CALIFORNIA MEMORIAL OF JAPANESE INTERNMENT
On this porch where you are now standing, the Matsuoka family was ordered to leave their home and farm on March 25, 1942. The Matsuokas — all American citizens — were given 6 days to dispose of all their belongings other than what they could carry in two suitcases. All other belongings they were ordered to leave behind. They were told to stand at the corner of Avenue 7 and Highway 99 where a flatbed truck would pick them up.
The entire Family was loaded onto an army transport and taken to the Fresno County Fairgrounds where they and thousands of other Japanese Americans citizens were held in cattle yards and livestock pens while the permanent internment camps were still being planned. Once the internment camps were constructed taking many more months to complete — men, women and children — including the disabled, the pregnant, the dying — were delivered in box cars by trains. Some of these internment centers were thousands of miles away taking days to get there. Once there, they were unloaded and forced to march miles at night so they wouldn’t know where they were. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire and although not one single case of espionage by any Japanese American was ever uncovered, over 100,000 innocent people were interned at these concentration camps. And there are numerous instances of innocents who stranded too close to the barbed wire perimeter fence being shot and killed by guards.
The Matsuokas — like most other other Japanese Americans — were farmers and had mortgages to pay. And since no sale could possibly be completed in the 6 days they were given to clear out and since they were unable to farm and unable to pay their mortgages while in these concentration camps, they were foreclosed upon and all their property sold at auction. Also these families had no idea when or if they would ever be allowed to return to their homes and farms. Because of this rush to sell, properties and inventories were sold at a fraction of the true value.
Such is the case with this property–the Sherian ranch. This property was sold to the family of the founder of this memorial. No one in his family had ever told him this story. After his father passed away, he was going through old paperwork and spotted the older deed. But now that he is aware, he has created this memorial and remembrance under the auspices of Brother to Brother — a Bay Area nonprofit whose mission is to foster community.
Sarkis Sherian, a genocide survivor himself, who had purchased the Matsuoka Ranch at auction went on to house refugees escaping from Hitler’s Nazi Germany here on this property during WWII. That story is written about by a son of one of those refugees in the chapter titled “Madera” in the best seller anthology Highway 99. After the war, Mr. Sherian went on to make industrial history as the first importer of Japanese steel products to America from postwar Japan. Mr. Sherian the future “Wire King” flew to Japan in 1947 when the country was under US military occupation and made contacts with Japan’s top industrial companies and secured contracts whereby he would be the exclusive importer of Japanese steel products into the US.
In a final note of irony, when asked years later by a reporter what prompted and possessed him to go to Japan while it was still under US military occupation and import industrial steel products when at the time “Made in Japan” was a running joke for shoddy products, he answered when he inspected the construction of the Matsuoka home and irrigation system of the Ranch, he was so impressed by the workmanship that he figured any people who could accomplish that would soon be back on their feet again. And he was certainly right.
