The Heymans and Yasuis of Grass Valley and Hood River

Nariyuki

History as a course of events

Histories are written by and for the living. Their sole purpose -- whether academic or novelistic -- is to provide the living with meanings of life by imputing meanings to the lives of predecessors who have come and gone. As such, histories are about what compels humans -- as social animals -- to both endure and enjoy the cradle-to-grave struggles and pleasures of life.

Family histories explore the meanings of life through the lives of ancestors and the bonds of kinship, whether ties of blood, or of marriage by any name. They are most likely written by family members interested in their own roots and place in the scheme of things. But some are written by third parties, who are motivated by other than family ties.

I am not a member of either the Heyman-Weissbein or the Yasui-Miyake clans. Yet my aspirations to illuminate their converging stories, from my own point of view, have personal origins in both lines. Their histories have become part of my own story, on account of how I discovered them -- or perhaps how they discovered me.

Either way, my stories here are testimonies to the nariyuki that has led me to where I am as I write this in Japan -- my home for the past 50 years. The country is not as far as it used to appear on maps from my original homes in California -- which, because I remember them, I am not at liberty to forget. In many respects, the insertion of myself into the Heyman-Yasui stories reflects my desire to nurture what memories I still have of my own earlier life in America.

Nariyuki means "course of events" of the sort one can't foretell. You get up one day, something happens. Then the next day or a decade later, something else happens. And over time, a string of unforeseen and seemingly unrelated encounters -- path crossings, discoveries, opportunities, unchartered woods, seemingly unfordable streams -- affect your life, for better or for worse. The journey for me has been mostly one of broadened horizons and new interests, for which I have to be grateful.

My Heyman-Yasui nariyuki unfolds roughly like this.

1958   I had been working at Bennetts Bootery, a shoe store and haberdashery at 140 Mill street in Grass Valley, since the summer of the year my folks moved up from San Francisco in 1955, when I was 14. One day, when in high school, I climbed a ladder to the attic of the store, a brick building built in 1874.

The boards above the ceiling had been covered with a few inches of sand to slow the spread of a rafter fire. The sand had become a toilet for cats that fed on rafter rats. And I found, buried in the sand, some letters, invoices, checks, and a ledger and daybook that had belonged to Jacob Heyman, dated in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Many years later, I would learn more about Heyman -- that he was born in Prussia in 1837, grew up a German-speaking Jew, came to Grass Valley in the late 1850s, built the store in 1874, moved to San Francisco with his wife and 5 children in 1889, became a real estate agent and home developer, and died in 1904.

1987   After moving to Japan in 1975, I became somewhat of an activist whose modus operandi was civil disobedience. I violated laws and regulations in order to protest their purpose. When my children were born in 1978 and 1982, and were unable to acquire Japanese nationality on account of the patrilineal restriction in Japan's Nationality Law at the time, I initiated a law suit against the Japanese government, claiming that they were Japanese, and contending that the law's restriction was unconstitutional. I also refused to register my children as aliens, as required by Japan's then Alien Registration Law. For this, I was found guilty and fined on two counts of violating the registration law. My daughter's case went as far as the Supreme Court, but was withdrawn in 1987 after the law was revised and my children were able to become Japanese through special measures in the revision.

In the meantime, in late 1986, I joined a growing movement to protest the fingerprinting requirement of the Alien Registration Law, by refusing to let the municipal registrar take a print of my right index finger. Then in early 1987, shortly after Minoru Yasui died, I wrote a eulogy about him, titled A civil rights champion, in which I wondered what he would have done if he had been an alien in Japan.

2015   I posted the first version of my story of finding the Heyman documents on the first incarnation of my Mill street, Grass Valley website. The following year, I contributed the Heyman documents to the Nevada County Historical Society -- except the ledger and daybook, which Howard Bennetts (1896-1967), the store's proprietor, had kept.

15 June 2022   I received the following query from Mari Hayman in Seattle, writing me through the contact form on my Yosha Bunko website.

