Fire Consumes Home of Valley’s ‘Original Garlic King’

Gilroy
– Flames obliterated the treasured home of Gilroy’s original
Garlic King, Jimmy Hirasaki, early Sunday morning as firefighters
struggled to reach it on muddied country roads.
Gilroy – Flames obliterated the treasured home of Gilroy’s original Garlic King, Jimmy Hirasaki, early Sunday morning as firefighters struggled to reach it on muddied country roads.

Hirasaki’s son-in-law, Lawson Sakai, was too distraught to speak with a reporter Monday morning, as his family scanned the charred remains of the famous home. Nearly 70 years ago, the valley’s first garlic magnate paid to transport a Japanese home to the Golden Gate International Exposition, then reassembled it, piece by piece, on his Gilroy farm, south of Pacheco Pass Highway.

The wooden house was a county historic site, opened each spring to Gilroy schoolchildren. Before the sooty, bare beams of the home, a veterans’ flag flies, the reminder of Lawson Sakai’s service in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an all-Nisei unit assigned to fight in Europe.

“When I came to Gilroy 30 years ago, people were talking about that house,” recalled Ted Uchida, son of the late Zenichiro Uchida, the Japanese-American activist who ushered thousands of Japanese immigrants into the U.S. “Their family is very well-known … Hirasaki was a leader before the war, and after it, too.”

The house survived Hirasaki’s post-Pearl-Harbor arrest and internment, a 1950 heat wave that decimated Hirasaki’s crop, and even Hirasaki himself, who died in 1963, a pillar of Gilroy’s Japanese-American community. But it didn’t survive Sunday’s fire, a two-alarm blaze that kept more than 20 firefighters busy until dawn.

Fire alarms woke the Sakais about 1:20am, and all escaped safely. But Saturday’s downpour turned the dirt roads leading to the home to mud, slowing fire crews. It took 11 minutes for firefighters to arrive, said Division Chief Clay Bentson.

“We could see the fire in the distance, but we couldn’t get to it,” said Bentson, who estimated reconstruction costs at “a couple hundred thousand” dollars. “But something like that … it’s priceless.”

Firefighters aren’t sure what caused the blaze, believed to be an accident. Bentson speculated that a wood-burning stove, or the home’s aging electrical wiring, might have sparked it. Fire has struck the Hirasaki home before, said Bentson, but never to this effect: he’s fought three or four fires on the 10-acre property in the past.

Joanne Sakai, Lawson’s niece, said the family was renting a hotel room. As of yet, there isn’t a fund for community members to donate to the Sakais.

“It’s quite a loss,” said Connie Rogers, president of the Gilroy Historical Society. “The public might not miss it, because most of them don’t know about it. But in terms of Gilroy’s history … It’s a shame to lose.”