South Bay Pioneer Who Broke New Ground With Style

Riye Yoshizawa’s memory is long and vivid.

She recalls when home was a small farm in what is now downtown Los Angeles, where her father grew flowers in 1910. The Los Angeles Hilton now occupies the property.

She remembers the move a few years later to Hermosa Beach, which took all day in a horse-drawn wagon on dirt roads. Here, her father again grew flowers on 5 acres near what is now the archway at the entrance to King Harbor.

“I got up at 6 a.m. to help my parents and deliver flowers,” she remembers. And after her chores, the 11-year-old--who had come with her family from Japan four years earlier--took the big red streetcar back to Los Angeles, where she went to school. The Robinson’s department store has a parking lot there today.

She recalls a fascination for clothes and fashion kindled by the primitive movies of the day: “We had Indians and the Katzenjammer Kids, but what impressed me the most were the ladies with the beautiful gowns and long trains, hats, furs and muffs.”

And this fascination later gave her a career as a teacher of sewing and dress design and a pioneer of fashion shows in the Los Angeles Japanese community during the 1930s. “I started the shows, and then other designers followed me,” she said. “I wanted to show the community the right kind of clothes to wear.”

Friends and former students recall that through the 1950s, she was a well-known figure in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo--teaching sewing, designing wedding gowns and creating formals for Los Angeles Nisei Week queens and their courts. A red velvet coronation robe with ermine trim she made is still worn by the queen.

These days, Yoshizawa is petite and tranquil at 87, a widow whose husband, Kichinosuke, died in 1981 at 93. Her Carson home is filled with her major pastime of the last 20 years--oil paintings.

“It was hard for me to stop teaching,” she said, remembering her decision to close her Modern School of Fashion in Little Tokyo in 1959. “But my son said, ‘Do what you want, enjoy yourself.’ ”

That’s what she did the other day at the Gardena Nisei VFW Hall, where several hundred friends and former students of Yoshizawa--some of whom hadn’t seen her for many years--attended a showing of 59 paintings, including portraits, flowers and landscapes of the Japanese seacoast Yoshizawa has visited on her travels.

“Mother said she would like to show her paintings and friends said they wanted to see them, so we decided to have a showing,” said Yoshizawa’s son, Rick, who made all of the easels for the paintings.

For Yoshizawa, the afternoon was a matter of standing, handshaking and hugging. “They lined up to talk to me, but I couldn’t talk to everyone because I lost my voice. But I did enjoy the event.”

One visitor was a woman she had not seen since Yoshizawa’s wedding day in 1924. Another had been a student of 30 years before, who said Yoshizawa was “as lovely and gracious” as she had remembered.

Yoshizawa says she has led a “wonderful” life, even though there are unhappy memories of the 26 months that her family--including her husband and three children--spent at Manzanar, the relocation camp near Independence where many Japanese were incarcerated during World War II.

“We were able to take nothing,” she remembered. “I had beautiful things--imported chests and paintings. We sold a new bedroom set for $25. It was sad for me because I cherished these things.”

At the time, she recalls, her major concern was surviving: “At home, we ate well, but in the camp they put mutton stew and jello on the same plate and we got to be like skeletons.”

She said her skill as a seamstress--”I had a trade and could earn a living”--helped the family gain a release from the camp in 1944. The Yoshizawas went to New York, where she sewed for clothing manufacturers and later sold dresses for the Elizabeth Arden salon.

In 1948, things took a decided turn for the better when Yoshizawa--wearing a gold coat and an orchid hat--was plucked from the crowd of Fifth Avenue Easter paraders by emcee Dennis James and put on television as the “Easter Sunday Mother of Fifth Avenue.”

Yoshizawa is remembered as an exacting but patient teacher and a woman who was very different from many Issei, or native Japanese, women in Los Angeles.

“The Issei are traditionally known for old-country values, but she really is a vanguard of my generation, which is second generation or Nisei,” said Sue Okabe, a voice and piano teacher in Gardena who was executive director of the Nisei Week Japanese Festival in 1948.

Cosmopolitan Views

She said Yoshizawa’s clothes and cosmopolitan views surprised people in those days:”She was not the ordinary Japanese-reared lady who was quietly in the background. She spoke her mind freely.” She also insisted that ball gowns, not kimonos, be the standard dress of the Nisei court:”She said we were American-born.”

Kats Kunitsugu, executive director of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo, was one of Yoshizawa’s students as a teen-ager in 1940. She recalls her as a “perfectionist” who was not satisfied until a student did things correctly, whether making a buttonhole or stitching a hem.

“She had definite ideas about what fashion was,” she recalled. “She thought a lady was not dressed completely unless she wore a hat. I’ll always remember her telling me white gloves were very gauche. They reminded her of Minnie Mouse. So I’ve never worn white gloves since.”

Yoshizawa, still a stylish dresser herself, said:”Clothes make the person. Clothing talks.”

And she likes to think that her students took kindly to her even when she was demanding:”I wanted things right and I had to know that they knew.’

She was recognized by clothing and fashion specialists of her day for her distinctive method of measuring material and fitting clothes. Instead of using tape measures, she cut pieces of string to indicate the length of sleeves or circumferences of collars. And she cut fabric while it was draped over the woman she was designing for, prompting Bullock’s Department Store to observe in a commentary on one of her shows:”Each garment looked as though it had been molded to the figure.”

While she gave up clothing for painting years ago, Yoshizawa said she would like to do one more fashion show.

Today’s women, she says, could use it.

“The pants they’re wearing may be comfortable, but they would look much better with dresses,” she remarked.