This is a picture of Tadao Fukuda, my grandpa, and bratty me taken almost 75 years ago. Yes, that is the kindly and amused expression that he always wore but which I had forgotten. I must have been a spoiled three year old to get away with this pose and it has been exciting to get reacquainted with Grandpa through the magic of genealogy!
It was made possible by my friend Virginia who is a long time hiker with our Southern California Trail Trekkers. Virginia has been a genealogist who loves nothing more than sharing her excitement over the discoveries to be made with genealogical research.
I don’t remember Grandpa very well. He visited us (and all his other seven children) once a year every year until his health gave out.
Until I learned a few things from Virginia, I had forgotten how genial and amused he was. Or how kindly.
But there is one memory that stands out: Grandpa and the parakeet. We had a long time pet parakeet who lived in a cage, occasionally was allowed to fly around the house and who sang and sang.
One day, while I was eating lunch, Grandpa walked from the living room to the bathroom. The parakeet was out. I heard “peep…peep…peep,” and saw the parakeet hopping along the floor and after every hop, he let out a cheerful “peep.” With every step, Grandpa was also saying “peep,..peep…peep.” He had charmed the bird into following him! It’s that vision of him marching about the house with Tweetybird that has stayed with me.
So one day in November, I visited Virginia in her well appointed home that was stacked with documents she was gathering for numerous friends. It was an unexpectedly exciting afternoon, filled with discoveries drawn from nearly century old digital documents, many handwritten by well meaning clerks who had no idea how to transcribe foreign names! There were census records, death certificates and even immigration documents and a marriage certificate. Virginia found them all!
She first checked the l930’s census. It included Grandpa, Grandma, my dad and five of his siblings. Dad at the time must have been 10 years old. At the end of the listing, there was an additional name listed as living with the household: Nakatani. He was identified as “son-in-law.” Now my dad was the oldest son and he was ten. No one ever mentioned an older half sister.
So who was this Nakatani? Is there a black sheep branch of the family? I had never heard of any relatives named Nakatani. Woah, I thought. Grandpa must have been a player.
It matched the few stories Dad told about Grandpa: how he tried to be an entrepreneur in very rural Kona Hawaii. How he ran a small store. How he spied on the agricultural research station next door, run by the University of Hawaii. Dad said he filched some of the experimental plants to try for himself. I remember a huge macadamia nut tree that produced many nuts that the family struggled to shell with hammers. None of these ventures made any money for Grandpa. Finally, he raised his eight children on a coffee farm in Kealekekua, Kona, Hawaii. (It’s on the “big island” of Hawaii.)
All but two of his children left Kona to establish families In Honolulu. Thus the yearly visits.
But there is an explanation for Nakatani that’s not so dramatic. Again, Virginia found it in the aging documents. Using a birth date, she found Grandpa on an immigration document. That listed many many Nakatani’s. About all of the immigrants from Japan listed were visiting or planning to stay with Nakatani…he was an immigration agent of some sort, who helped Japanese immigrants who landed in Hawaii. 
Whew, no black sheep branch of the family. Also no stories of a wild and crazy life by a young man suddenly freed from family obligations and observations! I have to admit, Grandpa didn’t seem to have a wild side.
Grandpa was part of a large wave of some 100,000 Japanese workers who immigrated to America from the mid nineteenth century to 1902. Many settled in Hawaii, where they had been recruited to work first on the large sugar plantations and then the pineapple plantations. He actually debarked on Maui, as a guest of “Nakatani” but 10 years later, he had relocated to Kona on the big island of Hawaii. At age 27, he married and by 1930, he and his young wife had the five oldest of their eight children. By then, my father was ten years old, with five younger siblings.
Grandpa was actually at the tail end of the immigration. By 1902, an agreement between Japan and the United States effectively ended the plantation recruitment of Japanese workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act had earlier cut off immigration of laborers from China.
By the time he got to Kona, there was a close-knit Japanese community , a Buddhist temple and cemetery, Japanese owned stores and businesses. My grandma had been born in Kona, from a family that immigrated 40 years or so earlier.
Family lore tells that Grandpa left Japan at 15 years of age. His family lived in Fukushima Province, a rural part of Japan that had not benefited from the economic growth of the Meiji era. He was supposed to sail to Hawaii, make some money to send home and then return. But he didn’t. He became part of the community in Kona, married a local girl and raised a large family. He didn’t return to Japan until he was in his 60’s, after he had received his citizenship through naturalization. The family he left behind did well too. He met dentists, teachers, as well as farmers who had received the money he sent home before World War II.
But I am still disappointed there are no wild Fukuda-Nakatani’s out there, ready to be discovered and folded into the family. It would have been another crazy round of stories.