Auburn man shining light on county's Japantowns

Auburn's David Unruhe is a man with a mission. He also has a deadline on that mission and is hoping people with connections to Auburn's past will check through old photos and papers to help him out.Unruhe will be working for the next year on a book and museum exhibit that's intended to shed some well-deserved light on Placer County's Nihonmachis, or Japantowns.Located in Auburn, Newcastle, Penryn and Loomis, Japantowns thrived as business and social hubs for first-generation Japanese Americans and their offspring until World War II took away the lives they knew as well as their livelihoods. Unruhe won't be telling the tragic tale of the internment camps. Instead, he'll be gathering information on a comparatively more comfortable time. Vestiges of those times survive. There are still Japantowns in San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles. But there is little to remind today's Placer County residents of what once was. Tsuda Grocery in Old Town Auburn is a notable survivor from those times.Supported by the Placer Japanese American Citizens League, Placer Buddhist Church, Loomis Methodist Church, Sierra College Placer Union High School District, and Loomis Basin and Placer County historical societies, Unruhe has secured a $15,000 grant from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program.Unruhe said that while Placer County was the predominant fresh fruit-growing region in the United States prior to World War II, it's not so widely known how important a role Japanese immigrants and their descendants played in making the area an important one agriculturally.Over the last 20 years, orchard after orchard has been sold off, the trees chopped down and rooftops put up in their place. And while the word "Japantown" probably conjures up images of tourist-friendly enclaves in big cities, Placer County's clutch of Nihonmachis were anything but that. As Unruhe describes them, his research has shown them to be more akin to ghettos that existed to serve the needs of immigrant Japanese who were denied the ability to live, work and buy basic goods and services in the dominant Caucasian enclaves.These were the places Japanese turned to for traditional foods and products as well as essentials like haircuts and shoes.Pearl Harbor and a sickening tide of anti-Japanese sentiment that had been bubbling under for years turned Japantowns into ghost towns. As the war progressed feelings were rubbed raw. One report from the time told of the acquittal of Army privates Alvin and Elmer Johnson and bartender James Watson in Auburn on charges of attempting to burn and dynamite the home of Sumio Doi, a native-born American of Japanese ancestry. There was no attempt by the defense attorney to deny the charges. Instead, his arguments hinged on revenge for Japanese war crimes. He concluded his final argument with the words "This is a white man's country - let us keep it so." Two of Doi's brothers were serving in the U.S. Army at the time.Japanese-Americans did return to Placer County, some to take on prominent roles in a post-war world.Now time is running out, not just for Unruhe's project, but for a generation of Japanese Americans whose memories of those times need to be tapped. As it is, it's a chapter of Placer County history that remains virtually undocumented, Unruhe said.PUTTING "DUKES" UP ON SCREENAuburn's Gary Davis was in the audience for an advance screening Wednesday of "Dukes of Hazzard" and ended up taking a bow at the Sacramento theater when KMAX-TV's "Good Day Sacramento" entertainment anchor Mark S. Allen gave him a shout-out for keeping him alive during a spectacular stunt at the Gold Country Fairgrounds a week earlier.Davis served as second-unit director on a tight nine-minute opening sequence that sets the stage for plenty of car chases, car crashes and broad humor from stars Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson, supported by Willie Nelson and Burt Reynolds.Allen rolled a Crown Victoria taxicab rigged out like a police car, emerging dazed and uninjured.Judging from the audience reaction to the opening scenes, Davis' work will go down well with movie audiences today, when "Dukes" is released nationally. Davis, whose work has included the "Terminator" movies and "Starsky & Hutch," said after the screening that movie-goers will get their money's worth from the action sequences alone.Davis said it was good to see and hear the audience enjoy the opening sequence, which ends with the Duke brothers' General Lee hurtling over a river.As for the acting, Knoxville and Scott had some chemistry as Appalachian-American good ol' boys."But in my heart, I thought the acting could have been better," Davis said.Nelson may sleepwalk his way through the movie, but the screenplay does give him a ton of one-liners. If you see the movie, you'll learn from Nelson what politicians get when they take Viagra and why divorces are so expensive.EXTREME EXPERIENCEAuburn landscape architect Steven Crouch took part in TV's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," adding his skills to an army of contractors as they transformed a needy single mother's home into a veritable castle. His verdict - the whole thing was more akin to a military operation.Not a big fan of the show but willing to help after learning the back story of Fairfield's Susan Tom and the seven children she has adopted, Crouch provided planning for landscaping after being put on a list of candidates willing to help by builder John Laing.Crouch said he had a chance to stand in the VIP area last Saturday and bask in the glow of TV celebrity. The show gets an average of 15,000 applications a week and the actual effort draws hundreds of lookey-loos at a time. Crouch said he plans to go back this week to try to catch a glimpse of the finished product. The Journal's Gus Thomson can be reached at gust@goldcountrymedia.com.