LOOKING BACK

Young Chang

There wasn’t a kid in town who didn’t know sweet and smile-y Soto

Nishikawa, Judge Robert Gardner remembers.

He was a nice, quiet “little Japanese gentleman who came to Balboa God

knows how many years ago -- must’ve gone back 1,000 years.”

In the 1930’s and 40’s, Nishikawa owned a Japanese curio shop called

“Soto’s” on the corner of Bay Avenue and Main Street. He was known and

loved, according to a few locals, but was sent to a Japanese internment

camp during World War II only to die soon after the war ended.

Current business owners in that area of Balboa Island don’t seem to

know anything about him. Any trace of where the shop once was seems to

have faded. But Gardner, a long-time Newport Beach resident, was one of

those kids who spent probably too much time in Nishikawa’s little haven

of priceless, delicate Japanese goodies.

“Every kid spent his time crawling through Soto’s shop,” he said.

“Picking up precious little things and dropping them and he smiled,

smiled, smiled.”

Gay Wassal-Kelly, also a long-time Newport Beach resident, remembers

seashells. Nishikawa sold them along with little figurines that she and

her friends would buy after pooling pennies, because that’s what young

children in those days spent.

“He just loved kids to come into the store,” she said.

And at the end of the day, Nishikawa would close up shop and walk his

fuzzy, little white dog down to the tip of the peninsula and back.

Unfortunately, World War II hysteria had spread by that time to the point

where locals thought he and other Japanese immigrants were spies, Gardner

said.

“When he and the dog walked down there, the lights in the police

department would come on,” he added. “We were a bigoted population . . .

it was a time of great and embarrassing hysteria.”

Nishikawa was eventually sent to an internment camp in Arizona. While

he was away, the shop’s landlord closed Soto’s permanently.

After the war ended in the late 1940s, once Gardner had also returned

from the service, the judge got a call from the Orange County Hospital.

Soto was there. He was dying and wanted to see Gardner, so they visited.

Nishikawa told Gardner he wanted to go back to the shop. Gardner

didn’t have the heart to tell him it didn’t exist anymore.

“So I made up some kind of ridiculous story and said I’ll be back

tomorrow and I’ll take him down there, but thank God Soto died during the

night, because I didn’t have the guts to tell him the landlord had closed

his shop. He woulda had a heart attack,” Gardner said.

What Nishikawa’s friend and patron remembers most vividly is just how

much everyone loved him before the war hysteria struck.

“He was a fixture in a time when, to be as brutally frank as possible,

all people that were not considered Caucasian” were treated unfairly,

Gardner said.

* Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a historical

Look Back? Let us know. Contact Young Chang by fax at (949) 646-4170;

e-mail at young.chang@latimes.com; or mail her at c/o Daily Pilot, 330 W.

Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627.