Minneapolis man may just be a Japanese-born vet buried in Fort Snelling

A US Navy veteran owned a coffee shop north of Minneapolis and lived in the same Linden Hills bungalow for three decades, less than a mile from Lake Harriet. When he died at the age of 87, he was buried in Fort Snelling National Cemetery—an honorable farewell that came a quarter century after Ed Yamazaki received a different kind of esteem.

On December 8, 1941, Federal Reserve officials with the help of Minneapolis police shut down Ed’s Sandwich Store under a Treasury Department directive to freeze businesses operated by Japanese citizens. It was the day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

“We are sorry to see the war come, but what can we do?” said Yamazaki, who was born in Japan in 1881 and served as a flight attendant in the Navy from 1906 to 1908 after emigrating at the turn of the century. “My family and I have no ties in Japan.”

Backed by North Side fur traders and other nearby merchants, Ed’s Sandwich Shop reopened four days later—provided that all revenue be deposited into a supervised account that allowed $200 a month to be withdrawn to offset living expenses.

The episode was just one of many turns in Yamazaki’s unique life.

“I suspect he may be the only person who was born in Japan and buried at Fort Snelling,” said Christa Hanson, a World War II researcher from Maplewood. “He may be the only person born in Japan and buried in any national military cemetery.”

Robert Rosser, superintendent at Fort Singling National Cemetery, said he doesn’t know any way to determine if Yamazaki was the first – or the only – Japanese-born American warrior buried in the Twin Cities cemetery of 280,000 people. They all had stories, but there were only a few Yamazaki’s rival stories.

Born in Maruka, Japan, Edward Yoshinosuke Yamazaki was 18 when he sailed from Yokohama to San Francisco aboard the America Maru, a high-speed passenger ship in the Oriental Steamship Co. fleet. He crossed the Pacific Ocean in February 1900 in hopes of receiving an American education and studying music. Hanson said the ship’s manifest listed him as a student at a trade school.

Less than two weeks before Yamazaki turned 25, he survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that killed more than 3,000 people and destroyed four-fifths of the city. He ran away with little more than the clothes he was wearing.

His next stop was in Brooklyn, New York, where records show that he ran a YMCA and taught violin under famed teacher Franz Kneissl at the music school that would become Juilliard. Unable to find work, Yamazaki ended up at the Naval Yards in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he served for two years as a serving officer. The Navy remained racially segregated until 1948 and he was still out of citizenship for decades, so cooking and cleaning on board the ships would probably be the best he could do.

By 1914, Yamazaki had landed in Minneapolis. He worked at Café Mandarin before opening a Japanese café on Nicollet Street in 1919, and married the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, Anna Hansen, who was under 16. They welcomed a son, also called Edward, in 1920.

Exorbitant rent and antique equipment eventually forced him to sell the tea house, but by the 1940s he was running his modest North Side sandwich shop.

Meanwhile, the sports pages were listing his son Ed among the city’s top skaters at the popular races at Powderhorn Park. Military scholar Susan Adler said that young Ed changed his last name to Evans who sounded more American around 1940, “before his enlistment in 1941.”

Evans, an Army sergeant, was at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Eventually, he would rise to the rank of major in the Air Force, retiring after 20 years in the Army after serving during World War II and the Korean War. He buried a few sections south of his parents in Fort Snelling.

Yamazaki’s sandwich shop, at 922 W. Broadway in north Minneapolis, not only endured the closure of Pearl Harbor but a kerosene fire that spread from a shed behind the company in August 1942. Even after the shop’s 28-year run ended, Yamazaki was still brimming with the “young vigor” of its Age 80, according to a 1962 article that said he remained busy working five hours a day at the historic Nankin Café in downtown Minneapolis and played an active role in the Lake Harriet Methodist Church.

After a life that included emigration from Japan, surviving the San Francisco earthquake, a YMCA job in Brooklyn, a stint in the Navy and years of working at a restaurant in Minneapolis, Yamazaki became an American citizen in 1954. When he died in 1968, he said A short obituary in the Minneapolis Star that his wife and son in Houston, three grandchildren and a sister in Japan survived.

His trading neighbors were quoted as saying of Yamazaki in the hours after Pearl Harbor, when authorities came to shut it down: “He’s fine as far as we people are concerned.”

Kurt Brown’s tales of Minnesota history pop up every Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at [email protected]. His most recent book looks at Minnesota in 1918, when influenza, war, and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.

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