PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : Among the Gifts of the Sea, Hearts at Peace

In a small, square shop in Gardena, far from the smell of the sea, Yo Yoshida makes fishing rods. Everything in his store seems old and well-tried: dusty little boxes stuffed this way and that with paper bags full of reel parts, head hooks, pliers, tiny lead heads for crappie and surf perch, trolling feathers like ancient fetishes.

Every now and again, a chair turns up. Others, old-fashioned and trusty, line up under the second-hand television by the back door to the alley--a door that stays open in the long summer evenings as men come home from the sea, or from cramped offices far from this flat corner of Western Avenue.

It seems as if the store has always been this way: old fridges full of milk, fish and wriggling worms, a battered soft-drinks machine and drip-stained microwave, cushions slung on rickety seats for those who pass an hour, an evening, hanging out, talking of peacock bass in Venezuela, of leather-back cabrilla from Mexico, or just mackerel off a pier somewhere. The bare lights, the flooring that is surely never washed and is full of holes, the display counters that do not match, yellowing walls and yellowing windows. And those who know it would have it always this way. Here boys grow into men, and men slow down stilled by the love of the sea.

A country store would have such a feel: the comfort of life that continues forever, of lore handed down from old to young, of craft and customs shared. Yo has a thick, juicy smokers’ cough, faded skin, wide smile and slow, plain talk. Foreigners would think of him as a “real” American: He looks you in the eye, his words and ways are unadorned. He was born a few miles from here; he saw the local waters fouled, he has seen the fish come back. The tides of men and nature at war have washed across his 60 and more years.

At the back of the store, great bins of custom rods wait to be collected. Fighting-chair rods for huge marlin or yellowfin tuna. Heavy lines for those who relish a struggle, lighter ones for landing small stripers or wahoo. Rods for fisherfolk who listen carefully to the sea and the winds, who watch the currents.

Yo signs his name in ink on each rod, his client’s name above it. He wraps around each the client’s colors: some plain, others intricately woven into diamonds of bright blue and yellow, quieter blacks and browns. His rods cost hardly more than the factory ones he sells. His craft is his way of life.

When he was a boy in Westminster, Yo would go to the sea with his father. In winter, they caught rock cod. In summer, they harvested tomatoes and strawberries on the family’s 20-acre farm, fertile, well-tended. And he never asked where in Japan his grandfather was born; he never talked of another country, other ways. He was an American, rooted in his own soil.

He was 15 when the soldiers came to take them away. In a few hours, everything was lost: his home, his childhood, his mother’s sheets and china, his father’s farm, his bamboo fishing rod, everything together as if of the same value--or of none. His father had a stroke in the camp in Arizona. The family never lived together again.

He went into the Army at 18: “After they told me I had no country, I got drafted.” Yo has never spoken of all this to his children. “I never talked--and they’ve never asked.” And the sea has covered his pain and the years after the war when he worked as a gardener, tending other men’s patches, trying to forget the farm that was taken away, to forgive a family’s shame and hurt.

Time has lent a plain, easy-going kindness to his face. And his life is about the sea--a sea that looks away from man, from his clumsiness and cruelty.