Mercers to Japan!

Or, the very limited history of the first Japanese race car drivers in the United States. As many of these stories start, I was poking around in old motoring journals and caught sight of a brief mention of two Japanese drivers, H. Sakamoto and W.T. Watanabe, who were allegedly the first Japanese to race on American soil, back in the summer of 1915, long before the Nisei hot rod racers right around World War II. What exactly brought the two to Los Angeles wasn’t stated, but with a little digging, we can start to form a narrative.

The Horseless Age first made mention of the two in its September 1, 1915, issue, stating that “Japan has made her formal debut in the society of international automobile racing,” when Sakamoto raced a Mercer and Watanabe raced both a Case and a Stutz. Mention wasn’t made of where they raced, but we’re going to assume Ascot Speedway, for reasons we’ll get into shortly.

The next day, both The Motor Age and The Automobile reported that both Sakamoto and Watanabe would soon travel to Tokyo for a series of track races in a pair of Mercers to help celebrate the anniversary of the coronation of the Japanese Emperor (who, at the time, was Emperor Taish?, though I don’t see any clear reference to such festivities). These were to allegedly be the first automobile races in Tokyo, and were apparently arranged by the man who bought both of the Mercers, Fred Jiro Fujioka.

We’ll get to Fujioka in a moment, but the man who sold Fujioka the Mercers was George R. Bentel, who at the time owned both the Simplex and Mercer agencies for all of the Pacific Coast and all of the United States west of Denver. To promote his Mercers, he entered them in plenty of California races in the years just prior to World War I, and, presumably, to provide a track for them to race on, he managed the Ascot Speedway for at least a couple of those years.

With those clues, it’s not a stretch to believe that Bentel arranged for Sakamoto and Watanabe to visit Los Angeles, take a whirl around his track, then arranged for Fujioka to take the cars and the drivers back across the Pacific, perhaps in a grand scheme to open up his own automobile agencies in Japan. Bentel, however, seemed content to manage Ascot and run several other schemes on his own turf.

As for Fujioka, he has an interesting story. He immigrated from Japan in 1903, studied engineering at Cal Tech, then invented and marketed a “coal oil fuel engine” in Japan. Though he apparently couldn’t own land in the United States, he still found a way to buy a house in Los Angeles, manage the Japanese Automobile Club of Southern California, run a garage (the F&K Garage in Los Angeles at 231 N. San Pedro St., in Little Tokyo right down the road from where the Japanese American National Museum would find a location) and start two Oldsmobile dealerships, one of which would become the second-largest in the state through his willingness to sell cars to Japanese farmers.

Fujioka appeared in the trade papers in 1922-1923 as the head of the Fujioka Motor Car Company, formed with Earl Spencer and George B. Morrow, allegedly two Pierce-Arrow veterans, with the intention of building a small car designed for export to Japan. Funding apparently came from Sakai Shokai Ltd., no telling whether that’s the same company doing business under that name today. Fujioka only built a few cars before the company failed, and Spencer, thinking he would succeed in the same market, only built one such car under his name.

Two hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested Fujioka on suspicion of being a Japanese spy. They held him for six months, during which time the government confiscated his dealerships, and sent his family to Heart Mountain in northern Wyoming, one of the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Today, one of Fujioka’s  grandsons, Fred J. Fujioka, serves as a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, while Fred’s brother, William, is the chief executive of Los Angeles County. The family recently appeared in the news, and Fred wrote an excellent account of his family’s history in Gavel to Gavel, the court’s judicial magazine.

In all our searching, however, we never discovered the full names of the two racers nor what ultimately happened to the cars.