José Ernesto with his mother Masao in the greenhouse of their house.

José Ernesto Matsumoto was born, among flowers and brocades, in a huge and elegant mansion in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City in June 1923. Ernesto was the first-born son of two Japanese immigrants: Sanshiro Matsumoto and Masao Matsui.

Although the Revolution expelled President Porfirio Díaz from the country in 1911, the Porfirian mansions continued to retain their elegant and distinguished touch; the neighborhood with its parks, statues and gardens was different from the rest of Mexico City. The mansion of the Matsumoto family’s house was so large that it covered an entire block between Colima and Tabasco streets. It also had a greenhouse where hundreds of flowers and plants were grown to supply the Matsumoto family’s flower shop on Colima Street.

The Matsumoto family’s wealth and fame had been built over two decades. José Ernesto’s grandfather, Tatsugoro Matsumoto, had arrived in Mexico in 1896, and later in 1910, his father Sanshiro. The enormous prestige the Matsumotos had achieved owed to the work of both.

As a landscape architect, Tatsugoro earned recognition from the wealthy sectors of society and from President Porfirio Díaz himself. The specialized art of garden care, flower arrangements (ikebana) and miniature trees (bonsai), which Tatsugoro created, were popular with wealthy families who owned mansions with large gardens and spaces to display such arrangements. The flower shop became a widely recognized establishment for its various floral arrangements, including those carried by brides for their religious wedding ceremonies.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Tatsugoro and his son Sanshiro were still in charge of the care of Chapultepec Forest and the flower arrangements at the Castle, the official residence of then-president Álvaro Obregón. The end of the armed phase of the revolution and the stability achieved in the early 1920s allowed Sanshiro to ask his mother to travel to Japan to find a young lady who would like to start a family with him in Mexico. Masao Matsui accepted the marriage proposal and moved to Mexico, where the religious ceremony was held in July 1922. From then on, Masao Matsui took the name Maria Consuelo Matsumoto.

In this environment José Ernesto was born and spent his first years of life. María Consuelo dedicated herself fully to running the flower shop, so the baby was taken care of by his Mexican nanny, Angelita. She was the one who taught him the Spanish language and who educated him in the customs and habits of Mexican culture. At the age of three, José Ernesto, his newborn sister and his mother traveled to Japan with the purpose of getting him to know his maternal family and the country of their ancestors.

José Ernesto with his mother in Japan

The Matsumoto family business continued to improve in the early 1930s, allowing them to acquire several plots of land in order to expand their greenhouses to meet the growing demand for flowers and trees. President Pascual Ortiz Rubio even requested that the Japanese government donate cherry trees to beautify the city, a proposal that the Matsumotos rejected, rightly, due to the city's weather conditions. Instead, the family proposed to the president to plant jacarandas in the city’s avenues because they would reproduce more easily, flowers that we still admire year after year.

At the age of seven, José Ernesto entered one of the most prestigious private schools in Mexico: the German School. This school educated the children of the country’s political and economic elites. One of his classmates was the son of President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, with whom he would maintain a long friendship since 1930, the year he entered the school.

In 1932, his father Sanshiro and his mother Maria Consuelo considered it better that Ernesto should study primary school in Japan. The Matsumatos wanted their son to be educated in Japan and eventually study engineering or botany with the aim that upon his return he take over the family business. The first years of his stay in Japan were very difficult for José Ernesto, who was only nine years old and did not speak Japanese fluently, much less know how to read or write kanji, the form of writing in that language. This stage undoubtedly shaped José Ernesto’s character to face the more complicated years that would come later.

In Mexico, the Matsumoto family’s situation was unbeatable, to the point that Sanshiro decided to become a naturalized Mexican because the family had built a solid financial and social situation that rooted them to the country where they had arrived in 1910. On the other hand, the situation in Japan was getting complicated in the face of the advance of ultra-nationalist and militaristic tendencies that were gaining ground in the leadership of the government and that would lead it down the path of war.

At the beginning of 1941, José Ernesto entered the University of Tokyo to study agronomy. Relations between Japan and the United States were worsening and the winds of war were blowing stronger every day. At that time, Ernesto’s four younger sisters were in Japan so their parents decided that the girls should return to Mexico. José Ernesto stayed in Japan to continue his university studies.

José Ernesto with his sisters in Japan

When the war broke out in December 1941, José Ernesto’s return to Mexico became impossible, as communications were completely broken off following the Mexican government’s declaration of a state of war against Japan in May of the following year. Contacts between José Ernesto and his parents were absent during the war; the concern and anguish of his parents and grandfather increased as Japan’s military defeat loomed day by day, a situation that foreshadowed the almost total destruction of the country, as it happened.

Within Japan, the population supported the war with great sacrifices due to the growing lack of food and basic goods. In the first years, students at all levels only carried out exercises and campaigns to support the army. As the war progressed, college students who had reached the age of 20 were incorporated into the armed forces.

José Ernesto was called up to join the Japanese naval forces in 1943. Matsumoto’s family went to see him off as he was sent to the naval training school in Yokozuka, in the port of Yokohama. The military’s goal was to train young people to recruit them into the war. At the end of that year, in the month of October, after having received his training, José Ernesto met with all the conscripts at the Yoyogui stadium in Tokyo, where the Prime Minister, General Hideki Tojo, urged them to leave their books and enlist to defend their country.

Family says goodbye to José Ernesto to join the naval forces.

In these first months of training, the best-trained young men were selected with the purpose of specializing in a specific task that the Navy required. José Ernesto was sent to the naval base of Ryojun, (the Japanese name for Port Arthur), stationed in Chinese territory south of Manchuria to train him in the handling of naval artillery, granting him the rank of second lieutenant.

Jose Ernesto sitting (first from left) with his classmates at the Ryojun Naval School.

After this long period of training and preparation, José Ernesto was transferred to Tokyo at the beginning of 1945 to be part of the defense of the capital against the unstoppable advance of the American army that was openly bombing the most important cities of Japan and that preparing to occupy it completely.

José Ernesto was certain that the end of the war was approaching and that Japan’s defeat seemed inevitable; however, he held out hope that this would not happen and that it would be possible to stop the occupation alongside the few military forces that still defended the island.

To be continued...

© 2024 Sergio Hernández Galindo