Last year, Maddox Chen, now a senior at Mira Costa High School, was walking through the central quad on the Manhattan Beach campus and passed a monument dedicated to a man named Francis Uyematsu.
Chen knew nothing of Uyematsu or his legacy, which the monument iterated. So he began looking into it.
And what he discovered was tragic. It was also cinematic.
Uyematsu, Chen learned, was a Japanese immigrant. He was a farmer who grew cherry trees, camellias and other plants in the San Gabriel Valley, successfully selling them wholesale during the first half of the 20th century. His agricultural and business acumen made him a millionaire — during the Great Depression. Then, in 1940, Uyematsu, looking to expand, bought 120 acres of land in Manhattan Beach.
But then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. America joined World War II. And the United States launched the policy of internment, which incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans nationwide.
Uyematsu and his family were among them. They were interned at the Manzanar War Relocation Center — and lost virtually everything.
Mira Costa High now sits on 40 acres that was once part of Uyematsu’s 120-acre Star Nurseries.
“I think it’s really important to have an understanding of what’s been sacrificed,” Chen said in an interview, of “what’s been lost.”
And so, when Chen, a nascent filmmaker, needed a project for a summer documentary course at USC last year, he knew what his subject would be:
Uyematsu — and what he lost because of internment.
The result was the short documentary “Grandpa Cherry Blossom,” which has been on the film festival circuit of late —- winning several awards — and was screened at the Hermosa Beach Museum last week in recognition of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Once it’s off the festival circuit, Chen said, the seven-minute film will likely be posted to YouTube for free, so folks can learn about Uyematsu — and the cost of internment.
‘Camellia King’
Francis Miyosaku Uyematsu came to the United States from Japan in 1904. He was 22 years old.
He initially worked at a farm in Salinas, but moved to the Los Angeles area a few years later. Uyematsu began importing and breeding Japanese camellias and cherry trees, according to Chuck Currier, a former Manhattan Beach teacher and local historian, who described the farmer’s life in a speech during the 2021 dedication for the Mira Costa monument. Currier is one of two people Chen interviewed for his documentary. The other was Uyematsu’s granddaughter, Mary Uyematsu Kao.
In 1910, Uyematsu bought five acres in Montebello. The next decade, he bought land in Sierra Madre. But his business, Star Nurseries, kept growing. And so, in 1940, Uyematsu bought 120 acres in Manhattan Beach for $60,000 — the equivalent of $1.3 million today.
Uyematsu, who also married and started a family during this time, was a pioneer in new methods of breeding and cultivating flowers, Currier said. He was so successful that he gained the moniker, “Camellia King.”
But then the bombing of Pearl Harbor occurred in December 1941. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 shortly after, establishing the policy of internment, which called for the removal of Japanese Americans from their homes and into camps.
The policy particularly decimated Japanese American communities in Southern California.
About 800 inhabitants of a Japanese fishing settlement on Terminal Island, for example, were rounded up, with their community razed.
The Palos Verdes Peninsula, meanwhile, had more than 200 Japanese American families farming there before the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Many of those families ended up in internment camps. Some returned after the war, refusing to be deterred from the lushness of the Peninsula — but the community never reached its former heights.
As for the Uyematsu family, which by then numbered six, it was sent first to the Pomona Assembly Center, a temporary facility at what is now the Fairplex. The clan was later moved to Manzanar, more than 200 miles away.
But before the family was shuttled there, Currier said, Uyematsu sold a significant number of his beloved camellias. After alll, he wouldn’t be able to operate his business while in the camp — and he’d need cash.
Manchester Boddy, then the publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News, and Richfield Oil Company President Charles S. Jones bought 300,000 camellias from Uyematsu. Those blooms, which were planted on Boddy’s property in La Canada Flintridge, later became the first signature collection for Descanso Gardens.
The Uyematsu family spent three years in the internment camp. During that time, to make ends meet, the patriarch was forced to sell most of his 120 acres in Manhattan Beach.
By the time WWII ended, in 1945, the farmer only had 40 acres left.
“My grandfather held on to some (land),” Kao said in an interview this week, “because he was planning on and he did try to continue the nursery business after he was sent to the concentration camp.”
But Uyematsu couldn’t recapture his former success.
Eventually, he had to sell what remained of his Manhattan Beach land.
Then, in 1947, according to Currier, Uyematsu also had to sell the final 40.
