Japanese Americans Los Angeles

Nearly 80 years after a Los Angeles kindergarten teacher began a youth club to lure children of Japanese immigrants off the streets, her grateful students paid tribute to her at a poignant luncheon Saturday that also marked the group's disbanding. "We are so proud and thankful for what Miss Nellie Oliver did," said Ets Yoshiyama, chairman of the group, which came to be known simply as the Olivers in her honor.

Traffic roars past on Centinela Avenue, but it is quiet inside the store. Teenagers Ryan and Tammy Uyehara do homework when not waiting on the day's final customers. Their parents, June and Wayne, walk slowly toward the back, then climb steep stairs to the office. It's almost closing time at Aloha Grocery. Like the rest of the store, the office is nothing fancy. Used also for storage, it is unpretentious, worn tenderly by time and filled with memories.

As an American soldier fighting to help his country win the war in Okinawa, Mits Usui often longed for the day when he could go home and build the picket-fenced house of his dreams. "I remember the soldiers would sing a song about how they were going to make the San Fernando Valley their home," said Usui, referring to the Bing Crosby hit "The San Fernando Valley." "When we came back from service that song stuck in my mind. I thought to myself, 'What could be better?'

Before they were laid off this year, 53-year-old David Kubo and 33-year-old Jose Valdez expected to finish their careers at Rafu Shimpo. The Japanese American newspaper had been a Little Tokyo fixture since 1903, and the focus of their working lives. Valdez was 8 when Kubo hired him to deliver the English- and Japanese-language daily. That was three years short of the minimum age for delivery boys, but Kubo knew that Jose had to help his mother and five siblings, so he made an exception.

In retrospect, it was a silent precursor to one of the darkest episodes in U.S. history. For decades, before racial prejudice and wartime hysteria resulted in the shameful internment of Japanese Americans, physicians and patients of Japanese descent were the victims of routine--and often deadly--discrimination by Los Angeles' hospitals and medical professionals.

Saturday's events would have been unfathomable for Pete Mitsui back in 1930, when he began playing baseball for the San Fernando Aces. The Aces, one of the first Japanese American baseball teams in the country, played on a dusty infield and a weedy outfield in those days. And there certainly were no major leaguers from Japan.

Japanese legend has it that a monk named Mogallana rescued his mother from the depths of hell after he took the Buddha's advice to share his wealth with others. On that fateful day in 538, the first obon festival was born as Mogallana, overcome with joy, clapped and danced in a circle with other Buddhist disciples. The spirit of Mogallana was alive and well this weekend at the annual Obon Festival, held since 1963 at the San Fernando Valley Community Center in Pacoima.

Kaz Suyeishi will never forget the quiet peace of that cloudless August morning in 1945. The 18-year-old was in the front garden of her Hiroshima home, chatting with a friend, when a gleam of silver in the sky caught her attention. "It looked like an angel," she said. "It was the most beautiful airplane. It looked like heaven and peace." The plane was the Enola Gay, dropping the world's first atomic bomb over the Japanese city. That morning, the B-29 released the weapon known as "Little Boy."

Every day for the past 100 years, babies have been born in Los Angeles. They never stopped coming--not even during the worst of times. Dr. Sakaye Shigekawa, 86, delivered nearly 20,000 of them. She remembers the ones who arrived kicking and screaming into the barbed wire confines of a detention camp. She remembers those born at downtown's Japanese Hospital, built for Japanese Americans when other hospitals would not accept them.

Dr. Linda Morimoto dedicated her life to two causes: delivering babies--perhaps 2,000 during a 40-year career--and fighting crime. So a mourning Japanese American community has had an especially difficult time coming to grips with the circumstances of her death. Morimoto, 75, was found bludgeoned Friday in her ransacked Westlake-area home. "Everybody knows how much she fought against things like this happening," said Frances Hashimoto, president of the Little Tokyo Business Assn.