Sumi Harada’s old house on Lemon Street is now a National Historic Landmark with an American story to tell. For much of the twentieth century, members of the Harada family, Americans of Japanese ancestry, lived in this modest California house on Lemon Street in Riverside, working to realize the American Dream of aspiring to happiness and fulfillment by owning a home of their own. Like some of the more familiar landmarks representing the experiences of Americans with an immigrant heritage—Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty come to mind—or other places in our country where people of color...

Still living in a crowded rooming house with yet another baby on the way, Jukichi and Ken Harada were determined to move into their first real home as soon as they possibly could. The Haradas had moved to Riverside in 1905 and, after ten years of hard work building a business, raising their children, and saving their pennies, by Christmas 1915 they were finally ready to make their move.

Like others in his extended family, Jukichi had been educated to be a school-teacher back home in Japan. However, independent and restless for change, he only worked a year in his...

When the delicate kakitsubata irises blossomed once again in the shallow marshes of Aichi-ken in spring 1897, new schoolteacher Jukichi Harada caught the eye of fifteen-year-old Ken Indo, and before long the young couple began dreaming of change. Years later, on sunny days in late spring and summer, when temperatures in her prosperous California town at the edge of the great Mojave Desert climbed to 100 degrees or more, this quiet daughter of a samurai, a young woman who would one day be remembered by her children for her bright eyes, beautiful smile, gentle hands, hard work, and forgiving nature,...

Faith in the possibility of upward social mobility rests at the heart of the American immigrant experience. The wish to provide one’s family with a new house on a nice street among good neighbors is still a cherished American tradition. Like others who came to live in the United States, immigrants from Japan adapted to their new American home by applying and modifying the cultural traditions and behavioral habits of their native land. Their early dedication to moving up the social and economic ladder also shaped the cultural experiences of their American-born citizen children. The compatibility of key aspects of...

California has always been a land of possibilities. Its borders have never prevented dreamers from crossing, challenging, and forever changing the way of life here, and many a dream has been realized, or at least imagined, in this free land of the sunset at the edge of the Pacific. The origins of Riverside were no exception. In the spring of 1870, entrepreneur John Wesley North, an abolitionist who had already developed new communities in the Minnesota and Nevada territories, proclaimed from Knoxville, Tennessee, new plans for “A Colony for California.” With his friend Dr. James P. Greves, another anti-slavery advocate,...

Despite Frank Miller’s promotion of world peace, international goodwill, and cultural understanding, and despite Riverside’s relative tolerance and refinement, most of the Mission Inn’s beds and banquet tables catered to the pleasures and comforts of white folks. Although men and women of varied ethnic origins worked together day and night at Miller’s welcoming hotel as chambermaids, waiters, cooks, liverymen, and gardeners, the greatest number of the community’s people of color lived some distance from the famous Mission Inn. Some of Riverside’s wealthier neighborhoods were clearly reserved for the families of upstanding, fairly well-to-do, and mostly white citizens. Other less affluent...

All in all, life in this California town had been hard but good for the Haradas. Standing at the great front window of his Washington Restaurant on some slow afternoons, Jukichi could watch the steady progress of his adopted hometown. After hearing stories of less civilized places from his Issei friends and other acquaintances—stories that suggested the United States still had a long way to go to realize its ideals of freedom and equality for all—the growing city of Riverside was a good place to live and raise a family.

When Jukichi, Ken, and Masa Atsu had come...

Jacob and Clara Van de Grift’s big Victorian house on Orange Street stood in marked contrast to the little six-room cottage for sale around the corner on Lemon. Reflecting the wealth and social status of its prominent owners, the much more expensive and elegant Van de Grift home featured “a spacious entrance hall with leaded glass windows and a beautiful staircase. The parlor and large dining room had almost floor-to-ceiling windows with curved tops and fine woodwork. In the front yard a round fountain had two cupids holding up the water spout.” Just inside their big front door, the approach...

Word of the coming court test of California’s Alien Land Law soon spread throughout the state. On the East Coast, details of the case were published in a brief front-page article in the New York Times on Friday, October 6. Other similar reports of the lawsuit were appearing in hometown papers across the country. In the nation’s capital The Washington Post also published an article about the anti-Japanese litigation pending against the Harada family in California. Surrounded by nosy reporters seeking information about his character and background by speaking with his new neighbors and others in town who knew little...

Sitting inside his farmhouse on Chase Road at the northeastern outskirts of Riverside, writing in Japanese in a small notebook as he did nearly every day, Issei immigrant farmer Toranosuke Fujimoto added a brief note to his personal diary. Translated into English, it said: “Harada closed his business today. I went to the court.” Fujimoto had purchased his own land in Riverside shortly before the Alien Land Law was passed in 1913. Joining several of his Issei friends heading downtown to the courthouse to await the outcome of the state’s lawsuit against Jukichi Harada, like many other young Japanese fathers...

International developments and pressure from Washington contributed to Attorney General Webb’s handling of the Harada case and to a marked decrease in anti-Japanese agitation in California during the Great War. Even though it was already obvious to some California officials that the 1913 Alien Land Law was ineffective in limiting Japanese landownership and that new legislation would be required to check further acquisition of land by the Japanese, widespread anti-Japanese sentiment in California did not resurface until after the armistice between the Allies and the Germans was signed on November 11, 1918. Seeking reelection in 1920, Senator James Duval Phelan,...

