SDC NEWS ONE | Historically Speaking
Black American Japanese Families Forced to Camps WWII With American Surnames
In the late 1900s, Los Angeles was a sprawling paradox of golden light and deepening shadows, a city where the scent of orange blossoms from the San Fernando Valley often mingled with the salt spray of the Pacific and the heavy, metallic tang of industrial growth. It was a city built on the promise of the future, yet constrained by the rigid hierarchies of the past.
Thirty miles north of the city’s bustling core, tucked away in the rugged, sun-scorched terrain of the High Mojave Desert, lay Aqua Dulce Canyon. It was a place of dramatic rock formations and ancient silence, far removed from the neon lights of the movie palaces on Broadway. Here, two families lived as neighbors, their lives woven together by a decade of proximity and a shared status as outsiders in a land that claimed to be free.
The Nakamoto family occupied a prestigious, if secluded, estate. The Honorable Hiroshi Nakamoto served as General Counsel at the Japanese Embassy in Los Angeles, a man of quiet dignity and sharp legal intellect. His wife, Himari (Chase) -Yahamoto-Nakamoto, the daughter of Admiral Eiichiro Chikanobu Yahamoto, carried the grace of the old world into the harsh desert landscape. They had two children: Dennis, a senior at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Susan, a junior at the same institution.
Adjacent to their five-acre ranch was the home of the Chases, a Black American family whose roots in that dry earth went back five generations. They had been there long before the canyon was a fashionable retreat, surviving on grit and the legacy of ancestors who had sought refuge in the West after the Civil War. The eldest son, James Edgar Chase, was a phenomenon—an eighteen-year-old senior at UCLA School of Law, having skipped multiple grades in his youth.
James and Susan had been inseparable since the first grade. They were bound by a shared passion for the precision of mathematics and the transformative power of chemistry. They have no idea that they are related.
On the edge of their properties, where the manicured embassy grounds met the rugged Chase scrubland, they had built an "outdoor laboratory." It was a patchwork of salvaged glass, wooden crates, and copper tubing where they experimented with local flora and studied the chemical properties of the desert soil.
To the world, they were a Japanese girl and a Black boy; to each other, they were simply two scientists searching for the building blocks of the universe.
However, the history of these families was more deeply entwined than even the neighbors knew.
The Shadow of 1920
The connection had begun eighteen years earlier, in a scandal that the Japanese Embassy had tried desperately to bury. In the late 1920s, Eiichiro Chikanobu Yahamoto, the young teenage son of General Counsel Kanobo Yahamoto, the embassy official and his mother, Kaori, had been a fixture of the Los Angeles social scene. Eiichiro was a "playboy" in the truest sense, a young man who found the rigid expectations of his diplomatic family stifling.
He was drawn to the vibrancy of Central Avenue, where Black-owned jazz clubs like the Dunbar Hotel echoed with the revolutionary sounds of Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
Eiichiro loved the culture, the music, and eventually, he fell in love with Natalie Jean Chase, the nineteen-year-old sister of the Chase children and housekeeper for the Ambassador’s private residence in Aqua Dulce Canyon.
When Natalie became pregnant, the embassy reacted with clinical efficiency. Her baby brother James is only 5 years old at the time. They viewed the pregnancy as a diplomatic liability. Eiichiro was a Japanese citizen with a diplomatic passport.
Natalie was a young Black woman in a state with strict, albeit complex, racial laws. Natalie loved the theatre and plays, and she was a thespian. The days of early moving pictures attracted her attention, and she wanted that world.
The embassy personnel informed the young man that they would "handle" the legalities and that the information would be buried deep within the archives of the consulate.
Eiichiro was ordered back to Japan for mandatory military enlistment. But before he left, a pivotal moment occurred in Mexico City.
The embassy had encouraged Eiichiro and Natalie to travel south for a "medical procedure" to terminate the pregnancy. While sitting in a sterile waiting room in Mexico, Eiichiro’s keen ears caught a conversation between his father’s security detail and the Japanese General Counsel to Mexico.
They weren't talking about his "scandal." They were talking about the Pacific—about the "Southern Expansion," the growing hostilities with the United States over rubber-rich islands, and the inevitability of a clash between empires.