He did so in 1947, selling the land to the local school district — Manhattan Beach Unified didn’t yet exist — for the same price he aquired the original 120 acres.
Mira Costa High School opened three years after that, on Sept. 30, 1950.
His family continued operating the nursering for another four decades, though the business never regained its former glory, Currier said. The final nursery, which closed in 1988, was in Ontario.
Uyematsu died in 1978.
And now, not much remains of Uyematsu’s legacy — except, Kao said, at Descanso Gardens.
Kao said her grandfather’s legacy is still at Descanso Gardens.
“Quite a few of those (camellias) continue to exist at Descanso Gardens today,” Kao said. “We’re working with Descanso Gardens in terms of trying to give him proper recognition.”
There is, of course, also the monument at Mira Costa.
Uyematsu monument at Mira Costa
Currier, a 1972 graduated of Mira Costa, spent 24 years teaching economics and social studies, and coaching football there. He retired in 2018.
But 14 years before he retired, Currier began researching how Mira Costa was built and financed. He found the research interesting and would be worth writing and publishing, Currier said. But that idea wouldn’t pick up speed for another decade.
In 2014, Currier began researching the property and the Uyematsu family in earnest. He became hooked on the history. Even after he retired.
Currier, in fact, helped spearhead the installation of Uyematsu’s monument at Mira Costa in 2021, with the encouragement of another grad, Dennis Keene.
“(Keene) got me going on the Uyematsu plaque back in 2020, when I mentioned it to him,’ Currier wrote in an email, “and he said, ‘What are you waiting for?’”
Currier designed the monument and worked with Assistant Superintendent Dawnalynn Murakawa Leopard on the final wording. Murakawa’s grandparents were also sent to camps during WWII, Currier said.
MBUSD’s Board of Trustees approved the monument on March 31, 2021, and and appropriated $5,000 to construct it, though the final cost was higher, Currier said.
The moment was dedicated in October 2021.
And the next year, Chen, the student filmmaker, would look at that monument — and, soon after, decide to tell Uyematsu’s story in film.
Cinematic journey
Chen’s family has lived the immigrant experience as well.
His grandparents on both sides of his family came to the U.S. from Taiwan.
His father’s side is mainly Chinese, while his mother’s side is Taiwanese, said Chen, who has a younger brother, Hudson Chen, who is a freshman at Mira Costa.
Chen’s family moved to Hermosa Beach in 2018 from New York, when he was in the eighth-grade.
But it was at Mira Costa where Chen developed his interest in film. He took cinematic art classes there all four years.
“Before going into high school, I didn’t really know if I wanted to do film at all,” said Chen, who is also co-president of the school’s Cinema Club. “So it was a great introduction for me to film.”
The USC filmmaking course in non-fiction filmmaking, which Chen took last summer, is where he started working on his short documentary. He kept at it after the class ended.
Chen finished the most recent cut in October. He then started submitting the short to various film festivals to get his name out there, to have something to put on his resume — and, he said, to “spread the word” about the documentary.
“Grandpa Cherry Blossom” had its world premiere at the DisOrient Asian American Film Festival in Eugene, Oregon, in March. Recently, it was screened at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival in downtown L.A. and the NewFilmmakers Los Angeles festival earlier this month.
Chen, who will graduate Mira Costa in June, will attend New York University in the fall. he plans to study film and television production.
Yet, making “Grandpa Cherry Blossom” showed him “just how significant documentary filmmaking is,” Chen said.
“It’s definitely something that people don’t have much of an emphasis on usually,” Chen said about studying film. “But I just love film in general; I want to try out everything.”
His talent certainly impressed at least one of his interview subjects.
“I’m a teacher, but on this journey, I was the one receiving the lesson,” Currier said about Chen’s documentary. “Maddox has used his incredible creative talents as a young film maker to bring something so overwhelmingly large, the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans 81 years ago, and reduce it to the life story of one individual, Francis Miyosaku Uyematsu.
“In doing so, he has given us a ground-level view of the depth and breadth of not only the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans,” he added, “but Uyematsu’s entire experience after arriving in San Francisco in 1904. It’s a compelling story.”
And it all began when Chen walked past the monument to Uyematsu.
“When I do walk past the plaque, it usually does feel kind of strange,” Chen said. “It serves as a link between Francis Uyematsu and the school, a connection that is always going to be a little peculiar to me. I still have a difficult time grasping the idea that the ground that I walk on and go to class in every day was land that was unfairly seized and is filled with such a rich history.”
