Hasegawa Monogatari: 5G Over 124 Years by Andrew Hasegawa
SETSUTARO HASEGAWA
When Setsutaro died on October 4th, 1952, the Hasegawa family’s relationship with Japan became paper-thin. At the height of the northern hemisphere summer, in August, when Japanese pay homage to their ancestors, no one gathers at his grave. Japanese tradition was lost before it was ever gained. It was an era when it was easier to deny your heritage than to acknowledge it.
Grandpa Hasegawa knew who he was. There was no confusion triggered by internment, war and 55 years living in Australia. He died a proud Japanese man. In 1942, when he fronted a tribunal seeking an early release from internment, he was asked whether he was a patriotic Japanese, he didn’t hesitate to reply: “Naturally”.
Grandpa Hasegawa was born on December 24th 1871 in the port town of Otaru in Hokkaido, the son of a public servant, Setsuzo Hasegawa of Niigata, and Matsu Koike of Tokyo. He was the eldest son and raised in a household where it was expected he would look after his parents and, under the laws of primogeniture inherit, the family estate; which he did in 1907.
At some point he headed to Tokyo to pursue his education. Details are scant but we know he lived there. There is not a single document in Australia, be it marriage or death certificates or any the documents associated with internment, where he acknowledges Otaru as his city of birth. In the 6 months prior to departure, he lived in Kobe. After finishing his education he became a schoolteacher.
Late 1896 or early 1897 he boarded the steamer Yamashiro-Maru and arrived in Australia February 12th, 1897, aged 26. He came to Australia to learn English, initially working for Arthur Tuckett, a businessman who hired young Japanese men to work as home-helpers. Passports were confiscated and the workers underpaid, a familiar story , even 124 years later. Grandpa Hasegawa didn’t stay an employee of the Tuckett household for long; he reclaimed his passport and continued his Australian adventure.
Setsutaro Hasegawa’s passport
In an era when finding work in the hospitality industry was not an option, many Japanese found themselves working in laundries and then setting them up and managing them themselves. Why were so many Japanese in Australia involved in the laundry business? Because barriers to entry were low and you didn’t need a lot of capital to set one up, the capital equipment was Japanese, standards in Japanese laundries were higher than in local ones, giving them a competitive advantage, and then there was the Confucian work ethic. Grandpa Hasegawa became a laundryman by accident and that he stayed in Australia for the rest of his life was also.
In 1905 Grandpa Hasegawa married Ada Cole and late in the same year their first child, Leo Takeshi was born. In 1907 the second son Moto Kozo arrived, followed by Joe Gonzo in 1911.
Rear left Setsutaro Hasegawa, centre Ada, left front Leo Takeshi, right front Moto Kozo
Around 1910 Grandpa and family moved to the inland town of Ballarat where he set up a laundry. What motivated him to move from Geelong to Ballarat is unclear but he lived there until around 1914. In the local newspaper he and wife Ada are recorded as winning prizes at dog and poultry shows. He was not shy about involving himself in local activities and was probably the only or one of very few Japanese in town at that point in time.
In 1913 he made an application to be naturalized as an Australian citizen that was rejected, because “natives of Asia are not eligible”. At some point his wife left him. I puzzled about when this happened for decades. In the record of interview at the Alien Tribunal in 1942 he said he had not seen her for twenty years, suggesting early 1920s; then a distant relative and great granddaughter of Ada told us that she had given birth to a child in 1915 and another one in 1917, leading me to conclude that sometime around 1913/14 Grandpa Hasegawa had become a single parent.
He moved back to Melbourne and was recorded as living with his tailor and friend Ichizo Sato in 1916, before returning to Geelong and sharing accommodation with another life long friend, Motoshiro Ito. In the Hasegawa family there are no stories about those times; Grandpa did not share his emotions or talk about what happened. Geelong then became the family’s permanent home through to his death.
During cross-examination at the Alien Tribunal in 1942 Grandpa Hasegawa told his inquisitor that he had not had contact with his family in Japan for more than thirty years. The family register indicates his father died in 1907 and that he became the head of the household that year. There are a couple of photos of his mother, sisters and other family members that date from the early 20th century. There was no sign of his father and around the same time an elegant photo of Grandpa and family was taken in Geelong. I speculate that at some point he broached the subject of why retuning home was difficult and his mother cut him off, because he could not fulfil his duties as eldest son.
