The Japanese American Fishermen of Fisherman's Wharf

Walk down the length of Fisherman's Wharf and look at the fish market stalls. Before World War Two, eight of them were owned by Japanese American families, a history that the dominant Monterey fishing narrative, which centers on Italian American culture, has largely written out.

Japanese immigrants in California in the early twentieth century operated under a specific legal structure of exclusion. The nineteen twenty-four Immigration Act effectively barred new Japanese immigration. The Alien Land Laws prohibited noncitizen immigrants, which Japanese-born residents were legally prevented from becoming, from owning agricultural land. Despite this, Japanese American families built a commercial fishing and fish-market presence in Monterey that was substantial enough to make eight wharf stalls visible to anyone paying attention.

Between April twenty-seventh and July fourth, nineteen forty-two, more than three thousand five hundred Japanese Americans from Monterey County and surrounding areas were detained at the Salinas Rodeo Grounds, held under armed guard, and then transported to internment camps elsewhere in the western United States. Their boats and their equipment were sold or lost while they were gone. The legal mechanism for recovering those losses, after the war, was inadequate to the scale of what had been taken.

After the war ended, John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and Robinson Jeffers signed a petition calling for the Japanese American community's welcome return to Monterey. These were the most prominent residents of the Monterey Peninsula at that moment. The petition was a gesture of solidarity from men with the names that got listened to. The community returned. The economic losses did not.

There is a larger story visible from this wharf, if you look for it. The Monterey fishing narrative that tourists encounter centers on Italian American families, the fishing boats, the restaurants, the working-class harbor culture of the postwar decades. That narrative is real. It is also incomplete. It became the official story partly because the Italian American community was present when the story got written down, and partly because the Japanese American community was gone when that happened. History is, among other things, a record of who was in the room when the record was made.

The stalls on the wharf today look the same as the stalls that were there in nineteen forty-one. The names on them are different.