They Remember a Friend in Need : Community: When Japanese-Americans were hustled off to internment camps, Hazel Roberts protected treasured possessions. They haven’t forgotten their late neighbor.

It was 1942, the world was at war and, for Chiye Taniguchi, there was no room for hope.

So the 29-year-old West Covina woman packed only what she could carry when the U.S. government forced her and other Japanese-Americans to move inland to isolated internment camps.

That meant that her cedar hope chest--a girlhood treasure packed carefully with her white brocade wedding dress, handmade quilts and family photo albums--had to stay behind

A friend, Hazel Roberts, offered to keep the chest for Taniguchi, as well as the prized possessions of other evacuees.

Japanese-Americans also entrusted Roberts with the keys to the community’s heart and soul: their beloved three-room social and cultural hall on an acre of donated farmland in nearby Baldwin Park.

Today, 51 years later, the hall--now known as the East San Gabriel Valley Japanese Community Center--is going strong in a new building in West Covina, thanks in part to Roberts’ efforts to watch over the original facility.

Recently, community center members erected a thank-you plaque in memory of Roberts, who died of natural causes in April at 94. Her Japanese-American friends stayed at her bedside until the end came at a nursing home in La Verne.

The plaque also honors Roberts’ husband, Ted, a dairy farmer, who died in 1973.

Roberts’ extraordinary 65-year relationship with the Japanese-American community was a godsend, said West Covina homemaker Taniguchi, now 79.

“Although we felt betrayed by our country, (Roberts) and others like her helped us to keep our faith in America,” Taniguchi said, in a eulogy during Roberts’ funeral.

A shy, soft-spoken woman, Taniguchi sometimes shows people her yellowed pre-war photos from her hope chest. There is one of Roberts, a sunny-looking young woman with short hair and a floppy hat, surrounded by Japanese-American girls.

“People say, ‘How come you were able to save all this?’ ” Taniguchi said. “I said, ‘Because I kept them in a safe place.’ ”

By order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, about 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them American citizens, were sent to relocation camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. On Feb. 20, the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations will sponsor a “Day of Remembrance” program at the Japan America Theatre in Los Angeles to mark the 51st anniversary of the evacuation order.

Roberts lived long enough to see many of her Japanese-American friends receive $20,000 checks from the U.S. government in compensation, and as an apology, for their internment. It was a time in which some families lost everything--their homes, their businesses and their pride in being U.S. citizens. Most reparation payments are expected to be delivered this year.

Since the mid-1920s, Roberts had volunteered time in the Japanese community, including those war days when people taunted her with the epithet, “Jap-lover.”

Roberts, who had no children, taught Sunday School and, in 1926, started a Camp Fire Girls’ troop called The Cherry Blossoms. The group was comprised of five Japanese-American girls, including Taniguchi. Other Japanese-American children also frequented her West Covina home, knowing they could get a freshly baked cookie and a smile.

During the period, most Japanese immigrants were farmers, working from sunup to sundown to harvest their raspberries, blackberries and cabbage. Many had no time for frivolities, or learning American ways.

“She did for us what our immigrant parents could not,” wrote former Cherry Blossom member Sachi Kaneshiro, in a program for the 1987 pre-war community center reunion. “She introduced us to things American: Boston baked beans, wiener roasts, hand-churned ice cream, pajama parties.”

The war did not end Roberts’ friendships with Japanese-Americans. But Roberts kept quiet about the fact that some evacuees had stored their belongings at her mother’s house next door to her home.

“She was always afraid that, if people knew, they would take a match to it,” Yosh Sogioka, a 76-year-old retired leek farmer said of Roberts. Sogioka said his sister was married in Roberts’ back yard garden, which was brightened by wisteria vines, roses and tall trees.

At the time of the evacuation order sending them to a barbed-wire enclosed detention camp in remote Heart Mountain, Wyo., the Japanese community in the east San Gabriel Valley was small--about 500 people--and close-knit. Many families had few non-Japanese friends to turn to for help.

Some evacuees had no choice but to leave their homes and businesses unattended, only to find their places looted and ransacked when they returned.

Others, such as Sogioka, made a desperate effort to hawk their possessions and pocket a few dollars. It was a buyer’s market. Sokioka could get only $40 for his pickup truck. And when his family returned at war’s end, they found that their small, rented wood-frame house in Baldwin Park had been razed, the furniture they had left there nowhere to be found.

Thanks to Roberts, the community center was spared a similar fate.

“If it wasn’t for (Roberts), the original building we had would have been vandalized and torn up while we were gone,” Sogioka said.

Roberts stood watch over the facility, leasing it to West Covina schools to help pay for upkeep and property taxes. The center remained just as the Japanese-American families had left it.

In July, 1945, when the Taniguchis returned from Wyoming, Roberts was waiting at the Pomona train station, waving in welcome.

In 1946, Roberts and her husband retired to Carlsbad. But Roberts, who was known to never forget a birthday, kept in touch with her Japanese-American friends. In 1967, for the Roberts’ 50th wedding anniversary, community center members dreamed up a special surprise: They sent the couple to Japan for two weeks.

The community center continued to flourish. Such was the dedication of its members that 13 families mortgaged their homes to finance the $300,000 construction of a new center, a mile away from the old one, in 1973. Today, Japanese-Americans gather there to play cards, learn line dances and plan trips to Las Vegas. About 200 senior citizens eat lunch there every week; February’s menu includes sashimi, caught by center members who are deep-sea fishermen.

After Roberts’ death, center members collected $600 in o-koden , traditional Japanese funeral money, and sent it to Roberts’ family, which includes her five nieces and nephews. They sent it back.

“We thought it’d be a good memory of her to do something with the money at the cultural center,” said Roberts’ nephew, Glenn Bashore, a 70-year-old Azusa resident.

Added another nephew, 66-year-old Harlow Hurley of Whittier: “Whatever she did, it was returned from both sides.”

As it turned out, the gesture by Roberts’ family left her Japanese friends shaking their heads. They wanted to have the last word but, as usual, she prevailed.

“To the end,” Sogioka said, “that’s the way she was. That’s Hazel for you.”