I stumbled upon your website while researching my great-great grandfather, Jacob Heyman. While I know a great deal about my Japanese family history (my mother's side is Japanese American), I know almost nothing about the Heymans of Grass Valley. I was curious whether you still retain any of the letters (or transcripts) that you mentioned here: [link to original Mill street webpage, which I took town to totally revise].

I recognized Mari's name as a byline I had seen somewhere, and within a couple of minutes I was rereading an article she had written in 2015 -- Minoru Yasui's Struggle, Revisited (Nov 30, 2015, 04:37 PM EST, Updated Nov 27, 2020). On 24 November 2015, just three days before the article's dateline, Minoru Yasui (1916-1986), Mari's great uncle, had posthumously received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in a ceremony at the White House, for having "spent his life fighting for the human and civil rights of all people."

It took me a couple of hours, using Ancestor.com, to establish a crude family tree of Jacob Heyman's descendants, and learn that Mari was the daughter of Robert Hayman (1952-2011) and Barbara Yasui. I then learned that Barbara was the daughter of Minoru Yasui's youngest brother, Homer Yasui (1924-2023), who had attended the awards ceremony.

I also eventually worked out that Robert Hayman's father -- Alvin Heyman Junior (1923-2004) -- was the son of Jacob Heyman's younger son Alvin Heyman Senior (1882-1960). And Alvin Jr. -- and apparently also Alvin Sr. -- had started going by Hayman, rather than Heyman, by the time Alvin Jr. was in college in the early 1940s. And when his uncle Oscar Heyman (1872-1960) and then his father died, both in 1960, Alvin Jr. rebranded their businesses Hayman Brothers and Hayman Homes.

My foggy brain needed a couple of days to recall that I had regarded Minoru Yasui as a hero since first learning about the wartime internment camps and his activism, while I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s. And I had written about Minoru shortly after he passed away, in a tribute titled A civil rights champion.

My nariyuki had taken a sharp turn from interesting to fascinating. My writer's nostrils were overwhelmed by the scents of stories that had suddenly become very personal for me.

On the one hand, Mari's serendipitous query rekindled my youthful infatuation with Jacob Heyman as the recipient of many letters, some of them scandalous, dated in the late 1870s and early 1880s, which I had found in 1958, buried in the sand above the ceiling of a building he had built in 1874. On the other hand, I found myself, through Mari, well under 6 degrees of separation from Minoru Yasui -- whose civil disobedience in Oregon in 1942 had inspired my own civil disobedience in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s.

Since my early 20s, my bible for action has been a now dogeared, shaken, bumped, frayed, and foxed copy of Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" or Life in the Woods with essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience". I bought it while a student at Berkeley in 1962-1963, at the height of my political alienation over the Cuban Crisis, the Cold War, and Silent Spring. And I displayed it in my footlocker during inspections while serving in the U.S. Army in 1963-1966, as a medic and ambulance driver, then a hospital laboratory technician.

I've never met a Heyman, Hayman, or Yasui in the flesh -- or hiked their trails, much less in their boots -- although I did have the honor of a Zoom talk with Homer, Barbara, and Mari shortly before Homer's death on . But I'm pretty sure the suns that have risen and set on our horizons -- and the stars we have seen at night -- are the same.

I have sometimes posed as an anthropologist, but only in the sense of having become a life-long student of the human condition. Yet I put more stock in "personality" than in either "culture" or "society". Both have been inculcated in people's imaginations, but their existence is analogous to that of a forest and its flora and fauna, which are there for the people who live in it, but each in a different way.

What matters is how individuals play the cards that border, breed, and birth deal them. Hence my stories of the Heymans of Grass Valley and the Yasuis of Hood River will highlight their personalities and nariyukis -- not their impersonal and amorphous cultural or social backgrounds -- which are what they are, but not what they are.

