Travel: The way to San Jose

SAN JOSE, Calif. —

Jimi Yamaichi has spent most of his life in San Jose — most, that is, except for those years in the 1940s when he was resident at California’s Tule Lake Relocation Center, just south of Oregon’s border.

The Japanese-American man was 19 years old on the day in 1942 that he and his family were interned. Months later, he and other young Tule Lake men successfully fought being conscripted into the U.S. Armed Forces on grounds that their free will already had been compromised. When the Second World War came to an end, he returned to his San Jose home and carved out a long and healthy life and a career in the carpentry business.

Now 93, Yamaichi is an icon of one of the only three officially designated “Japantowns” in the United States. He lives within a short walk of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, where he formerly was director and curator. He is a frequent sight in the district on his walker-assisted strolls past the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Church Betsuin, built in 1937 and a storage place for belongings of interned families in the 1940s.

Yamaichi invited me to join him one morning on a promenade around his neighborhood, centered on Fifth and Jackson streets a couple of miles north of San Jose’s modern downtown. He led me first to the Art Object Gallery, a former garage and walnut-shelling warehouse where sculptor Ken Matsumoto has maintained a studio since 2000.

Then it was snack time. At the Shuei-Do Manju Shop on Jackson Street, owned for three decades by Yamaichi’s friends Tom and Judy Kumamaru, we enjoyed handmade manju: The shop sells more than 1,000 of these sweet rice-flour pastries each day. A block to the west, Chester Nozaki, the third-generation son of a Heart Mountain (Wyoming) internee, introduced us to his San Jose Tofu Company, which distributes handmade tofu daily to markets and restaurants throughout the south San Francisco Bay region. Then we stopped by Roy’s Station, which serves leaf tea and espresso drinks in a building where family scion Roy Murotsune once owned a gas station.

Small cafes, gift shops, groceries, florists, salons and martial-arts studios are among other tenants of Japantown, which retains its historic flavor even as some of its older buildings are boarded up and designated for redevelopment. Everywhere we walked, we were roundly greeted with a “Hi, Jimi!” salute.

Silicon plus

San Jose is best known today as the metropolis of Silicon Valley, its cutting-edge technology superimposed on a rich multiethnic history. The city of 1 million (the metropolitan area is twice that big) now ranks as the third-largest city in California after Los Angeles and San Diego: It has surpassed San Francisco and Oakland as the most populous city in the Bay Area.

It’s flanked by high-tech communities in adjacent Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, where the San Francisco 49ers have just built a new football stadium, and is just down the historic Camino Real highway from renowned Stanford University. But this is an old city. The Peralta Adobe and Fallon House date from 1797, when California’s first Spanish pueblo was moved from Santa Clara, 3 miles distant, and Mission San José was built 20 miles away in what is now Fremont.

Initially a farming community, San Jose in 1850 became the first incorporated city in the new U.S. state of California. Computer technology didn’t make its economic entry until the years of the World War II, when IBM first established a presence in San Jose.

Modern visitors can learn a lot about the history of the technology industry at The Tech Museum of Innovation, next to the Plaza de Cesar Chavez in the heart of downtown San Jose. Although this three-story museum is geared to school groups, it also has plenty to teach adults — especially those who, like me, grew up learning to use typewriters rather than computers.

Immediately north of the Plaza is the domed Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph, a city landmark since 1884. Right next door, the San Jose Museum of Art offers rotating exhibits that presently feature the late-20th-century work of New York social photographer Milton Rogovin and a multimedia presentation of artists’ statements on preservation of sensitive ecosystems.

The Peralta Adobe today anchors San Pedro Square, a foodies’ paradise of small dining and drinking establishments. East of Plaza de Cesar Chavez, the Paseo de San Antonio is a theater center with more upscale restaurants and bars. The Paseo extends several blocks to the campus of San Jose State University.

South is the bohemian SoFA District, the city’s “South First Area.” Latin-flavored nightclubs and community theater companies share street space with painfully hip art galleries, such as the over-the-top Anno Domini Gallery, and cultural showcases like the Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

I especially enjoyed the Movimento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, far better known as MACLA. Joey Reyes, its “curator of engagement and dialogue,” walked me through an exhibit room where a new, interactive installation was going in, and a classroom area where a couple of dozen teens were encouraged to freely explore graphic design and other arts.

Winchester mystery

San Jose’s best-known attraction is west of downtown, just beyond the European-flavored shopping and dining blocks of Santana Row.

The Winchester Mystery House is the unique legacy of Sarah Pardee Winchester, widowed heiress to the Winchester rifle (“The Gun That Won the West”) fortune.

In the early 1880s, battling severe depression after the deaths of both her husband and her daughter, she consulted a Boston fortuneteller who determined that the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles — from Native Americans to Civil War soldiers and Old West gunslingers — had killed her family, and she might be next. The medium suggested that if Mrs. Winchester were to move west and build a great house for the spirits, her life would not be in danger, so long as construction never ended.

It so happened that Mrs. Winchester had $20 million and nowhere else to spend it. She packed her bags and left her Connecticut home for Menlo Park, California, where she had a niece. In 1884, 3½ miles west of San Jose, she bought an unfinished farm house where, for the next 38 years, she kept a team of carpenters working in shifts around the clock.

