Lost Dolls Tell Story of One Man’s Bridge Across Cultural Gap : ‘Why Riverside? Why did Mr. Miller get them? Those were the big questions.’

They were the tiniest diplomats the world had ever seen.

They had names like Doris, Alice, Ehime and Kagawa and they crossed the Pacific 67 years ago to help tear down barriers between the United States and Japan.

They were children’s dolls--among 12,797 that were part of the most unusual cultural exchanges ever staged between the East and West.

Blue-eyed, gingham-clad figures were sent by Americans to schools throughout Japan. Black-haired, kimono-wrapped creations were sent by Japanese to towns across the United States.

The doll swap was engineered in 1927 by an American-born educator searching for a way to improve sagging relations between the two countries.

These days, a Japanese-born real estate agent is searching for two of the “Friendship Dolls” in hopes of doing much the same thing.

Seiji Horita, 53, of Temple City, has spent nearly a year hunting for kimono dolls named “Miss Chiba” and “Miss Fusa” that were sent to Riverside in 1928 but have since disappeared.

Horita, who sells houses in Alhambra, figures the dolls will help tell the story of how a man named Frank Miller stood up for the rights of immigrants to own homes in California.

The missing dolls have already taught Horita plenty about Miller, he says.

As a child growing up in Japan, Horita was familiar with the legend of the Blue-Eyed Dolls as memorialized in school books and in popular children’s songs. But he didn’t learn about the other half of the swap--the kimono dolls--until after he moved here in 1969.

A chance encounter with a Japanese university professor visiting Los Angeles to research the Japanese dolls triggered Horita’s own search.

Horita learned that the Japanese handcrafted 58 elaborate dolls--one representing each regional prefecture and large city--as their part of the swap. The 3-foot-tall figures ended up in American museums, mostly in large cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco--where single dolls were sent.

“But for some reason, two of them went to Riverside,” Horita said. “To Frank Miller.

That was perplexing to Horita. The Riverside of the 1920s was a dusty agricultural and railroad town, hardly a cosmopolitan metropolis. And just who was this Frank Miller, anyhow?

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“Why Riverside? Why did Mr. Miller get them?” he said. “Those were the big questions.”

Months of poring over old newspaper records and talking with historians in Riverside--where Miller built what is now known as the historic Mission Inn--provided the answers.

Horita traced Miller and his ties to Japanese immigrants to 1901. He learned that Miller had helped start a church for local Japanese, helped launch a Japanese civic association and been host of frequent bashes at his hotel for such occasions as the Japanese emperor’s birthday. In the 1920s he helped organize a national relief effort that raised $12 million for food, medical supplies, tents and blankets after a disastrous earthquake in Japan.

But more importantly, Miller fought proposals in 1913 and 1920 to prohibit immigrants from owning land in California.

His was a public fight: Miller took out large ads in The Times labeled “Our Stand” and “Think Again” that urged voters to reject the proposed law. When it was enacted anyway and a Japanese immigrant named Jukichi Harada tested it by buying a house in his American-born children’s name, Miller offered to purchase the residence for Harada. Eventually, though, the law was overturned.

The Japanese did not forget that kindness a few years later when the doll swap occurred.

The American doll-collecting was started by Sydney Gulick, a missionary and educator from the East Coast who had lived in Japan. Drawing from schools, PTAs and other groups across the country, Gulick raised enough money to buy 12,739 American factory-made dolls. Each was dressed in custom-made clothes and given a make-believe passport in its own name.

The Japanese responded by producing the 58 fancy kimono dolls. They toured 479 U.S. towns before being distributed to museums in this country’s largest cities.

The chosen sites, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York, each got one. Except Riverside, where Frank Miller got two.

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Historian Mark Rawitsch of Willits, Calif., author of a 1983 book about early Japanese immigrants in Riverside, said Miller’s forthright stance against the land-ownership ban elevated him in the eyes of Japanese leaders.

“I’m absolutely certain that’s why he got the two Friendship Dolls,” Rawitsch said.

Most of the American-made dolls were destroyed in the anti-U.S. frenzy that swept Japan during World War II. The kimono dolls, meanwhile, were tucked out of sight in U.S. museums. A Japanese researcher found “Miss Taiwan”--the doll sent to Los Angeles--in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History in 1988.

“They were quite excited to discover that one of them is still in the museum,” said Beth Werling, a museum collections manager who puts it on periodic display. “The Friendship Dolls are very important culturally to the Japanese. It’s a sign of respect for them to come and visit the doll and pay their respects to it.”

Miller died in the mid-1930s, meriting a front-page editorial in The Times praising his efforts “to further the cause of better international relations.”

“We’re not sure what happened to ‘Miss Chiba’ and ‘Miss Fusa,’ ” said Kevin Hallaran, current curator of the Mission Inn Museum. “When the hotel was sold, my guess is they went with the Miller granddaughters in 1956.”

Those women have since died. “We’ve not been able to track down their heirs,” Hallaran said.

Horita is convinced the missing dolls are still somewhere in Southern California. If they can be found, he hopes to have them displayed--perhaps at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.

They would be a popular attraction for Japanese tourists, Horita is convinced.

“It will be big news all over Japan,” he said.