initially coached girls 10 years old and under.
“I was a head coach and instructor,” she said. “I also had a day job for 17 years as manager of a periodontal office where I could divide my time between the two.”
Mortimer worked her way up coaching young women 18 years old and under. She led her players against other girls’ teams in tournaments held in states like Colorado and Georgia. She eventually headed teams participating in tournaments sponsored by the sports equipment giant Nike and U.S. Softball, which began in 1999.
In addition Mortimer has become an overall fitness coach for women and men competing in a variety of sports.
“I’m not limited to one sport,” she said. “Today I teach physical fitness and conditioning.”
In 2020 Mortimer took on head coaching duties for International Team Japan, a participant in the yearly Triple Crown Fastpitch International Challenge held in June in Westminster, Colorado. The event is a tournament featuring the best women softball players from around the world representing 20 countries.
“The International Challenge started in 2020 and since then they’ve been able to bring in more players from countries in Africa and South America,” Mortimer explained. “We hold tryouts (remotely) by watching videos of the players in action and we find the best of them. For my team roster we’ve found players from all over for example Hawaii and New York.”
Mortimer’s Team Japan players are selected by her and must have some Japanese descent.
“You have to have at least a great-grandparent who was born in Japan,” she said.
Mortimer said previously there had been no team representing players of Japanese nationality or Japanese heritage, the reason she took the job as head coach of Team Japan. Given the popularity of the game in Japan, it was a need that needed to be filled.
In 2021 Team Japan made it to the finals (among 20 countries) and faced off against players from Cuba. Cuba took the Gold Medal in the final inning (games go seven innings), winning with a margin of one run on a play at home plate. Team Japan got the Silver Medal. In 2022 Team Japan made it to the Bronze Medal Championship (Cuba again won the Gold).
Mortimer said it gives her great pleasure to see the way women’s softball has progressed into a sport with international exposure.
“I think softball has gained respect and recognition finally because it’s so deserving,” she said.
For young girls who want to play softball Mortimer advised them to look for local leagues in their communities offering tryout opportunities to play.

At the 2021 games, Mortimer on the right, on the left is her assistant coach for Team Japan, Sarah Woofter.

The team photo above was taken last year in Colorado for the Triple Crown International Tournament.