Adrift, alone and a single father of three sons, he battled on without complaint. His economic situation changed from stable to comfortable in the mid 1920s. I wondered about this for many years and then one day the penny dropped: he had sold the assets that belonged to him in Japan under the laws of inheritance and become a man of means. He bought a house and owned the freehold of the business he operated in a prime location in central Geelong. There was a car and some other landholdings, and the youngest son, Joe Gonzo, was sent to an exclusive private school in Geelong. Life was comfortable and, as one of my Aunts says, it was the “good times’.
INTERNMENT
The good times ended December 8th, 1941 when the police knocked on the door of 21 Little Ryrie St and arrested Setsutaro Hasegawa. He was just short of his 70th birthday. The laundry closed, the family’s economic situation deteriorated and, being a Hasegawa went from being a matter of no concern to one of heightened self-awareness. By the end of the war, just when you might have thought things would improve, they became more difficult.
Mug shot of Setsutaro Hasegawa in his Alien Card, taken January 1940
Grandpa Hasegawa was not a gregarious community character, he was happy tending to his Japanese garden, breeding goldfish and birds. He was the patriarch of the house and meals did not begin until he was seated. After dinner he retired to his room and studied, read and kept diaries. He knew that if you wanted to breed goldfish with certain characteristics, you had to understand how to do it, so you bought a book. During cross-examination his good friend George Taro Furuya was asked in what language he spoke to Hasegawa: “Japanese” of course. One of the tribunal panel comments on Grandpa’s English language skills and how good they were. My Aunt said when speaking with him in English there was no “accent” or feeling that he was struggling to understand.
IDENTITY CRISIS
The seeds of the Hasegawa family identity crisis were planted during the Pacific War and what followed was oppressive. Capturing the mood of the moment in words is not easy. During the Pacific War parts of northern Australia were bombed, Japanese soldiers came within 32 km of Port Moresby and tens of thousands of Australian soldiers found themselves prisoners of war in South East Asia. The death rate in the camps was just short of 30%. In September and October 1945, 14,000 POWs returned home with tales of deaths and atrocities in the camps. Amongst those who returned home were those who were mentally and physically ill, who often led short lives as a result. Of those who recovered and returned to a “normal life”, there were those who forgave and those who remained bitter.
My Aunt Matsu, the second eldest daughter of Leo Takeshi and granddaughter of Grandpa Hasegawa, remembered the forties and fifties with bitterness. At school she was persecuted and rocks thrown at her because of her Nikkei heritage. Outside of the family she was known as Sue. When my mother considered naming my younger sister with a Japanese name in the early sixties Aunty Matsu intervened and told her you must not do it. My mother heeded her advice and my sister was named Elizabeth. Aunty Matsu once told me that she occasionally ran into people she had been to school with when she was young and if they approached her to start a conversation, she could not “look them in the eye”; such were her memories of those times. Matsu was conflicted by her love for her Grandfather and her difficulty dealing with her Japanese heritage. She was a good cook; my cousins tell me she often made Japanese food and was partial to Japanese pickles. In the 1990s, when being part Japanese had stopped being a burden, she was my guest in Tokyo, enjoying what she had so long had to hide: her Japanese heritage.
The Hasegawa family house was located in central Geelong and my Grandmother, Grandpa’s daughter in law, knew just about everyone. So it was no surprise when, in 1953, three hungry, lonely Japanese students studying wool classing at the Gordon Institute were introduced to the family. In the Hasegawa household they found food and friendship. One of the students was Hironoshin Furuhashi, a former world record holder in the 1500 metre swimming event and an Olympian. He was later the Japanese Swimming Federation President through to his death in 2009. His experience in Australia in 1953 captured the intensity of the hatred towards Japanese in some quarters. In swim crazy Australia state swimming associations banned him from swimming in competitions. The racist attitude of these associations was prominent in the print media at the time but not everyone agreed and eventually he was allowed to swim. In a brief online biography Furuhashi makes mention of the deep hostility of some Australians towards him because he was Japanese and the troubles he had finding accommodation.
