It was called “Maikura,” and it was home to as many as 500 people. It had a marketplace, shops, an inn, restaurants, a church, and even a Japanese garden with a bridge and a pool and a miniature forest of banzai trees. Anyone who travels from Topanga to Santa Monica on Pacific Coast Highway drives right through the heart of Maikura, but nothing is left now, not even the name.
This seaside village was founded in 1899 by Hatsuji and Hiede Sano, Japanese immigrants, or Issei. The Sanos arrived in California in 1898. Hatsuji saw potential in the stretch of coastline west of “Port Los Angeles,” also known as the Long Wharf. The wharf was railroad magnate Collins Huntington’s effort to turn the Santa Monica Bay into the port of Los Angeles.
Huntington’s port consisted of a railroad line and the wharf—a massive structure a mile long. Steamers anchored and unloaded cargo onto rail cars that transported goods and people into Santa Monica. Sano leased about a mile of coastline west of the wharf from Southern Pacific Railroad. With a small group of like-minded Issei, began building a fishing village on the edge of the bay.
The residents of the village worked hard to build prosperity. The fishers rowed out in dories every morning to the deep water offshore, where they netted barracuda and yellowtail. During the fall they caught lobsters. Some of the catch was sold fresh at the little marketplace in the village or taken into town to supply restaurants and the Japanese community on the Westside, some was salted or dried on the beach.
The residents renamed the village to “Freeth” in December of 1907, after pioneering Hawaiian-born lifeguard George Freeth and members the United States Volunteer Life-Saving crew that he trained, risked their lives to save eleven fishermen during a potentially deadly squall that generated gale-force winds and powerful waves. Freeth dove into the water, despite the impossibly big surf, and saved three men from almost certain death. His team, aided by volunteers from the village, was able to get the other men to safety, too.
The names Maikura and Freeth never really stuck, and the media almost always called the community just “the Japanese Village.” The 1910 census shows a population of just under 60 people. Heide Sano is listed, like her husband, as a fisherman, in addition to being the mother of five children, but she was soon the proprietor of the town inn. The town continued to grow.
There are news accounts in the early years on Sano’s innovative approach to fishing, including keeping some of a catch in boxes or enclosures in the water to extend its market life.
By 1913, the village had a population of 200, and by 1915 it had grown to around 500, with houses, lodging houses, two grocery stores, an inn and a church spread along a mile of shore, between the sea and the cliffs. While many of the residents were Japanese, there were also Russians, Finns, Germans, Italians, and Swedes.
The village was achieving the prosperity the Sanos envisioned. Hard work had made the little fleet of fishing boats profitable, and the village was also becoming a tourist destination and a popular stop for motorists.
Motorists on the scenic route from Santa Monica to Topanga stopped at the village for lunch or dinner—there were at least two restaurants in addition to the inn. Japanese groups came from town to picnic on the beach or camp there on weekends. Artists painted the fleet of dories, the strings of drying fish, the Japanese-style houses and the colorful fish-shaped windsocks—koinobori—that flew in the wind.
A 1913 feature in the Morning Tribune described the village as “a miniature corner of Japan.
“A touch of the oriental that is very pleasing,” wrote the Van Nuys News and Green Sheet but in the same paper, on the same page, is a news item about a bill that would “exclude all aliens or alien corporations from land ownership…” This xenophobic legislation was called the “Japanese Bill” and was aimed directly at people like Hatsuji and Heide Sano.
That paranoia extended to the media and law enforcement. The residents of Maikura faced endless suspicions and accusations that read like something from one of pulp novelist Sax Rohmer’s highly racist and sensational “Fu Manchu” stories. Newspaper stories accused the townspeople of smuggling opium, of building an elaborate network of tunnels to facilitate “white slavery” and of trafficking illegal aliens into the country on their boats.
When an alleged resident of the Japanese Village was implicated in a possible incident involving prostitution, the media ran with headlines like: FEAR L. A. GIRL KIDNAPED IN JAP COLONY: Detectives Dash Through Hidden Passageway in Hunt for Mystery Victim.”
The descriptions sound like they came straight out of a silent era police thriller: “The search followed a midnight raid on a house in the village and the mysterious disappearance of the girl by secret passageways which the police say honeycomb the village.”
The alleged victim, an unnamed sixteen-year-old caucasian girl, was never found. However, just the potential involvement of a “Japanese immigrant,” was enough to generate headlines like “A Revolting Story of White Slavery.”
The cast of characters includes Robert Elmer Denning, who also reportedly went by the names “Buckshot,” “M.V. Turner,” “R.C. Rothchild,” and the “Mystery Kid”; a “beautiful young blonde” (according to the Morning Tribute) called Adelaide Ahl and an H. Orama, identified by the Los Angeles Times as “a Japanese Immigrant,” but also as “the Mayor of Jap Town, considered wealthy.”
It seems likely that Denning wasn’t the only one with a penchant for alternate personas. “Oroma” is not a Japanese surname, but it was the name of a French steamer that was sunk by the Germans in the Mediterranean in March of 1915. No “H. Orama” from Japan can be found in the immigration or census records, and the only place the name shows up in the media record is in connection with this incident.
The San Francisco Call reports that Denning was arrested with Oroma in Santa Monica, “Both are charged with selling white girls into slavery at the Japanese fishing village of Long Wharf, near Santa Monica.”
The Times also reported that Denning and Oroma were apprehended transporting a sixteen-year-old girl to the village for “immoral purposes.” The Morning Tribune claimed that the girl was “spirited away” in the village. The village was raided and every house, business and boatshed searched. Nothing was found.
