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 some might think 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 the 1870s.

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 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. And eventually I worked out that Robert Hayman's father, Alvin Heyman Junior (1923-2004), the son of Jacob's younger son Alvin Heyman Senior (1882-1960), had started going by Hayman -- rather than Heyman -- while in college. And after his uncle Oscar Heyman (1872-1960) and father died, both in 1960, he rebranded their businesses Hayman Brothers and Hayman Homes.

It took my foggy brain 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 a student at Berkeley in the late 1960s. And I had written about him 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 scent of a story 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.

My bible for action is a dogeared, shaken, bumped, and frayed 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, ambulance driver, and 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. 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.

William Wetherall
Abiko, 25 July 2025