William Wetherall
Abiko, 25 July 2025

Revised 1 September 2025
Revised 13 December 2025
Revised 1 January 2025
Revised 5 January 2025

Personality

Family members as individuals

Consider telling, in 2 hours, the life stories of a man and a woman like Jacob Heyman (1837-1904) and Lina Weissbein (1851-1918), who lived 66 and 67 years, during which they were married for 33 years and raised 5 children, all of whom grew up and married. Or the stories of Masuo Yasui (1886-1957) and Shizuyo Miyake (1886-1960), who lived 70 and 73 years, were married for 45 years, and raised 9 children, 7 of whom lived beyond their childhoods and married.

What did the nuclear Heyman-Weissbein and Yasui-Miyake families achieve in their brief existences, other than to survive and breed? What are their legacies -- not measured by their ability to stay alive, or their fertility, but how they lived their lives?

Why should anyone today -- whose main personal concerns are biological and social survival, if not also leaving offspring -- want to know the Heyman-Weissbein and Yasui-Miyake clans, and what they left in their tracks -- other than X descendants, Y tons of excrement and rubbish, and Z kilograms of bones and ashes?

Marriages

The Heyman-Weissbein and Yasui-Miyake unions had several things in common other than their male-female coupling. All four individuals immigrated to the United States -- Jacob and Lina from Prussia, Masuo and Shizuyo from Japan. The men came first -- both when young, ambitious, and malleable. The women followed, with expectations of becoming the wife of a man for whom she would keep house and bear and raise children.

Both Jacob and Masuo made it a point to marry a woman of their country of origin, linguistic background, and religious persuasion. Jacob and Lena appear to have been born into Jewish families. Neither Masuo nor Shizuyo were raised as Christians, but both had become Christians through separate paths by the time they married.

The American-born, 2nd-generation offspring of the immigrant Heyman-Weissbein and Yasui-Miyake unions also generally married Jews or Christians who more likely than not had similar national racioethnic ancestral backgrounds -- namely, German or Japanese. But their common language was English, so racioethnic and religious ancestry trumped linguistic ancestry.

By the 3rd generation in both families, commonality of racioethnic background was less important. And today, in their 4th and 5th generations, both clans are very mixed. Members of the extended families now have little in common, other than the thin lines which link them on a family tree with their Heyman-Weissbein or Yasui-Miyake progenitors. And these two trees are linked through the marriage of Robert Hayman and Barbara Yasui -- Robert a 4th-generation Heyman-Weissbein, Barbara a 3rd-genertion Yasui-Miyake -- hence the start of the Hayman-Yasui line.

In the natural scheme of things, every person born exists at the intersection of literally countless ancestral lines. Focussing on a particular point or crossing of lines, for whatever reason, is arbitrary.

The focus on "Heyman-Weissbein" and "Yasui-Miyake" as starting points, and the attention given to "Hayman-Yasui" as a meeting point, are choices I made as these unions appeared on the event horizon of my nariyuki, where I crossed paths with the families -- first in 1958 through Jacob Heyman's buried records at the Grass Valley shoe store in the brick building he built in 1874 -- then in 2022 through a chance encounter with Barbara's and Robert's daughter Mari Hayman.

Religion

The religious colors of Masuo's and Shizuyo's birth families were probably a fairly fluid, undoctrinaire mixture of the Buddhist and Shinto beliefs and practices associated with the village temples and shrines the families had come to patronize over the generations. Their natal homes -- like many homes still in Japan today -- probably had both Buddhist and Shinto altars, which served different purposes. Buddhism is generally associated with death and funerals, and the burial and memorialization of the dead, while Shinto is more commonly the province of marriage, birth, and other celebratory events of life. In any case, neither Shinto nor Buddhism are singular religions with tenets their practitioners dogmatically share. Like Christianity, which also comes in many colors and stripes, the families and individuals they embrace mediate them differently.