Some accounts suggest Ahl was the girl, although she was not a minor and she denied ever having been to the village. She was arrested, questioned, and released without charges. Two women described as living with Denning were also questioned and released.
Denning pleaded guilty not to trafficking women but to a charge of vagrancy. He was given a six-month suspended sentence on condition that he get on the next train out of town and never come back.
The Tribune reported that there were plans to deport Oroma as “an undesirable alien,” but there are no reports of when or whether this occurred, and no indication that he was ever charged with a crime of any sort.
While it is possible that Oroma and Denning may have been bringing prostitutes to the village, no evidence was found to support the allegations and no charges related to trafficking or pandering were made. The lack of evidence or of even a consistent story strongly suggest that the allegations were an excuse to harass the residents of the fishing village for the crime not of trafficking but of simply being Japanese.
The village was raided again in June 1915. This time law enforcement couldn’t make up its mind what it was looking for. “It was stated that the present raid had been planned since the white slave crusade in the Japanese village,” the Los Angeles Herald reported. And that it was “in no way the result of criticism by Former Assistant District Attorney Harry Ellis Dean, that District Attorney Woolwine’s record of blind pig raids, and convictions was far below that of his predecessor.”
“Blind pig” was an early term for a speakeasy. Prohibition wouldn’t go into effect nationwide until 1920, but Santa Monica was already a “dry town” in 1915, with ordinances that banned the sale of alcohol. The fishing village wasn’t technically part of Santa Monica—the census records from the time list the area as being in Malibu—but that didn’t stop a “squad of detectives” from searching the village. Once again, absolutely no evidence of “white slavery” was found. The raid resulted instead in two people being arrested for “having a quantity of alcohol.”
Lazaro Stignaro and Heide Sano were charged with “the illicit selling of liquor” at the village’s inn, described as “a two-story resort.” Heide Sano, the proprietor of the inn where the alcohol was found, pleaded guilty and paid a $100 fine. Stignaro entered a not guilty plea, and ended up serving a hundred and fifty days in jail. News reports made a point of describing Sano as “young and unusually beautiful.” The media did not mention that she was the co-founder of the town, a mother of five, and a highly respected businesswoman in the community.
Even after two major raids turned up nothing worse than a few bottles of beer, the persecution continued. The Venice Chamber of Commerce sponsored an appeal to the commissioner of immigration in July of 1915, demanding more scrutiny. The letter writers requested that a patrol boat be assigned to the area, to address the allegation of “immoral conditions,” prevent “the landing of coolies along the beach” (a derogatory term for Chinese immigrants), and “the possible importation of opium.” That there was no evidence of any of these things did not trouble the authors of the appeal: the residents of the village were Japanese and they simply must be involved in sinister activities. They couldn’t possibly be there to fish for a living and provide for their families.
The community also faced the constant threat of natural disaster. The village was threatened with wildfire at least twice. Storms in January, 1914 swept six power launches and seventy-five rowboats out to sea. The loss, valued at 18,000 dollars, was a major hardship for the small community.
The following year, almost the entire town was flooded by big waves during a January 29 storm event that sent the residents fleeing to higher ground. The big waves damaged the coast road, washed houses into the sea, and destroyed a large section of the Long Wharf. The Venice and Santa Monica piers were badly damaged, parts of Venice were flooded, and the beaches covered in dangerous debris.
The town recovered but was soon struck with more misfortune. In April 1916, part of the town was buried by a landslide. Two weeks later, a fire consumed more than half of the village. Newspaper reports state that the fire started when a kerosene lamp broke in a room at a lodging house. “Hemmed in by towering cliffs on one side and the pounding surf on the other, excited groups in sleeping clothes gathered and watched the flames destroy their homes.”
There were no casualties, but most of the community was left homeless. Only sixteen houses remained standing. The residents of the village set to work rebuilding, but they now faced a new threat.
Port Los Angeles ceased operations in 1913. The fight over the port was highly political, but Huntington, despite his influence and money, was on the losing side. The open ocean conditions and frequent big surf had always made the site impractical. Long Wharf had been damaged several times during storms, and development on the coastline by the wharf was constrained by the massive, and geologically unstable cliffs—that’s what enabled the Sanos to lease the land at a reasonable rate. No warehouses or other infrastructure would fit along the narrow stretch of coastline.
The San Pedro Bay port area was a practical choice. It was annexed to Los Angeles in 1909, and it was clear that the official port for Los Angeles would not be in the Santa Monica Bay. The land the village was built on had been leased from Southern Pacific but in 1913 it was annexed by Los Angeles. The city didn’t want the fishing community there. They gave precedence to a real estate developer named Robert Gillis, who ran the Santa Monica Land and Water Company and envisioned the beach and the bluffs as an exclusive, wealthy, white resort development.
The residents of Maikura had no way to fight back. They did not even have the option of buying the land, thanks to the legislation that banned Japanese, even American-born Japanese, from owning property. The town was razed, and the community scattered. The remaining parts of the Long Wharf were demolished in 1919, after WWI, but the beach resort never materialized.
Heide Sano died in September of 1916, “after a short illness.” Hatsuji Sano was crushed by the loss and died two months later. He was only 49. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times says simply, “late of the Japanese Fishing Village.” The couple’s five young children lost both parents in less than a year. The village the Sanos worked so hard to build would soon be gone as well, almost completely erased from history.
Today, the former site of Maikura is buried under Pacific Coast Highway and the Will Rogers State Beach parking lots. The site of the Port Los Angeles Long Wharf is a California Historical Landmark. There’s a sign and a plaque, but nothing marks the spot where an intrepid and courageous group of Japanese settlers built a prosperous life for themselves, if only for a little while. No one who lived there is alive today. Not even the memories remain.