By the time the matriarch died on Sept. 5, 1922, the house rambled over 6 acres. It contained 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms and six kitchens. Its many bizarre features include a staircase that ends at a ceiling; another staircase that descends seven steps and rises 11; a door that opens outward to an 8-foot drop, and other doors and windows that open onto blank walls. Historians postulate that secret passages in the miles of twisting hallways were intended to confuse any evil spirits that may have been tailing Mrs. Winchester as she traveled to and from her nightly seances.

Thirty rooms at the front of the house were never visited after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The 8.3-magnitude tremor severely damaged the home, toppling a seven-story observation tower and other cupolas. Concerned that the spirits were warning her not to spend too much money in this area, Mrs. Winchester ordered her carpenters to seal the rooms off.

From the outside, the Winchester Mystery House gives a fanciful impression. It’s a Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion that seems to go on and on — and on. Towers and turrets, cupolas and cornices, spires and balconies lend the house a castle-like appearance.

Three guided tours are offered, but the Mansion Tour is by far the most popular. It takes in 110 of the 160 rooms, two dozen of which are restored with Victorian-era furniture, and exhibits many beautifully crafted Tiffany art-glass windows. Tour guides warn participants not to stray from the group, lest they be lost for hours in the architectural maze.

Those of adventurous spirit can don hard hats and venture into hidden recesses on a late-afternoon Behind the Scenes Tour. Garden tours explore 18 acres of grounds with plants imported from 110 countries. There’s also a museum of Remington firearms, a cafe and an extensive gift shop.

Ancient artifacts

The city’s other unique attraction is the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Located in a quiet neighborhood on the city’s west side, this museum — designed after the Temple of Amon at Karnak, Egypt — exhibits 4,000 Egyptian artifacts from predynastic through early Islamic times. It is the largest such collection of ancient Egypt on display in western North America.

Egypt in San Jose seems an anomaly, but this city is the home of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Cruci, an international organization founded in 1915 to study the wisdom of ancient mystery cults and to practice metaphysical laws believed to govern the universe. Best known simply as the Rosicrucian Order — it dates its Western philosophical history from the Middle Ages, and numbers Leonardo da Vinci, René Descartes and Benjamin Franklin among its disciples — the group’s primary focus is ancient Egypt.

The current museum, built in 1966, includes a library, a sculpture garden and a planetarium with daily shows narrated by Robert Redford, Whoopi Goldberg and Al Roker.

A highlight for me was a recreated burial chamber, accessed by descending a staircase to the building’s basement. Egyptians believed that in the afterlife, the soul, or ka, had a life somewhat parallel that of a mortal. In burying the dead with their possessions, the Egyptians believed they were assuring their own safety and prosperity. The more rich and powerful the deceased, the more elaborate the burial and more complex the tomb.

An entire room of the museum is devoted to mummification and burial practices. Other elaborate exhibits introduce visitors to Egyptian religion and its gods, from Osiris and Isis to Sekhmet, the lioness-headed goddess of war whose image was the gallery’s very first artifact, as well as to the lives of the pharaohs and the common people.

I regret that on my recent visit, I didn’t have an opportunity to also visit the New Almaden Mining Museum. Located within a county park on San Jose’s south side, this museum documents the importance of mercury to the local economy during the California gold rush era of the 1850s, when this liquid element was extracted from mined cinnabar ore to be used in the processing of gold and silver. So important was it that the local newspaper was named the San Jose Mercury News — and it remains so to this day. In its heyday, more than 1,800 miners and their families lived in the community of New Almaden.

Science and wine

A little farther from the heart of the city, but well worth the trip, is the James Lick Observatory. Located atop 4,209-foot Mount Hamilton, this University of California, Santa Cruz, facility offers daily guided tours of its six operational telescopes. Constructed between 1876 and 1887, it is one of the most historically important observatories in the world.

Serious science buffs may find several other sites worth seeking out. The Intel Museum in Santa Clara and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View lift the lid off decades of Silicon Valley technology. The NASA Ames Visitor Center, meanwhile, looks at the technology of past and future NASA missions, including aeronautics, robotics, and life and earth sciences.

Scientists don’t spend all their time geeking out, though. Back in 1959, four Stanford Research Institution fellows who shared a love of wine bought a historic but then nonproducing winery in the rugged Santa Cruz Mountains. Within three years, they produced their first “hobby” wine, a cabernet sauvignon, and decided it was pretty good. Today, the Ridge Winery is regarded as one of California’s finest.

The scientists hired young winemaker Paul Draper in 1969. Forty-seven years later, he’s still at Ridge, now as the CEO. Draper is a disciple of 19th-century French production methods, supported by modern equipment and advanced analytics. To that end, he practices sustainable organic growing methods to this day.

Located 19 miles from San Jose, at an elevation of 2,300 feet, the winery specializes in Bordeaux varietals (cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, petit verdot). Ridge boasts the first and oldest wine club in California, sharing with its members exclusive red blends that never go to market. Chardonnays and zinfandels — the latter from a second winery in north Sonoma County — complement the cabernet selection. The Santa Cruz Mountains winery is open weekends and by appointment.

The view, not coincidentally, is spectacular. On a good day, you might even pick out San Jose’s Japantown from here.

— Reporter: janderson@bendbulletin.com