There is no evidence that either Masuo or Shizuyo became Christians for deeply religious reasons. Both appear to have become Christians through socialization -- exposure to Christian teachings and practices in the course of their daily lives. Adopting Christian ways was mostly a matter of assimilation into new social environments. Nothing in their Shinto and/or Buddhist backgrounds would have compelled them to resist Christianity. They found its tenets and practices both palatable and convenient.

Masuo became a Christian in the United States while living in a dormitory that belonged to a Methodist mission, where he was influenced by a its minister. And he worked in a Christian home, where he learned a lot of English. Shizuyo became a Christian while attending a Christian college in Japan. Social intercourse was then, and remains today, the most common pathway to other religions. The most essential qualities that all religions share -- even when they are politicized as parts of nationalistic ideologies -- is their instrumental function as sociocultural matrices in communal life.

Jacob Heyman appears in several reports as a co-founder or officer of a synagogue, lodge, and graveyard, with other Jews in Grass Valley, many of them also German speakers, including his own long-time business partner in the 1860s and 1870s. And Grass Valley's Jewish organizations had connections with counterparts in neighboring Nevada (City), and in San Francisco and elsewhere.

Co-religionists among immigrants seek each other out. Had Masuo fallen in with Japanese Buddhist interests rather than Japanese Christian interests in Washington or Oregon at the time he arrived, he might not have become Christian. There were already well-establishment networks of Jews in California by the time Jacob Heyman arrived in Grass Valley and found himself in the company of other German-speaking Jews

Longevity

Both the Heyman-Weissbein and Yasui-Miyake unions were stable in the sense that the couples remained together unto death did them part. In both unions, the wives outlived the husbands -- which is expected when considering that women, who usually live longer than men, typically marry older men. Masuo, though, was slightly younger than Shizuyo.

Lena, who was nearly 14 years younger than Jacob, outlived him by over 14 years. He died when 66, she when 67 -- roughly 20 years longer than their Prussian/German age peers in Europe.

Shizuyo was 6 months older than Masuo. He died when 70, and she was 73 when she died 3 years later. Masuo lived a few years longer than most of his age peers in Japan, while Shizuyo lived to an average age for women of her generation in Japan.

Would Masuo have outlived Shizuyo had he not taken his own life? Did his suicide shorten her life? Or did the probably suicide of Kay, their 1st-born child and son when 17, shorten both of their lives?

The average longevity of the 5 Heyman-Weissbein children was 68. The average longevity of 7 of the 9 Yasui-Miyake children -- all but Kay and Yuki, who died when 17 and 4-1/2 -- was 79. However, these are just two families. And they were separated by 30 to 40 years. Jacob, born in 1937, died in 1904 -- the year after Masuo, born in 1886, came to America. Alvin Heyman, the youngest Heyman-Weissbein child, was 31 when Kay was born, the oldest Yasui-Miyake child, in 1913.

Note, however, that even today, people in Japan live an average of 3 years longer than people in Germany. And Asian Americans have significantly longer life spans than European Americans, attributable to differences in diet and life style but also probably genes.

Occupations

Jacob and Masuo were merchants, though of different lines of merchandise. Jacob traded in dry goods, men's furnishings, and boots and shoes. Masuo dealt in general merchandising and produce.

Both men were involved in real estate. Masuo bought, leased, and sold mostly agricultural properties, but also engaged in fruit and vegetable growing. Jacob became involved in real estate development with his Weissbein brothers-in-law while still working as a merchant in Grass Valley. After moving to San Francisco, he launched a real estate agency that bought and subdivided residential properties, and built and financed homes.

Most likely because a significant amount of Masuo's work eventually concerned local agricultural interests -- which he could not have taken with him should he have moved to, say, Portland -- he was inclined to remain in Hood River. Jacob, though, could have plied his trades anywhere -- whether he stayed in Grass Valley or moved to San Francisco.

Jacob -- who was more rooted when younger -- became more nomadic. While Masui -- who was more nomadic when younger -- became more rooted.

To be continued.