It’s no small task to preserve a people’s legacy.
It involves collecting even the smallest personal stories – a grandfather and his neighbors digging a basement by hand, a couple’s hasty marriage at a seaport – and placing them within the broad scope of history. It involves years of collecting artifacts and building relationships. Mostly, it involves a sincere belief in the past’s ability to inform the present.
And, sometimes, it involves uprooting a 90-year-old building, placing it on a truck and hauling it from Scottsbluff to Gering.
On Dec. 10, 2019, construction crews moved a nondescript white-sided building from Scottsbluff’s 1705 Avenue C to its new home: The Legacy of the Plains Museum.
Constructed in 1928, the building is the most visible reminder of a generation of Japanese immigrants who settled in western Nebraska in the early 20th century, building a community in the state that endures today. For decades, the structure, the Japanese Hall, served as a gathering place for Japanese-American families in the area. It hosted Japanese language classes, dances, church services, theater shows – a community’s hub.
In its next life, the building will serve as a permanent fixture at the Gering museum. It will showcase exhibits that tell the story of Nebraska’s Japanese community: What brought them here, and how they became part of a community – and built their own – despite the challenges of American life.
“I don’t want this story lost,†said Vickie Sakurada Schaepler, coordinator of the Japanese Hall and History Project at the Legacy of the Plains Museum and the driving force behind the effort to preserve it. “I don’t want people to forget that there were Japanese immigrants that came to our state, and that people supported them and helped them to live and prosper here.â€
In 1882, responding to a groundswell of anti-Chinese bigotry that followed heavy immigration during the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese immigration. Japanese immigrants began to replace the Chinese as laborers on the railroad and in coal mines. Many came hoping to make money to send back to their families. Many fully intended to return to Japan.
In Japanese communities in North America, this initial group of immigrants is known as issei, or “first generation.â€
They began on the West Coast and eventually moved east, with some settling down to farm sugar beets on Nebraska’s High Plains when work on the railroad ended. By 1900, at least 700 Japanese had reached the state, wrote Rev. Hiram Kano in his “A History of the Japanese in Nebraska.â€
As the years passed, and Japanese immigration increased, so did racial animosity, echoing what had happened to Chinese immigrants. In 1907, the U.S. and Japan entered into the so-called “Gentlemen's Agreement.†Japan agreed to limit emigration of workers to the U.S. The U.S. agreed to allow for the immigration of wives, children and parents of Japanese men already living here.
That agreement led to an influx of “picture brides,†Japanese women who agreed to marry Japanese men in the U.S. Families often paired the couple using photographs. They were often married from afar, with a photograph standing in for the groom, Kano wrote.
These ceremonies were valid in Japan, giving the new bride the travel documents she needed to meet her husband on the docks in the U.S. There, he would often be waiting with an officiant to perform a second ceremony while standing on the dock.
This is how Takehiko Miyoshi and his wife Takeyo married, said the couple’s grandson, John Miyoshi, a retired conservation manager and member of the Nebraska Community Foundation Board of Directors who serves as the project manager for the Japanese Hall. The couple later established a successful farm near Hershey.
“I think people can be quite resourceful when they need to be,†Miyoshi said.
Many, like the Miyoshis, put roots deeply into the Nebraska soil.
“Why is it the Japanese immigrants who had come to America to make money to be sent back … decided not to return to Japan …?†Kano wrote. “They were now accustomed to the American way of life. They had learned enough English … they felt comfortable here since this was not a strange land anymore.â€
Listen now and subscribe: | | | |
The issei married and gave birth to a second generation – the nisei. These families formed strong ties with white neighbors in and around Scottsbluff and North Platte. The Japanese-Americans built social halls – one in Mitchell and one in Scottsbluff – where they held theater productions and church services, made mochi (Japanese rice cakes) and played baseball, gathered and bonded over their shared heritage.
But the nisei, the new generation, would come of age in a time of intense turmoil for people of Japanese descent living in America.
Legal discrimination was nothing new. In Nebraska and other states, thanks to anti-Asian land laws, the foreign-born issei weren’t allowed to own farmland.
But after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, things got far worse. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing the relocation of people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast into internment camps further inland.
The chill descended everywhere.
In Nebraska, the Japanese social halls closed, Schaepler said. Friends advised their Japanese neighbors to erect crosses to make the buildings look like churches and hopefully spare them from vandals.
Within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, Kano, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate, a Nebraska farmer and Episcopal priest, was stopped by North Platte police who interrogated him about family ties to the Japanese government. Deemed a threat, he was imprisoned in an internment camp where he remained for nearly three years until his 1944 release.
Despite heightened institutional and social persecution during the war, many second-generation nisei stepped up to join the war effort. Nebraska’s Ben Kuroki, born in Gothenburg in 1917, flew 58 bombing missions during the war, receiving three Distinguished Flying Crosses and a Distinguished Service Medal decades later.
Schaepler’s father, Shizuo Sakurada, served in the legendary 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed almost entirely of Japanese-American soldiers and recognized as the most decorated unit of its kind in U.S. history.
Decades later, in 2012, Schaepler attended a celebration of life at the Japanese Hall in Scottsbluff. She saw her grandpa’s picture hanging on the wall. It hung alongside black-and-white photos of the original issei who helped build the hall in 1928.
She decided: This hall was too important to lose.
“I started to ask my aunts and uncles about it, and they go, ‘Oh yeah. Grandpa used to talk about digging out the basement by hand and hauling out the dirt with their wagons and shoes,†Schaepler said. “They were talking about demolishing the building … So, I’m driving home, and I come up with this idea: I’m going to save that hall.â€
In recent decades, the Japanese-American community in western Nebraska has dwindled. Families have left rural communities for cities. Now Schaepler, a member of the third-generation sansei, estimates that only a few dozen descendants of the original issei still live in the area.
Which makes preserving the stories of their parents and grandparents all the more important, she said.
“We hope it gives more of a base for the community,†said Miyoshi. “As these people learn about the museum whether they’re in state, or out of state, or have relatives here or lived here at one time, we’re hearing from so many of them that want to be a part of it.â€
They soon will be able to. A grand opening is planned for Summer 2023.
“It’s been such a wonderful project for me because I’ve learned so much,†Schaepler said. “I’ve met so many people that are interested in this history.â€
The is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.
Vickie Sakurada Schaepler, the coordinator of the Japanese Hall and History Project, dons a hard hat to pose with Russ Reisig, the general contractor on the project to move and renovate the Japanese Hall at its new home at the Legacy of the Plains Museum in Gering.
Hundreds of Japanese immigrants landed in western and central Nebraska in the early 20th century, becoming farmers and business owners while starting families. They often gathered at social halls like this one in Scottsbluff, where a theater performance was staged in the 1930s.Â