Tokyo Students Tend to Graves of Countrymen

Ayako Hanada never met the man whose grave she tended Tuesday.

She had never before even been to the United States, where he lived and died.

But that didn’t stop the 16-year-old from Japan from feeling sad as she applied a fresh coat of white paint to the post marking the man’s resting place in a tiny, dusty wedge of land between Pleasant Valley and Etting roads in Oxnard.

“It’s very sorry that they have died and nobody takes care of them,” she said, speaking through an interpreter.

Ayako’s feelings were echoed by about 130 other students from a business college outside Tokyo--a sister school to Oxnard College--who took time out Tuesday from a two-week tour of the United States to clean up the small, neglected burial ground containing the sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants.

The graveyard--known simply as the Japanese Cemetery--is part of, but separate from, the nearby Hueneme Masonic Cemetery between Wood and Pleasant Valley roads.

To the west of the main cemetery, it is a sandy, brown lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. It contains about 118 wooden posts and granite tombstones dating between 1908 and 1960. Many of the names are chiseled in Japanese and English.

Assemblyman Nao Takasugi (R-Oxnard), who helped set up the sister school relationship, said local lore holds that Japanese residents were not allowed to bury their dead in the regular cemeteries at the turn of the century.

Although tended once a year by the Ventura County Japanese American Citizens League, when the students arrived on Tuesday, the site was strewn with litter, paint was peeling from the wooden posts and some grave markers had been knocked down.

Within hours, the litter was cleared, the sand was raked, grave markers were painted and reassembled and small plastic vases full of fresh flowers were placed before every grave.

Although Disneyland is also on their agenda this week, the students, who spoke through an interpreter, said cleaning the graveyard was an important part of their visit to the United States.

“We don’t know these people, but we are the same,” said Yoshitake Fukuoka of Tokyo. “We are Japanese.”

On Wednesday, the group will visit Oxnard College before heading upstate.

This is the sixth year that students from the Japanese private school have visited their American sister school.

The relationship started in 1990, when Kokusai Business College Principal Keisuke Tanaka approached Takasugi with the idea.

Tanaka’s ties to Oxnard date to 1957, when he was an apprentice at a local farm as part of a statewide exchange program.

In previous years, the students have helped clean up Oxnard’s beaches, parks and alleyways, Takasugi said.

“It is part of strengthening ties between Japan and California, Tokyo and Oxnard,” he said. “It is just a good gesture.”