Perhaps Jukichi was thinking of his own father, Takanori Harada, who had been adopted by another family in Japan more than half a century before, when he unexpectedly adopted a Japanese American boy who had recently lost both parents. When he brought the boy home to Lemon Street, he was responding to a family tragedy in the Southern California Nikkei community in the summer of 1928. On August 11, busy residents of the City of Angels read details of the sensational story on page three of their Saturday morning paper:

Obsessed by an insane fury, Yoshitaro Hashimura, Japanese gardener of...

By mid-morning on this winter Sunday, December 7, 1941, Saburo Kido had already left his family’s home at 1804 Stuart Street in the East Bay community of Berkeley, where he had been living for the last four years with his wife, Mine, and their three young children, daughter Rosalind and sons Laurence and Wally. Shuttling over to meet friends across the bay in San Francisco, once again Saburo was away from his family while taking care of community business on the weekend. In a few minutes, perhaps riding on a ferry or hitching a ride in a friend’s car, Saburo,...

The Washington Restaurant was the first to go. Because the family did not own the Eighth Street building in which their small business was housed, a real estate listing and sale were unnecessary. Letting only a few know the restaurant was for sale, they quickly sold its contents and fixtures. However, like most Nikkei families at the time, they were forced to make hasty decisions and lost money on the deal. Harold recalled: “We sold it for $150 and, . . . as I recall, it was to a Latino couple . . . The restaurant had a large ....

Still fond of California road trips to places he had never been before, early one morning in Riverside, Jess Stebler no doubt double-checked the level of the gas tank in his 1927 Cadillac coupe before heading out alone across the desert. The old blacksmith’s white hakujin face was about the last one anyone expected to see at the main gate of the Poston Relocation Center. Little is known about his strange desert journey to Poston, but it must have come within a week or two after the Haradas and Hashimuras spent their first afternoon standing in the Arizona dust, pushing...

Throughout the fall of 1942 the losses and humiliation of the forced removal set in for the thousands of incarcerees at all ten concentration camps. For many, life inside the camps became more difficult with each passing day. At Topaz, Mine Okubo remembered: “A feeling of uncertainty hung over the camp; we were worried about the future. Plans were made and remade, as we tried to decide what to do. Some were ready to risk anything to get away. Others feared to leave the protection of the camp.” Fretting over the uncertainties at Poston and distressed by her parents’ absence...

“The only time I see the sun is through the kitchen window,” Ken Harada used to say when she was hard at work from dawn to dark at the Washington Restaurant. Looking west across Utah’s empty high-desert flatlands, beyond snowcapped mountains toward their lost homes on the Pacific coast, those now living in winter’s sticky alkaline mud below the tall guard towers at Topaz sometimes saw a beautiful sunset. On this Wednesday evening, March 10, 1943, high clouds skated across the vast horizon. The temperature dropped from a daytime high of 50 to a nighttime low of only 26 degrees....

Ever since her brothers had entrusted her parents’ urns to her at Topaz, Sumi had made certain they were always close by. In lonesome moments in her cold and dimly lit barracks apartment in what some might have regarded as unlucky Block 13, having them near had provided Sumi with a strange sense of comfort. Now, in the middle of May 1944, she was finally carrying them away from Topaz, traveling by train from Delta to Chicago. Sumi still worried about what lay ahead but she was also curiously optimistic about leaving the desolation and sadness of her family’s recent...

As Clark Harada wrestled with his worries and plans for the future, believing strongly in his fervent convictions of how loyalty and patriotism should be expressed, word had come to brother Shig that he had passed his military physical examination. Shig’s brief civilian job at Dr. Israel Davidsohn’s medical laboratory at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Chicago came to an abrupt and unceremonious end:

The director of the hospital said that due to my unstable future since I passed the examination, he would have to relieve me of my duties, and he fired me on the spot . . . So...

Sumi Harada had been away from California for three chaotic and difficult years. In contrast to other incarcerees who had lost their family belongings, homes, and businesses because of the forced removal from the West Coast and were now thinking seriously about resettling permanently among friendly people in eastern cities and towns, Sumi hoped to return to Lemon Street as soon as she could. Jess Stebler’s willingness to care for her house while she was away meant that, unlike many others, Sumi still had a place to call home.

Staying in a small apartment on South Blackstone Avenue in the...

Standing on the front porch of her modest family home in Riverside, Sumi adjusted her glasses and squinted briefly into the setting sun, turning slowly to enter her empty house. As the screen door closed, Sumi shut and locked the front door behind her. Perhaps she was thinking about the last few turbulent years—of her invalid parents traveling uncomfortably from Riverside to Sacramento to Tule Lake and Topaz. She might have also contemplated her curious legacy contained in the two boxes holding their ashes, the boxes she carried from the desolate camp in Utah east to Chicago and then...

Located on a tree-lined street adjacent to Riverside’s downtown, the historic Harada House has been recognized as one of the most significant and powerful civil rights landmarks in California.¹ Although the house is a modest two-story home from the turn of the last century, the building represents one of the most central themes in our national story: immigration, and for people of color, the subsequent struggle for inclusion, often against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Although this significance has certainly been established by the designation of the Harada House as a National Historic Landmark, The House on Lemon Street: Japanese Pioneers and...