February 10, 1897. Ads from the Shin Sekai (The New World) reveal that Japanese immigrants were actively seeking Western clothing and abandoning traditional Japanese dress. 

June 26, 1897. A three-line notice appeared in the help-wanted columns of the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Japanese boy wishes a situation to do light housework: has good recommendation. Please address Masuko 1329 Pine St.”¹

Like the story of many other dekasegi, this boy was fifteen, and his address was the Japanese Methodist Episcopal Mission Church. His name was Takanori Mashiko, which was later shortened to Masuko, later Anglicized to Masko, and eventually he went by the nickname Tozan. He had reached San Francisco barely a year earlier, around the beginning of May 1896, after boarding the SS Doric at Yokohama around spring and crossing the Pacific alone. A prominent politician from his home district in Fukushima, Hironaka Kono, had urged him to study in the United States, master English, and prepare for the world power that Japan was about to become. ²

Masko belonged to a particular class of Issei: the privately funded working students, or dekasegi shosei. As Professor Yoshida has shown, according to Kumajirō Ishida’s 1886 emigration guidebook Kitare Nipponjin (Come, Japanese)-such students were typically young men of fifteen to twenty-five, from families of some means and education, who came to acquire English and a working knowledge of Western culture in order to raise their standing once they returned to Japan.³ Masko was a son of Kurobei Mashiko, a Fukushima landowner and entrepreneur who kept a house in Tokyo; as a boy he had frequented the offices of the Yamato newspaper and impressed its reporters with his precocity; and he had crossed the Pacific, at Kono’s urging, expressly to acquire English and a Western education. Like many students, he supported himself with part-time labor while he studied, with the domestic “schoolboy” work his Chronicle notice sought, and the wages he earned at the Shin Sekai.⁴

The paper he worked for was the Shin Sekai (新世界 = The New World), a Japanese-language daily founded in 1894 by Hachiro Soejima. When Tozan was there in 1897, it was only a small enterprise with a circulation of only about two hundred. Its surviving pages from that winter, were among the few issues we have to look into the daily life of early Japanese San Francisco.⁵ The teenager who placed the notice in the Chronicle was also one of the staff helping to produce those issues.

Almost none of the Shin Sekai issues from Masko’s years survived. The earthquake and fire of April 1906 destroyed the presses, offices, and back files of San Francisco’s Japanese immigrant press. The earliest issue of the paper that survives today dates only to August 28, 1895.⁶ We cannot read Masko’s byline, or find his name in a masthead, or recover a single sentence he wrote in those years. The record of his story survives not in the paper he worked for, but in information scattered across other documents referenced below.

Just from those fragments, we know that summer Masko left the mission for the household of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels near Santa Cruz, where he cooked, attended an American high school, and learned baseball. He returned to the Shin Sekai in 1902, and Soejima placed him at the head of the paper’s Fresno bureau; when he left it under circumstances the record no longer explains, he carried his trade south to Los Angeles in 1904.⁷

In Los Angeles, Masko found the success he had crossed the ocean to pursue. Not in the newsroom, but on the ballfield. He was apparently never much of a player, but had a newspaperman’s flair for spectacle, and he turned it into a career as a baseball promoter, organizing by the end of the decade the first professional Japanese ball clubs owned and run by an immigrant on either side of the Pacific. ⁸ The dekasegi shosei who had once advertised for housework and headed a Shin Sekai branch, had made himself an issei baseball pioneer

Footnotes

1. San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1897, help-wanted advertisement.
2. Robert K. Fitts, Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), ch. 4.
3. Ryo Yoshida, The Japanese Immigrant Community in America during Its Formative Years as Seen in the Fukuinkai Enkaku Shiryō (The Gospel Society Historical Sources): Non-sectarian Strategies of Welfare and Educational Advocacy among Japanese Immigrants in Late Nineteenth-Century America, citing Kumajirō Ishida, Kitare Nipponjin (Come, Japanese) (1886).
4. Kazuo Ito, Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America, trans. Shinichiro Nakamura and Jean S. Gerard (Seattle: Executive Committee for Publication of Issei / Japanese Community Service, 1973).
5. Fitts, Issei Baseball, ch. 4; Shin Sekai (The New World), February 10, 1897, advertisements, Japanese American History Archives, Seizo Oka Collection.
6. Fitts, Issei Baseball, ch. 4; Shin Sekai (The New World), August 28, 1895, Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.
7. Fitts, Issei Baseball, ch. 4.
8. Fitts, Issei Baseball, chs. 7–10.

Bibliography

Image: “Page 2.” 新世界 = The New World, 24 Jan. 1929, hojishinbun.hoover.org/en/newspapers/tnw19290124-01.1.2.

Fitts, Robert K. Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020.

Ishida, Kumajirō. Kitare Nipponjin (Come, Japanese). 1886. Quoted in Yoshida, The Japanese Immigrant Community in America during Its Formative Years.

Ito, Kazuo. Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America. Translated by Shinichiro Nakamura and Jean S. Gerard. Seattle: Executive Committee for Publication of Issei / Japanese Community Service, 1973.

San Francisco Chronicle. Help-wanted advertisement. June 26, 1897.

Shin Sekai (The New World). August 28, 1895. Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.

Shin Sekai (The New World). February 10, 1897. Advertisements. Japanese American History Archives, Seizo Oka Collection.

Yoshida, Ryo. The Japanese Immigrant Community in America during Its Formative Years as Seen in the Fukuinkai Enkaku Shiryō (The Gospel Society Historical Sources): Non-sectarian Strategies of Welfare and Educational Advocacy among Japanese Immigrants in Late Nineteenth-Century America.