San Diego's Japanese fishermen — the men who built the tuna fleet, and lost it.

San Diego in 1910 was already a Navy town in miniature — battleships and cruisers called at its protected bay — but the waterfront that fed the city ran on fish, and the men who knew where the fish were had come from Japan. They arrived largely from Wakayama Prefecture, on the Kii Peninsula, where fishing families had worked the Kuroshio Current for generations, and what they carried to California was not a net but a bamboo pole, a short line, and a method for persuading albacore to come to the surface in numbers that American fishermen had not imagined possible. By 1918, Japanese immigrants and their American-born children made up roughly half of San Diego's fishing crews, and the city's tuna canneries depended on what they caught.

The technique was called pole-and-line fishing, and its mechanism turned on a single insight about albacore behavior. A crew located a school, then scattered live anchovies overboard — chum — drawing the tuna to the surface in a feeding frenzy. The men lined the rail with eight-foot bamboo poles, each trailing a short line and a barbless feathered hook. The fish hit; the pole bent; the fisherman snapped his wrist; the albacore flew over the rail in a single arc and into the hold, the hook releasing by itself before the fish landed. A skilled man could take a fish every thirty seconds. A practiced crew working a live school could fill a hold with three hundred albacore in an hour, without a net in sight. The fish came aboard undamaged — no bruising, no asphyxiation in a purse seine — which meant they commanded a premium at the cannery, and the method could be worked by a small boat that didn't require the capital of a seiner.

The packing plants that rose along the San Diego waterfront in the 1910s and 1920s needed exactly what the Japanese fleet delivered: reliable daily volume of fresh, whole albacore and yellowfin. Canneries multiplied in the harbor south of downtown — first small sheds, then facilities of industrial scale with steam retorts and tin-plate lines. By the 1920s San Diego was among the country's leading producers of canned tuna. The economic loop was self-reinforcing: more fish meant more canneries; more canneries meant higher prices for catch; higher prices meant larger boats built to travel farther. The Japanese-owned and Japanese-crewed vessels grew with the industry, evolving from small inshore craft into long-range wooden-hulled clippers capable of working the grounds off Baja California and, by the 1930s, as far south as the waters off Ecuador and Peru — vessels built to be at sea for months, iced and provisioned for a Pacific crossing.

The men who ran those boats had built their lives along San Diego's waterfront under legal conditions engineered to keep them out. The California Alien Land Law of 1913 barred aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning agricultural land; amended legislation in 1920 closed the cooperative arrangements that had worked around it. Japanese immigrants — the Issei, barred by federal statute from naturalization — held boats and businesses in the names of their American-born children, the Nisei, who were citizens by birth. The arrangement was common and legally precarious. When the Immigration Act of 1924 effectively ended Japanese immigration to the United States entirely, the community that had built the fleet was sealed off from reinforcement. Their children were Americans; they themselves remained, by the law of the country they had made productive, perpetual foreigners.

The morning of December 8, 1941 — the day after Pearl Harbor — FBI agents were already moving through San Diego's Japanese neighborhoods. Community leaders, fishing association officers, Buddhist priests, men whose names appeared on the membership rolls of any Japanese-American organization were arrested under presidential proclamations and taken to federal detention. The boats at the waterfront did not stay long in the hands of their crews; fishing vessels, including the clipper Prospect, were seized by federal authorities. Some were requisitioned for naval patrol work in the harbor, their live-bait wells and tuna holds serving a different kind of war. Japanese fishermen who had worked these waters for thirty years were barred from the coast by military exclusion orders that ran from Washington State to Southern California.

Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorized military commanders to exclude any persons from designated areas — language deliberately broad enough to mean what Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command intended: the removal of every person of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast. In San Diego County, the process moved quickly. Families had days to dispose of property they could not carry, shutter businesses they could not sell, and arrange the care of equipment for which no arrangement would hold.

On April 7, 1942, approximately 1,150 residents of San Diego of Japanese descent boarded trains at the Santa Fe depot for the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia. Santa Anita was a racetrack. The families were housed in horse stalls, the names of the horses still chalked on the wooden walls. From there, in the months that followed, they were dispersed to War Relocation Authority camps in the interior — Poston, Manzanar, Gila River — where most remained until 1945. Among them were the fishermen who had extended the range of Pacific tuna fishing to the edge of the tropics, whose techniques were still being used by other men on boats they no longer owned.

The fishing community did not reconstitute itself in San Diego after the war. Some families returned to find boats sold, equipment dispersed, cannery relationships transferred. The tuna fleet continued — rebuilt around Portuguese and Italian and later Mexican crews — but the industry the Issei had built from Wakayama bamboo and Pacific longitude was reorganized around their absence. The harbor where they had pioneered the method that fed a generation of American households became, after 1942, the staging ground for the Pacific Fleet's expansion: Naval Base San Diego, two miles south of the old cannery row, is now the largest surface fleet base in the world. The men who first proved these waters could sustain a serious maritime industry — who drove wooden-hulled boats to Ecuador and back, who read the Kuroshio Current the way a navigator reads a chart — did not get to see what the bay became. The same bay. The same summer swells. You could sail it tonight.