Left rear Hironoshin Furuhashi, left front Motoshiro Ito life long friend of Setsutaro Hasegawa. Photo dates 1953
The encounter the Hasegawa family had with Furuhashi is still talked about to this day, emphasizing that deep down most in the family were proud of their Grandfather and their Japanese heritage but unsure of how to deal with it. My father, a keen amateur swimmer, often talked about “the flying fish” while his younger sister still displays a beautiful Japanese doll sent by Furuhashi to the Hasegawa family following his return to Japan. In a hostile environment Furuhashi and the doll became and still are a family symbol of connection with Japan.
One of two dolls sent by Furuhashi to the Hasegawa family on his return to Japan
The end of the Pacific War resulted in a deepening of the identity crisis for Japanese in Australia. On release from internment the majority were repatriated, often against their will, to Japan. Only a small rump was allowed to remain, with the criteria in most cases being a partner who was Australian. 69 Japanese were released early from internment and another 143 were allowed to remain. Many of the 143 who were not repatriated were children with one parent who was not Japanese. The easy thing to do for many Australians of Japanese descent was to deny their heritage and change their names. In the Hasegawa family the second son of Grandpa Hasegawa, Moto, changed his name to his mother’s maiden name Cole and his first name to Jack in the 1940s. The third son also changed his surname in 1956 to Cole. Both sons of Grandpa Hasegawa chose not to talk about their Japanese heritage, thereby snuffing out identification as being part Japanese in their families. What Joe and Jack did was common and rational rather than unusual in the Japanese community in Australia. This is the reason why there are so few people who identify as being pre-war Nikkei in Australia.
In the 1960s community attitudes towards Japan were starting to change. The tide started to turn as Japan presented a warm friendly face to the world when it hosted the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The bullet train that began operating in 1964 was a symbol of Japan’s technological prowess and modernity that helped give it further credibility. Japanese consumer goods become widely available and many Australian children would have watched the animation super hero Astro Boy (tetsu no atomu) on television, not knowing it was Japanese. By the end of the 1960s Japan was Australia’s largest trading partner, Japanese Departments opened at Monash and Queensland University in 1966 and several well known private secondary schools, for example Geelong Grammar, introduce Japanese language learning into their curriculum.
At home in the households of the various strands of the Hasegawa family not a lot changed, no one was keen on embracing their heritage. I was born in 1960 in a small country town not far from Geelong. In my grade three primary school photo, the only person in it with a non Anglo Celtic background was me. My father often spoke about Grandpa Hasegawa who was his male role model. He had taken possession of his passport, Alien Card, a diary, some letters from Japan and other bits and pieces. He would occasionally show me these family treasures and talk to me about Grandpa, and then remind me “you must never change your surname”. I didn’t really understand why he kept making that point until I was a teenager.
White Australia, Andrew back row 3rd from left, 1969.
ANDREW’S JAPANESE ADVENTURE
During the 1970s I spent many summer holidays at my Grandmother’s house; she was Grandpa Hasegawa’s daughter in law. She talked about her father in law often, she nursed him in his twilight years and in return he gifted all his property and personal effects to her ahead of his death. Out the back in the shed were two trunks full of hand tailored suits that had been worn by Grandpa Hasegawa and made by Ichizo Sato. I used to peer into those trunks admiring the beautiful suits and the handful of other items in them. My curiosity became an obsession and I decided to seek answers to all the unanswered questions.
My first point of call was the Public Record Office of Victoria. I wrote to them on the off chance they might have a record of Grandpa’s arrival; several weeks later I received a reply confirming the details. My next point of call was the Japanese Consulate to see if they could help with the translation of Japanese language documents that had withstood the test of time; they couldn’t but introduced me to someone who could. James Oki was an elderly Japanese man who spoke English with a crisp North American accent. I made an appointment and went to his apartment in East Melbourne and showed him my small collection of Japanese language documents and he agreed to help. Several weeks later I retuned and he told me what he could understand from the documents. The letters from Japan were not easy to read and he could only decipher bits and pieces of them, the passport was straight forward and the gem he uncovered was that Setsutaro Hasegawa’s birth was registered in the port city of Otaru in Hokkaido not Tokyo. My next act was to write to the City of Otaru and ask for a copy of the family register. About a month later a copy arrived and I was back asking Oki san if he could help translate the documents.