By John Sammon

Doug Uchikura traveled the world through his job with Chevron seeking sources of energy and some of the places where he lived you may never have heard of…for example Ashgabat in the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan.
“That country was isolated from the world, it was somewhat a closed society,” Uchikura recalled.
The sight of an American was so rare in such places. Uchikura agreed that in a way he and his wife Maris became ambassadors of a sort. Locals formed their opinions of America after meeting the couple.
“I think my wife was really good at that (shaping positive views of America),” Uchikura said.
His career became an interesting mix of the legal, business acumen and satisfying the world’s hunger for oil and natural gas. Retired and living in Alamo, Uchikura said his labors took him to Russia and the Ukraine, the scene of today’s bloody conflict. He said that there is nothing right about Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.
“All over the world, people expect a country to respect the sovereignty of other nations,” Uchikura noted.
He is the son of a mixed marriage, a Japanese American father and a mother who is of Scotch/Irish ancestry.
“My grandmother was from Osaka and my grandfather from Kyoto, which at one time was the capital of Japan,” Uchikura said. “My father was born in 1922 in Loomis (near Sacramento). My grandparents had immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900’s and my grandfather worked in a nursery.”
In 1942 during World War II the U.S. Government decided to remove and imprison 120,000 mostly American citizens of Japanese ancestry living along the West Coast including women, children and the elderly for alleged disloyalty. Uchikura’s family was sent to Tule Lake War Relocation Center in a remote area of Northeastern California. The concentration camp, one of a dozen major camps scattered throughout the desert southwest, was considered a prison for troublemakers, those who protested their illegal imprisonment or refused to sign a loyalty oath.
“At the time my father (Donald Uchikura) had just graduated from a junior college and was class valedictorian,” Uchikura said. “Before he could give his valedictorian speech he was imprisoned.”
After the war and release his father moved to Ohio where he met and married his wife Carolyn, an Anglo woman. Mixed marriages at the time were rare.
“It was something of an anachronism,” Uchikura agreed.
His father achieved a degree in biological science and became a medical lab technician while his mother served as a nurse at Mercy Hospital in Hamilton, Ohio, where Doug Uchikura was born.
“Eden Hospital (Castro Valley) offered my dad a job which brought us to California,” Uchikura said. “I was just over one year old, and my father became the head of the (hospital) lab. He was in that position for 35 years.”
The family moved to Hayward where Uchikura grew up. He said that his father rarely spoke about his experiences as a prisoner in the Tule Lake Camp during World War II, to Uchikura or his two brothers.
“He said that was his issue and not ours,” Uchikura recalled. “There were some demonstrations among people trying to get financial reparations (monetary damage payments) and he said, ‘I don’t want you involved.’ It was an injustice but it happened to him. He wanted me to go forward and concentrate on my own life and career.”
Later, Uchikura’s father visited local schools where he taught fifth graders about the history of the camps.
Uchikura attended Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward and California State University East Bay where he got an undergraduate and then a master’s degree in business. He followed that with a law degree from Santa Clara University.
“I knew a female friend working for Chevron who arranged an interview for me with the company,” Uchikura said. “This was in 1979. I was hired as a lawyer and became involved in what is called the ‘upstream’ part of the business, exploring for oil and gas. I was working on offshore California oil projects (Santa Barbara) and then out of an office in San Francisco.”
In 2000 the company sent Uchikura to Moscow, Russia.
“We had a pipeline project and there were many companies and governments involved,” Uchikura said. “They were getting ready to open a pipeline that would run from Kazakhstan (Southern Russia) to a port of Novorossiysk (Black Sea). The project was successful. Russia was one of the (pipeline) partners.”
Uchikura was joined in Russia by his wife Maris, who had retired after being a dental technician for 25 years.
“We lived in an apartment just a block from the Kremlin (seat of Russian Government),” Uchikura said.
The couple lived there for three years.
“The Russian people were decent to us,” Uchikura said. “But their government officials had their eyes on us. We had to be careful. I’m sure we were being watched.”
Chevron called Uchikura back to the U.S. where he worked in San Ramon for four years and then in 2008 the couple was sent to Turkmenistan. On its southern border were the countries of Iran and Afghanistan.
“This was a business development project and we were looking to see if we could produce a natural gas facility,” Uchikura said. “But nothing happened.”
The project failed to materialize.
Uchikura said Turkmenistan was a very different experience than Moscow. It seemed a more isolated and closed-off place. Women had a secondary status.
“It was a Muslim country, and a man’s world,” Uchikura said.
The Uchikuras were in the country for four years and then were sent to Warsaw, Poland.
“This was a project to develop natural gas from shale (oil-impregnated sediment rock),” Uchikura said. “The countries of Lithuania, Ukraine and Romania were involved. We did some exploration and sampling of wells, but it turned out to be not commercially viable.”
They spent three years in Poland.
“They were very good people in Poland, very European,” Uchikura said. “Poland had a western feel. We rented a house instead of an apartment. We saw a lot of Europe (side trips) from there.”
He added that the people of Poland use a lot of natural gas.
When the operation in Poland closed down Uchikura said he realized it was time to return to the U.S., finish his career and retire. He retired in 2016. In 2018 he received an award as a “Distinguished Alumni” in business and economics from the California State University East Bay for his career work.
The Uchikuras have six grown children (two adopted) and 13 grandchildren.
“We have plenty to do in retirement with family gatherings,” Uchikura said. “After doing so much international traveling, we travel a lot today around the U.S. We wanted to see our own country.”
Uchikura’s father has passed away but his mother Carolyn is 91 and lives in Hayward.
Uchikura said he also enjoys playing shortstop for the Islanders, a California-based softball team with a Hawaii connection.
“We play teams in Las Vegas, Phoenix and just got back from a game in St. George, Utah,” he added.
Noting that playing shortstop requires quickness, Uchikura joked, “My fielding range is about as wide as my shoulders.”
He likes to play golf as well.
Vladimir Putin had just been elected the president of Russia (2000) when Uchikura worked for Chevron in that country. He said he hopes and prays that Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine will come to an end.
Of Chevron, Uchikura said he will always have fond memories.
“It was a great company to work for,” he said.

Featured photo: Doug and Maris Uchikura.

Top photo: Doug Uchikura.

Bottom photo: Doug Uchikura in front row with his Islanders teammates.