In that moment, Eiichiro realized his recall to Japan wasn't just about a baby; it was about the drumbeat of war. He looked at Natalie, sitting nervously in the chair beside him, and saw not a mistake to be erased, but his only link to a humanity that was about to be torn apart.
If he survived the war, he would need a place to lay his head, as the waking of a sleeping giant is going to destroy everything. His daughter would be his anchor baby right next-door.
"Let’s go," he whispered.
They didn't go to the doctor. Instead, they walked two doors down the street to the Mexican Justice of the Peace. They were married that afternoon. They decided to keep the child, choosing to raise her in the seclusion of the canyon where the laws of the city felt like distant rumors.
When the baby was born—a beautiful girl they named Himari (Chase) -Yahamoto. Eiichiro was already back in Japan, serving as a Lieutenant. The embassy, unable to undo a legal Mexican marriage without further scandal, allowed the secret to persist as long as it stayed in the desert.
However, Himari was send to Japan to learn culture and a finishing school as a child to later to be returned to her mother Natalie with a young man by the name of Kanobo Yahamoto is in love with her, and has followed her home to Southern California from Japan.
Captain Eiichiro, now commander of a destroyer in the Imperial Navy, received a Western Union telegram informing him of his daughter's pending engagement to Kanobo Yahamoto.
To his surprise, the Commandant of the Navy, perhaps holding a glimmer of respect for the young officer’s father, granted him a brief leave to return to the U.S. to see his family late 1938.
He brought back a gift: a brand-new reflex camera, the Yashica 127. It was a marvel of engineering—crystal clear, auto-lighting, and capable of capturing heavy detail. It was the first of its kind in the United States.
While the world's militaries would one day use its tooling for navigator’s bomb sights, Eiichiro used it to take hundreds of photographs of Himari and Natalie in the golden light of Aqua Dulce. It was a fragile record of a peace that could not last.
The Gathering Storm
By 1930, the "playboy" was a ghost, a high-ranking officer in a navy that was becoming the United States' greatest rival. Back in Los Angeles, the two communities—Black and Japanese—lived in a strange, parallel state of grace and grievance.
Central Avenue and Little Tokyo were pillars of the Los Angeles economy. Japanese grocery stores and flower markets fed the city, while Black businesses and musicians provided its soul. Neither community enjoyed equal treatment. They faced housing segregation, employment barriers, and the constant, low-level thrum of racial prejudice.
Yet, the legal system treated them differently in one crucial, ironic way. California’s anti-miscegenation laws were designed to preserve "white racial purity."
Therefore, while a Black man could not marry a white woman, and a Japanese man could not marry a white woman, the law often ignored unions between Black and Japanese citizens. To the white legislators in Sacramento, such a union did not threaten the "purity" they sought to protect.
This legal loophole became a lifeline.
In 1941, the atmosphere in Los Angeles turned brittle. The air at UCLA felt different; the easy camaraderie of the campus was replaced by suspicious glances. Dennis and Susan Yahamoto felt the shift most acutely. Then, the coded communication arrived at the Embassy.
The message from the Emperor’s office was sharp and final: All embassy officers were to be recalled immediately. Furthermore, all male students with Japanese citizenship were ordered to be returned to the Japanese islands.
Hiroshi Nakamoto sat in his study in Aqua Dulce, the telegram trembling in his hand. He looked out the window at the garden his wife had tirelessly tended. He knew what this meant. This wasn't just a diplomatic reshuffling. This was the severing of ties.
Dennis and Susan were devastated. They were Americans in every way that mattered—they loved jazz, they loved the desert, they loved the intellectual rigor of their university. But they were citizens of a nation that was about to become an enemy.
The Sacrifice at the Border
As the news of the impending recall spread, James Edgar Chase, the eighteen-year-old law prodigy, saw the legal chess pieces moving before anyone else. He knew the history of his family—the secret marriage of Eiichiro and Natalie—and he knew that once war began, the "protective" laws of the United States would turn into weapons.
"If the war comes," James told Susan as they sat in their outdoor laboratory, "they will take everything. The land, the house, the dignity. They won't care that you were born here."
"What can we do?" Susan asked, her voice small against the Mojave wind.
"We use the law against itself," James said.
