By JONATHAN TSUNEISHI
SPECIAL TO THE RAFU
At the start of the new year, the City of Monrovia had the kind of day made for Rose Parades. Sunlight peeked through a canopy of trees on its newest public park, Satoru Tsuneishi Park. The San Gabriel Mountains bordering the city limits loomed large to the north.
Attention was being paid just off Huntington Drive, the famed Route 66, as residents of the city, friends and family, city officials and press were standing room only under a large tent as workers finished last-minute preparations near the stage and podium for what would be a long list of speakers and presenters.
Just behind the stage, a view of the new park, of winding pathways that led to a hundred-foot painted mural by artist Trinity Rivard. A literal landscape of the city’s history, Route 66, its farms, residents, the internment, and the park’s namesake, Satoru Tsuneishi.
There’s an image of my grandfather as a man starting a new life in the 1930s. The first Asian American to graduate from a public school in the Monrovia Arcadia Duarte School District.
He and his wife Sho farming the land. Raising chickens and strawberries. Satoru was one of many Japanese Americans who lived and farmed in Monrovia before World War II. His family fruit stand on Huntington Drive depicted along Route 66.
Another section of mural is of a guard tower, from Heart Mountain, Wyoming, where Satoru, his wife Sho and family were interned during the war.
It is the image of Sho Tsuneishi, my grandmother, holding a Blue Star flag that is well known in the Nikkei community. That image of a Japanese American woman holding a Blue Star flag with four stars in a camp barracks in the most desolate part of the United States while her sons and daughters served the government that held her and my grandfather speaks volumes about a history that the community has chosen to remember and embrace.
My grandparents’ four sons would be posted in the South Pacific and the Philippines. At the end of that war, they would be joined by two of Satoru’s daughters as civilian interpreters assisting the U.S. military under Gen. MacArthur in installing a new democratic government in Japan. A government that for the first time would give women in Japan the right to vote.
Another feature, probably a first for a public park in the United States, is the haiku etched into the walkways that wind through the park. And standing near one of the entrances to the park, a granite monument with a haiku etched into the stone. Once thought lost, the granite memorial has found a new home. It was a gift honoring the park’s namesake many years ago from the two haiku groups he helped to start in Los Angeles and San Diego.
The design of Satoru Tsuneishi Park incorporates several rock gardens — an important feature given the Japanese meaning of the family name, Tsuneishi (“constant stone”).
There are also decorative stone gardens along the border of the park, the stones taken from the nearby San Gabriel Mountains.
A brightly colored playground of interactive elements and shapes for children and the young at heart.
And something of note, a wood box holding books for visitors to take, a library as it were. Painted on one side, a short missive, “What Is Haiku,” which was Satoru Tsuneishi’s actual instructions to children in the Monterey Park public schools on how to write their own poems. The contest instructions and examples of Satoru’s own haiku cover all sides of that wood box, there for visitors to see and be inspired by. The last piece of note on the mural is an artistic rendering of the Order of the Rising Sun. This is an award given by the Emperor of Japan. Satoru Tsuneishi was awarded the honor in 1972 in recognition for his contribution to arts and haiku.
Satoru Tsuneishi published haiku and poems in Japan and the U.S. He became the founder of a haiku magazine in U.S. in the 1920s and contributed to Hototogisu, a Japanese literary magazine. He published a book of haiku while interned in Heart Mountain, a book of haiku later in his life, and was included in a textbook for the Long Beach School District on the topic of minority writers.
Satoru would support journalists fighting for immigration reform and farmworkers’ rights in the ’30s and ’40s. And while he was a pacifist and supported Japanese Americans who were against the war, he did this while his sons and daughters served in the armed forces.
After the internment, he returned to Monrovia. He continued farming, but his focus was on writing haiku and sonnets.
In 1977, Shisei, the pen name he used as a poet, would be honored by the Japanese government with the Kunsho, Sixth Class, Order of the Rising Sun, an award for a lifetime of promoting haiku in the U.S.
My grandfather and his wife often traveled across the U.S. with his haiku group. He traveled to Europe and Japan in his seventies.
One of my favorite photos of Satoru “Shisei” Tsuneishi was of his first haiku group in Elysian Park before the building of a stadium for Los Angeles’ new baseball team, the Dodgers. Yes, my grandfather would become a Dodger fan.
In researching the journey of my grandfather, the question was: How did he reconcile the internment of Japanese Americans with his personal beliefs? Satoru sought solace in prayer and a poem, “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. Among the papers from one of the original members of the haiku group in San Diego, I found Henley’s poem and a note that it was a favorite.
At the end of the war, Satoru and Sho traveled back to Monrovia, where they had begun as a family.
There, he worked a farm with Louis and Lucinda Garcia on the 500 block of Almond Street, growing strawberries. But by then, my grandfather was writing haiku in earnest and his children had begun to make their own life.
Their oldest son would start an insurance company, Western Pioneer, with the first office in Little Tokyo. Another son would attend Yale and take a leading position with the Library of Congress. Another would spend summers in Haiti at a country hospital, building wells and providing medical care near the town of Limbe.
An aunt would become a piano teacher. My father would go into the ministry, his
first church just east of USC. An uncle would lead the first move in the Japanese American community to seek redress and overturn the legal authority for the internment.
My grandfather and Uncle Paul supported Japanese Americans like Gordon Hirabayashi, whose case against internment would be taken to the Supreme Court. He lost and it would be years later before that decision was overturned, a decision based on race. My uncle worked through the church and in the community on issues from reparations to immigration reform.
Satoru Tsuneishi would move to Boyle Heights in the early ’50s and spent his time on his haiku and sonnets until his death in 1987.
This is the man and favored son after whom the city chose to name its newest public park, located off Huntington Drive (Route 66) not far from the Santa Anita Racetrack and where so many years ago Satoru and Sho raised strawberries and chickens.
And something worth noting is that the new park is near the City of Hope, and it hopefully will be a respite for families undergoing cancer treatment.
During the dedication of the park, you saw something that you might never see in the United States for the opening of a civic project — elected officials from the mayor and mayor pro tem to council members closing their remarks by reciting a haiku.
The city manager spoke on a resolution the city passed at the end of 2025 ending errors of the past that discriminated against Japanese American residents. He talked about remembering the sacrifices of Japanese American residents who were interned and of honoring the memory of those who served in the armed services.
It was a day for the Japanese Americans community to feel affirmation by a city with this gift, a park with haiku etched into the walkways and a panoramic mural to understand the present by not forgetting the past.