By Richard McDonough

The Ishimaru family grew a variety of chrysanthemums and prunes on their family farm in Berryessa.
“The chrysanthemums were eventually used in floral displays for funerals in the eastern part of the country,” explained Ricky Ishimaru. As a child growing up in Santa Clara County, he spent countless hours with his parents and siblings packing the flowers and doing a variety of farm work on the land.
Mr. Ishimaru’s mom and dad, Mae and George Ishimaru, both grew up in the region.
During the 1940s, George Ishimaru was imprisoned with his family first at the Santa Anita Assembly Center (Santa Anita Prison) at the Santa Anita Racetrack in Los Angeles County. He and his family were then transferred to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center (Heart Mountain Prison) in Wyoming.
Mae Ishimaru did not get incarcerated by the Federal government.
“My aunt had a brother already living in Colorado,” explained Mae Ishimaru. “He was able to find a home for me, my parents, and our family as well as a second home for my aunt’s family. We lived for a couple years in Brighton, near Denver.”
After World War II, Mae and George Ishimaru came back to California – Mae Ishimaru returned to Mountain View; George Ishimaru went to Menlo Park. Eventually, George Ishimaru moved to Mountain View. The two young people met while they were students at Mountain View High School.
After graduation, Mae Ishimaru did office work for HP; George Ishimaru worked for Levi Strauss.
During the years after the war, the parents of Mae Ishimaru operated a farm in Mountain View. Mrs. Ishimaru explained that her family shut down this farm after “…the State of California built a highway right through the middle of my parent’s farm. It wasn’t practical for us to keep farming that land.”
George and Mae Ishimaru then looked to establish a farm of their own.
“My mom and dad saved enough money by working for HP and Levi’s to be able to buy 8 acres of land in Berryessa around 1960,” Mr. Ishimaru stated. “Our family farm was located to the left of the tee box on the second hole of the San Jose Municipal Golf Course.”
“In the beginning, we harvested prunes from an orchard on our farm,” Mrs. Ishimaru stated. “We sold the prunes locally in San Jose. We then went on to add greenhouses to grow chrysanthemums.”
The orchard of prune trees covered about two acres of the Ishimaru Farm. Greenhouses and other farm structures used to grow and pack chrysanthemums were located on the other six acres of ground.
“At first, the greenhouses were covered with just plastic,” Mr. Ishimaru. “We then got fiberglass coverings.”
The family grew chrysanthemums in a few different colors, including yellow, white, and bronze.
“My dad would cut the flowers,” said Mr. Ishimaru. “I would help carry the flowers over to the packing area. The other kids and I – including my brother Gerald and my sisters Karen and Carol – would pack the chrysanthemums in groups of 25. Four bunches of each would then be put together so we would have 100 chrysanthemums packed together for shipment.”
He said that the family got 25 cents for each chrysanthemum.
The flowers were shipped in refrigerated trucks to a wholesaler in San Mateo, according to Mrs. Ishimaru. The wholesaler then sold the flowers to people back East. There, the chrysanthemums were assembled into floral displays for funerals.
“After the chrysanthemums were packed, I’d then go back into the greenhouses and pull out the roots from the plants that had just been cut and packed,” stated Mr. Ishimaru. “Those roots would then be thrown in the fields and we’d plant new chrysanthemums.”
The Ishimarus operated their farm for years.
Mae Ishimaru indicated that she and her husband encouraged their children to leave the farm and each get a college education: “We’d rather they got an education than work on the farm. All of our children went to college.”
“I enjoyed farming,” stated Mae Ishimaru. “But the economics changed through the years. Competition from flower growers in Mexico and overseas overwhelmed us. The imported flowers were able to be sold at much cheaper rates than we could produce the flowers on our farm.”
“As my dad got older, he asked me to take over the farm,” explained Mr. Ishimaru. “I declined. I was working in produce management at a supermarket. I told him he should sell the property and enjoy retirement.”
Within a year or so, the family sold the farm. The land that once produced prunes and chrysanthemums is now home to people living in condos.
Ricky Ishimaru is himself now retired, having worked for 33 years as a supermarket produce manager. He spends much of his time in retirement playing in a softball league. “I enjoy playing softball throughout the country – from Florida to Texas and from Arizona to Utah,” he stated.
Mae Ishimaru is staying active in her retirement years. “I’m on the stationary bike once or twice each week,” she explained. “I drive to San Jose two or three times each week to visit with family and friends.” Among her favorite activities? Tending to her garden at her home in Morgan Hill. “I enjoy growing sweet corn, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, and especially Kentucky beans. I try to keep busy to keep healthy.”