My memories of Boyle Heights take me to my grandparents’ house on Pennsylvania Avenue. They were one of many Japanese American families who settled in Boyle Heights due to its proximity to Little Tokyo and the garment district.
My grandparents lived around the corner from Higashi Hongwanji, a Buddhist temple and a few blocks away from Chuo Gakuen, a Japanese language school, that I attended every Saturday with my cousins for 6 years in the early 70’s. My Saturday routine consisted of struggling through 4 hours of Japanese-only instruction in reading and writing, followed by a short walk to my grandmother’s house where she, along with my great-grandmother would be waiting to serve us burritos and coke, and we could watch what little remained of Saturday morning cartoons -- 2 episodes of Fat Albert.
Burritos were not uncommon alongside sushi in our family, in those days the neighborhood was eclectic, filled with Japanese, Jewish and Mexican families. At that age, I never thought about how my grandparents ended up in Boyle Heights, or the life they led before settling there.
I would later come to learn that my great-grandparents, Isokichi and Sato, left their small fishing village of Kaminoseki, in the Yamaguchi prefecture in Japan in 1898 in search of better opportunity when they were just young teenagers. After much hardship working in the sugar cane fields of Hawaii, they moved to Seattle, and eventually to Nebraska. In 1905, Sato returned to Japan where my grandfather was born, but soon returned to the US to continue working. As the doors of the Exclusion Act of 1924 were closing to prevent any aliens from entering the US, my grandfather Seiichi, hastily married my grandmother Tsuru, and immigrated to the United States to join his parents. My grandparents first worked as an automechanic in little Tokyo and later in Mesa Arizona as farmers, and eventually grocers.
By the time of WWII, the family was spread across 2 continents, with my grandfather detained in Crystal City internment camp due to his involvement in the Japanese American community, while my father, Henry, the oldest son had been sent back earlier to Kaminoseki to live with my great-grandmother.
After the war, and in the decades to follow my father made it his mission to reunite his family and eventually in 1961, Private Bill H.R. 1572 co-sponsored by Congressman Gordon McDonough and Senator Thomas Kuchel was passed by the US Congress and signed by President John F. Kennedy to grant Seiichi, Tsuru and Sato Yasuda permanent resident status allowing them to return to America, where the rest of the Yasuda clan had settled.
In 1964, my father left a career in the US Air Force as a procurement officer, and formed a family business with his brothers and my grandfather at the helm, a modest grocery store called Parkside Market near MacArthur Park around the corner from Langer’s famous deli.
Though the small market eventually grew into a chain of supermarkets in the Los Angeles area, Boyle Heights was the place where our extended family of almost 70 relatives celebrated holidays, and birthdays. Where we met in my grandparents’ backyard to take annual family pictures, Easter egg hunts, and best of all, family potlucks of sushi, sashimi, tamales and burritos.
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