Introduction

The small Japanese community that existed in the North-East-England port city of Middlesbrough from the late Meiji period to early Showa owed its origins to the city being a port-of-call for ships of the NYK line (日本郵船株式会社, Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kiasho, Japan Mail Ship Company) [1]. The community was swept away by the tides of war but in its prime in the Taisho/Early Showa period, it numbered between 250 and 400 people [2], and consisted, predominantly, of merchant sailors and people who catered to the needs of these men—owners of boarding houses, cafes, laundries, and even a garage proprietor [3]. As these occupations suggest, this community was working class in character and almost exclusively male—at least in the first generation, as some of these men married local women [4] and had children (some of their descendants are still to be found in the area today). Several longer-term residents even served in the British Merchant Marine in one or both world wars [5].

"REAL PHOTOGRAPHIC POSTCARD OF CORPORATION ROAD, MIDDLESBROUGH, NORTH YORKSHIRE" by mark's vintage topographical postcards is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Grave Marker of Kuboki Naojiro ( 久保木直次郎) of the Kawachi Maru ( 河内丸), who died 29 December 1897; Linthorpe Cemetery, Middlesbrough. Image: author’s own collection.

As a whole, the community’s most obvious legacy today is the distinctly Japanese grave markers to be found in Linthorpe Cemetery in Middlesbrough, the last resting place of men who died of disease or accident on the way to England or shortly after arriving in port [6]. The appendix contains a list of the Japanese graves in Linthorpe Cemetery.

Significantly, in 1985, the NYK line—which is still in existence—gifted Middlesbrough nine cherry tree saplings, replacements for saplings given to the city by several NYK Line captains in the early 1930s lost in the intervening years [7].

One of the ways that these expatriates spent their leisure time, was playing baseball in the park, which excited press attention [8]. However, mostly, the members of the community and their families lived quiet, productive lives and did not excite attention—which is not to say that they didn’t know how to have fun [9].

It is just that, like most people, they mostly only drew attention when they were caught up in sensational events [10].

The Aomoris

‘Thomi Armorie’ was Thomi Aomori, and this 1929 incident was far from being the first time that there had been a disturbance at the Aomori boarding house and café. Four years earlier, it had been Aomori’s English wife, Beatrice, and step-daughter, Maud Kasai (née Sato), who had been caught up in a fracas [11].

Two years after that incident, it was Beatrice’s grandson/Maud’s son, George, who was to be the witness to violence [12].

Aomori was Beatrice’s third husband. She was born Beatrice Boulton in Leeds in 1882, but by 1901, she and her family had moved to Middlesbrough [13]. As her daughter’s maiden name suggests, Beatrice’s first husband was also Japanese: ‘Mitsharo’ Sato, a 22-year-old ship’s stoker and son of a postmaster. They married in Middlesbrough in 1902 when Beatrice was 20; their daughter, Maud, was born the following year [14]. In 1910, Beatrice married for a second time, to a 40-year-old general labourer at a local ironworks by the name of Walter Baynton [15]. I will return to the question of what happened with her first marriage below. A year after her marriage to Baynton, Beatrice gave birth to a baby boy, but he died in infancy [16]. Five years later, in the Spring of 1916, it was the turn of Walter Baynton to be carried off [17]. Within eighteen months of the death of her second husband, Beatrice had married for the third and final time, to Thomi Aomori. She was 36.

Beatrice’s marriage to Aomori reveals that there is more to her story than meets the eye, as the name recorded in the marriage register is Beatrice ‘Sato’ not ‘Baynton’, i.e., she used the name of her first husband not her second. In fact, her first husband, Sato, who had remained in Middlesbrough, had died just a few months before she married Aomori [18]. What does this sequence of events signify?

© Crown copyright

An inspection of the death certificate for Sato reveals that the death was reported by ‘B. Sato, widow of the deceased, present at death’. It is also almost certain that Beatrice paid for Sato’s burial (see below). Although it is possible that Beatrice had simply re-adopted the Sato surname when she returned to live with Sato after the death of Baynton [19], it seems more likely that her second marriage was bigamous. Bigamy was far from unheard of at this time—and in this community: in a single session of the York assizes in November 1926, four Middlesbrough women were convicted of bigamy, at least one of them in connection to a marriage to a Japanese seaman [20].

Regardless, with both of her two previous husbands dead, an unencumbered Beatrice was free to marry a third time. Her new husband, Thomi Aomori, was from Ishikawa, Japan, the son of a farmer, and a 38-year-old boarding-house keeper at the time of the marriage [21]. It has been suggested that the boarding house had some direct association with the NYK Line [22]. By 1921, he and Beatrice were running the boarding house together [23].