And so began an adventure to learn about the land where STH was born, Japan. In 1981, forty years ago this year, I arrived in Japan. I was twenty. It was the start of a lifelong relationship with Japan that continues to this day. I spent several years living in the Kansai region, studying Japanese and teaching English before returning to Australia to finish my degree.
In late 1985 I returned to Japan to collect data for my honours thesis on an outcaste (buraku) community in southern Osaka. It was and still is a sensitive subject which I became familiar with on my first visit to Japan, when a student at the university where I was studying broached the subject then told me I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. That made me even more interested and I went to the library, found a book called “Japan’s Invisible Race” and devoured it. My thesis topic was rejected several times, because the head of the Japanese department said you cannot succeed unless you have access. His point was fair; you can’t just walk into a community and start knocking on doors. I persisted and the Japanese Department reached out to a well-known Japanese academic who agreed to help me enter a “buraku”community. Even then there were no guarantees; it was a series of introductions that got me in. Two local leaders of buraku communities I was introduced to rejected me. Then the third person on my list asked me what I wanted to do and said “welcome”. I was in with unfettered access. I was given the privilege of entering the Yata community, interviewing residents and gaining an insight into Japan that stays with me to this very day. Many years later I realized that my patron was a leading figure in the Buraku Liberation League, a warrior for his cause.
ANNE HASEGAWA: “Yuck I’m not eating that”
Dealing with our Japanese heritage has always been a thorny issue in the Hasegawa family, as many of us lived through a period when Japan was not popular. When Anne was born in the early 1990s I thought the issues that had plagued us were long gone but that was not the case; she decided she would rather be European than Japanese. On a bad day it crossed my mind that she would probably have happily traded Mum and Dad in and replaced them with white Anglo Saxon parents.
Anne aged 7 in Tokyo. 753 ceremony
Anne’s mother is Japanese and was born and raised in Japan while I am a 4th generation Nikkei Australian. Anne grew up speaking Japanese and at the age of 4 relocated to Tokyo, Japan, attending a Japanese kindergarten before entering a primary school with a bilingual curriculum. She was treated as a Japanese native speaker and learned Japanese at the same pace as children in the Japanese school system. In Japan there were no signs that she would reject her Japanese heritage. It was all smooth sailing until we moved to Hong Kong and Anne started attending a school modelled on a British primary school.
Before long Anne’s American accent, acquired in Japan, was fading fast and the Queen’s English was in. Unbeknown to me, Anne made it clear to her mother that her carefully prepared school lunch box must not contain onigiri (rice balls) or other Japanese food. It was the start of her becoming very picky about what she ate and much of what she rejected, but not all, was Japanese.
There had been an incident at school in Hong Kong where Anne was teased for eating Japanese food, triggering a twenty-year period where she marginalised anything to do with Japan. That day the lunch box contained “onigiri”, Japanese rice balls with shiso; that was the source of her angst.
“Eeewww, what is that?
That looks gross. You’re gross.
It’s purple! Why is it purple? Yuck.
It smells funny! Blergh!”
Raw fish, be it sushi or sashimi, was out. “Yuck, I am not eating that let’s eat Mexican instead.” It was a familiar response that repeated itself many times over the years. I sat quietly watching and wondering at what point her feelings might change. It was a slow process. Occasionally I would share some Hasegawa family history with her but she showed little interest.
Then one day about four or five years ago Anne declared that she had started to eat raw fish and sushi again. Just why she had reacquired her taste for raw fish is not clear. I suspect if she was with her friends, and everyone else was enjoying raw fish, then she would have been the odd one out, considering her heritage.
I used the drip feed system over many years, occasionally sharing information about children with mixed heritage with her. Once in while she would show some interest. Then, suddenly, about two years ago, she demanded to know more about who she was. The identity crisis was over; Anne turned her cooking skills to making Japanese food and embraced her heritage. It has been a remarkable journey watching her accept who she is.
Andrew Hasegawa
September 2021
READ MORE :
Anne Masayo Hasegawa’s article Eggy reveries, onigiri nightmares and a reawakening for SBS
Story of Hasegawa Family by Andrew Hasegawa for Nikkei Australia
WATCH:
Interview with Ida Hasegawa on Hasegawa Family History Courtesy, Andrew Hasegawa
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