Mary Adams Urashima
@MaryUrashimaMary Adams Urashima is an author, government affairs consultant and freelance writer living in Huntington Beach. She created HistoricWintersburg.blogspot.com to generate more awareness about the history of the Japanese in Orange County, including stories of an area in north Huntington Beach once known as the Wintersburg Village. Urashima is chairing a community effort to preserve the century-old Furuta farm and Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission complex, named to the “America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” list in 2014 and designated a “National Treasure” in 2015 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Her book, Historic Wintersburg in Huntington Beach, was released by History Press in March 2014.
Updated April 2016
Stories from This Author
Wintersburg’s Okuda family and memories of life on the Bolsa Chica Gun Club
May 27, 2016 • Mary Adams Urashima
The divide between the “haves” and those with less was never more evident in the peatlands than when the gun clubs arrived. Past the western edge of Wintersburg’s farmland, the Bolsa Chica Gun Club was among the most prominent, boasting a wealthy, eclectic membership. For the Okuda family, the Bolsa Chica Gun Club was home for over two decades. Harry Okuda maintained the landscaping and kitchen gardens, including the yard of chickens being readied for club members’ dinners. Harry arrived …
Sakura: How Cherry Blossom Festivals took root in America
April 14, 2016 • Mary Adams Urashima
It took two attempts to bring the first gift of cherry trees to the United States from Japan. The first shipment of 2,000 trees in 1910 were not healthy enough to plant. The second shipment of 3,000 trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo to the city of Washington, D.C. in 1912 were a success! It is the recognition of that gift that sparked the National Cherry Blossom Festival along the Tidal Basin. It was an idea with roots in …
Memorial Day 2015: Kazuo Masuda remembered
June 15, 2015 • Mary Adams Urashima
Kazuo Masuda and the Nisei who served in the U.S. military were remembered at a Memorial Day ceremony at Westminster Memorial Park. The Masuda family story is important nationally, as this is the family specifically mentioned by President Ronald Reagan when he signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Kazuo Masuda will be one of three Nisei soldiers whose story will be featured in the upcoming Congressional Gold Medal Digital Exhibition by the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of American History. …
The View From Manzanar
June 9, 2015 • Mary Adams Urashima
If you don’t want to change your perspective, don’t go to Manzanar. The road to Manzanar is breathtaking. The foot of the Sierras has the sort of terrain travelers stop to photograph, snow-dusted peaks and painter’s clouds. Highway 395 passes through 19th century California, pioneer mining towns with western false front buildings straight off a movie set. It’s a beautiful drive away from California’s urban coast and into the big empty. And then, Manzanar. Nine miles past Lone Pine, a …
The McIntosh family of Wintersburg Village
April 8, 2015 • Mary Adams Urashima
She bought Japanese food from (Tashima market)…there was a meat market owned by a hakujin, MacIntosh Meats. So, she bought meat from them. Those were the only stores around here. There were no other stores. —Yukiko Yajima Furuta, Issei Experience in Orange County, California, California State University Fullerton Japanese American Project, Arthur A. Hansen and Yasko Gama, 1982 Wintersburg Village wasn’t just a farming town. It was also a cow town. Once part of the Rancho la Bolsa Chica, cattle …
A Century Ago: Dawning of A New Year in 1914 - Part 2 of 2
March 26, 2014 • Mary Adams Urashima
Read Part 1 >>The dawn of a new year, unrest and change A tremendous social shift was occurring as the world marched toward globalization. In Europe, 1914 would bring the beginning of World War I with the outbreak of conflict and declarations of war. Some from Wintersburg Village and Huntington Beach would later leave the peatlands for military service. Japan would join the allies and later declare war on Germany, invading their settlement in China. In South Africa in 1914, …
A Century Ago: Dawning of A New Year in 1914 - Part 1 of 2
March 19, 2014 • Mary Adams Urashima
A century ago, the New Year in 1914 brought both promise and uncertainty for Japanese pioneers in California. It was a time of global social and technological change—affecting state politics—while at the same time generating excitement about what opportunities lay ahead. In Wintersburg, Charles Furuta and his new wife, Yukiko, had completed construction on their white-trimmed bungalow and settled in to their life as newlyweds. Photos from 1913 show a clothes line with wooden pins behind the house, a lush …
The Japanese Mission Trail: Lost and at-risk history along the Pacific Coast - Part 2 of 2
Dec. 19, 2013 • Mary Adams Urashima
Read Part 1 >> Wintersburg Village By 1902, seventeen years after the first Japanese Presbyterian Mission was established in northern California, the Presbyterian and Methodist Evangelical churches in nearby Westminster had taken note of Orange County’s growing Japanese community. Rev. Inazawa was sent to investigate. By 1904, Rev. Inazawa and Rev. John Junzo Nakamura met with Rev. Terasawa, leading to the founding of the Wintersburg Mission. At that time, there was no Presbytery established in Orange County. The Los Angeles …
The Japanese Mission Trail: Lost and at-risk history along the Pacific Coast - Part 1 of 2
Dec. 12, 2013 • Mary Adams Urashima
The California State Parks describes the California Missions Trail’s importance as “humble, thatch-roofed beginnings to the stately adobes we see today, the missions represent a dynamic chapter of California’s past. By the time the last mission was built in 1823, the Golden State had grown from an untamed wilderness to a thriving agricultural frontier on the verge of American statehood.” The history represented by the Spanish missions trail is of European settlement, but it is not the only mission trail …
Why Orange County's Japanese community built a church in Wintersburg
Jan. 21, 2013 • Mary Adams Urashima
The century-old document below is held in the archive of the present-day Wintersburg Presbyterian Church (the former Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission and Church). It is a compelling document, placing the Mission and Church site in the context of the historic struggle for civil liberties and the desire to become American. The Mission is the oldest Japanese church in Southern California. Faced with the need to raise funds for the first Mission building, Orange County’s Japanese community circulated the prospectus to …