Beatrice’s daughter, Maud, although still helping run the boarding house, was no longer living with her mother by this time. She had married in the Spring of 1919—aged 15—to another Japanese seaman, a 30-year-old ship’s cook by the name of ‘Chomatsu’ Kasai. Maud and Kasai would go on to have four children, including little George, the probable witness to the razor attack in 1927 [24].

The entry in the 1921 Census for the boarding house at 94 Marton Road can serve as a snapshot of the Japanese community in Middlesbrough at this time (Table 1). It is worth pointing out that all of the Aomoris’ boarders were recorded as being ‘out of work’, i.e., were between ships. As they were not earning, their position was precarious, and the Aomoris would not have been the first Middlesbrough Japanese boarding-house keepers unable to pay their bills because their seamen boarders went broke waiting for a berth [25]. In this period, the average British seaman earned £10–15 a month when at sea [26], but, this would have to last him for as long as he was on shore waiting for his next ship.

The buildings in that section of Marton Road have long since been demolished but based on period photographs and surviving buildings on Commercial Road, which leads off Marton Road, 94 was most likely a three-story, single-fronted building. As there was a café on the ground floor, the Aomoris and their 10 boarders must have been spread across the upper two storeys, suggesting that the boarders slept two to four to a room. This was a recipe for the spread of infectious disease. Tragically, this would prove to be the case, as on 9 August 1926, Beatrice Aomori succumbed to tuberculosis, aged just 42 [27]. She was buried in Linthorpe Cemetery in the same grave as her first husband, Sato [28].

Beatrice Aomori died in August 1926, just over a year before the stabbing incident at the Aomori café witnessed by her grandson George, which means that Maud and her family remained involved with the running of the boarding house and café for at least this long after the death of her mother. Whether they were still involved when Thomi Aomori was himself stabbed in July 1929 is unknown.

Thomi Aomori survived the 1929 stabbing. However, the incident did have a tragic sequel. His attacker was ‘Teiji Takemoto’, a 38-year-old ship’s fireman (stoker) from Kobe, Japan, who was lodging at the Aomori boarding house. He was said to have attacked Aomori after he overheard him telling another of his lodgers that he—Takemoto—was ‘crazy’. Takemoto was sentenced to six months hard labour at Durham Prison but within a few weeks of his imprisonment, was moved to the prison hospital on suspicion of insanity. He had, according to his own statement to an interpreter, been suffering bouts of mania for most of his adult life. On 9 September 1929, after being stripped naked and restrained by prison guards, he suffered a fit and died. At the inquest, the jury exonerated the guards of any responsibility for Takemoto’s death, despite evidence to the contrary from another inmate, and delivered a verdict of death by natural causes [29].

This incident is a reminder that, although the majority of the Middlesbrough Japanese community led productive and fulfilling lives, taking on a range of work and raising families, life this close to the poverty line was precarious, sometimes short, and sometimes violent. This is an underexplored area in studies of the Japanese expatriate community in the UK in the interwar years.

The End

Although Thomi Aomori survived the 1929 stabbing, the next decade was evidently a hard one, as by 1939, there had been a downturn in his fortunes. He was still in Middlesbrough, but no longer a lodging-house and café proprietor. Instead, although now in his early sixties, he had returned to the sea and was working as a stoker (a ‘ship’s fireman’). The 1939 England and Wales register, taken in September 1939, found him living in digs in East Street, near Middlesbrough Docks; he gave his marital status as ‘widower’.

By this time, Beatrice’s daughter, Maud, also still in Middlesbrough, was working as a shopkeeper and living with a man named ‘Thompson’. She was still married to Kasai, but he was in King’s George’s Sanatorium for Sailors in Bramshott, Surrey (aka ‘the seamen’s hospital’). He would die there the following year, most likely of tuberculosis, the disease that had claimed Beatrice’s life. Maud married Thompson a few months later [30]. Time was running out for what was left of Middlesbrough’s Japanese community.

When the Pacific War broke out on 7 December 1941, Thomi Aomori was swept up with the rest of the remaining Japanese seamen in Britain at the time—although in his case, the arrest would come on 21 December 1941, in Glasgow [31], suggesting that he was at sea when war broke out and was arrested when his ship docked in the UK. Thomi Aomori was repatriated to Japan on board ‘El Nil’ and departed from England, his home for at least the last 20 years (after two false starts), on 29 July 1942.

Banner Image: Postcard, authors’ own collection.