On a weekend in late 1941, just weeks before the world ended, James and Susan took a trip to Mexico. Like Eiichiro and Natalie, 20 plus-years before them, they stood before a Justice of the Peace.
They were married, not just out of the deep, scholarly affection they held for one another, but as a strategic maneuver. Susan took the name Chase. In the eyes of the law, she was now tied to a family that had been on American soil for five generations. They hoped it would be enough to save the Nakamoto ranch—to keep it "in the family" should the worst happen.
The Day the Sun Went Out
December 7, 1941, was a Sunday. In Aqua Dulce, the sky was a piercing, cruel blue. When the news of Pearl Harbor broke, the silence of the canyon was shattered.
The transformation of public opinion was instantaneous. Fear became suspicion; suspicion became policy. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order didn't mention "Japanese" by name, but everyone knew whose doors would be kicked in first.
The Nakamoto family, despite Hiroshi’s diplomatic status, were given days to prepare for "relocation." The status of the embassy was revoked. They were no longer guests; they were "enemy aliens."
In a final, desperate act of defiance and trust, the Nakamotos met with the Chases. On the dusty porch of the ranch, Hiroshi Nakamoto signed a deed of sale. He sold the five-acre ranch, the house, and all its contents to the Chase family for the sum of one dollar.
"Keep it safe," Hiroshi whispered to the elder Mr. Chase. "If we do not return, it belongs to the grandchildren."
A few days later, the government trucks arrived. Men in dark suits and military uniforms swarmed the property. They didn't care about the deed of sale. They didn't care about Susan’s marriage certificate or her American surname.
"She’s a Chase!" James screamed, standing in the path of the soldiers. He held up the marriage license, his voice cracking with the fury of a law student who had realized that the law was a lie. "She is an American citizen by marriage and a resident of this county! You have no warrant!"
The lead agent didn't even look at the paper. "Ancestry is the warrant, kid."
When James tried to block the path to the car where Susan was being held, a soldier swung the butt of a rifle. The blow caught James in the ribs, sending him spiraling into the dirt. As he gasped for air, another soldier kicked him, pushing him aside like a nuisance.
James lay in the dust of Aqua Dulce, his vision blurred by tears and pain, watching as the Nakamotos—Susan, Dennis, Kaori, and Hiroshi—were loaded into the trucks. He watched the Yashica 127 camera, the one Eiichiro had used to capture their smiles, get tossed into a crate by a federal agent, its lens cracking against the wood.
The Long Silence
The camps were a landscape of barbed wire and dust, a far cry from the High Mojave. The Nakamotos were stripped of their honor, their property, and their freedom.
Back in Aqua Dulce, the Chases lived in a state of mourning. They occupied the Nakamoto ranch, not as owners, but as stewards. They fended off looters and ignored the hateful graffiti painted on the fences by people from the city. James, his ribs healed but his heart permanently hardened, finished his law degree in a world that felt fundamentally unjust.
He spent the war years writing letters to every government agency, filing injunctions, and fighting to keep the deed of the Nakamoto ranch from being seized by the state for "abandonment." He used every ounce of his "phenomenon" intellect to protect that one dollar contract.
The Return
When the war finally ended and the gates of the camps were opened, the people of Japanese ancestry emerged into a world that had moved on without them. Most returned to find their businesses sold, their homes occupied by strangers, and their savings vanished.
But in the High Mojave, a different story unfolded.
A battered bus pulled over on the side of the road near Aqua Dulce Canyon. Four figures stepped out—thinner, older, their eyes carrying the weight of years spent behind wire.
As they walked up the long drive toward the ranch, they saw a man standing on the porch. It was James Edgar Chase. He looked toward them, his face breaking into a sob he had held back for years.
He didn't say a word. He simply reached into his pocket and pulled out the house front door key.
The Chases had kept the gardens. They had kept the house. They had even managed to save the broken Yashica camera, though it would never take a clear picture again.
In a city of contradiction, amidst a history of blood and exclusion, the two families stood together on the five-acre ranch. They had lost their honor in the eyes of the government, and they had lost years of their lives to the desert wind. But they had kept the land, and they had kept each other.
The $1 deed remained in the county records—a small, paper testament to the fact that while the law could be used to destroy, it could also, in the hands of those who refused to be broken, be used to remember.
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