Biographies
Tokujiro, Masao, and Tora Wakimura (Kato), c. 1917.
Reading the information available on tombstones is a good way to begin understanding a cemetery. Learning more about the lives of the people and families represented among its graves, however, gives a far more detailed picture of the community and times that produced that cemetery.
These sample biographies are meant to add texture to the story of the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery. They come from both the "pioneer" community that used the cemetery until 1935, and the Japanese/Japanese-American community that continues to use the cemetery even today.
- Brooks:
Loyal friends - Hart:
Death by overstudy? - Hirose:
The futility of assimilation - Hopkins:
Murdered as a county deputy stood by - Ito:
A lost baby becomes Auburn's first Japanese burial - Kato:
A family murdered - Keevey:
A doomed love triangle - Kosai:
Victims of racist land laws - Kumano:
A bachelor laborer nearly forgotten - Natsuhara:
A little girl's special marker - Okura:
An elderly widow threatens U.S. security? - Omura:
A teenaged "picture bride" grows up in an alien land - Otsuji (Sagara):
A personal tragedy of infant mortality - Pauley:
Auburn residents join the Alaska gold rush - Sakagami:
Peeling back the layers of place - Sakamaki:
An identity (nearly) lost with an eroding tombstone - Sato:
A mystery stone translated - Seattle:
Angeline Seattle of the Muckleshoot Tribe - Shimasaki:
Tourism as treason - Spafford:
A Yankee family comes west - Swanson:
Restless remains - Terashima:
The mystery of cenotaphs - Tsubota:
Patriots interned - Williams:
A former slave becomes an Auburn nanny? - Yamanaka:
An all-American family uprooted