By Dennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
The Hirai family crest is on the left, the Yamagata
on the right. The Hirai crest embodies "four eyes,"
a pattern commonly found in the Kyushu area. The
Yamagata wood sorrel motif is commonly found
in the Hiroshima area.

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The crest of the search

Understanding patterns used
in Japanese family crests
helps trace bloodlines

By June Watanabe
Star-Bulletin

Bernice Hirai was flabbergasted when she found out her father had somehow traced his Yamagata family line back seven generations.

"He must have been a closet genealogist," chuckled Hirai, who teaches koto at the University of Hawaii. Fascinated with what her father had done, Hirai embarked on her own quest, eventually tracing the Yamagatas back 24 generations, to an archer/swordsman circa 858-876 A.D.

That's amazing when you consider that it's a feat for most people to be able to track great-great-great-grandpa's father five generations back, when a paper trail usually ends.

When Hirai's daughter asked about her father's side of the family, Hirai began researching her husband's genealogy as well. Today, she's got a 3- to 4-inch-thick binder filled with photos, letters, certificates and documents on both the Hirais and the Yamagatas.

Included are their kamon -- family crests -- each accompanied by stylized variations of the basic crest designs, showing how families branched out from particular clans. For many Japanese families, kamon are an integral part of its genealogy.

Hirai and Tomoyo Yanagihara will conduct a free two-part workshop on kamon at 7 p.m. Oct. 1 and 8, at the Japanese Cultural Center's Weinberg Building. The registration deadline is Friday. Call 945-7633.

Hirai says Yanagihara is the real expert on the subject of kamon.

According to Yanagihara, the use of Japanese crest designs originated among the aristocrats, who marked their carriages and personal items with specific designs to denote ownership.

"Since the premise of beauty and elegant taste was uppermost in their minds, they chose duplications of beautiful flowers, iridescent butterflies and the fusenryo (twill brocade weave)," she writes in "The Connection between Family Crests and Family Names."

The first patterns used by warriors of the Kamakura period were stripes, squares, circles or the first characters of their names, symbols that could instantly be recognized on the battlefield, Yanagihara said.

ByDennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
Bernice Hirai models a kimono adorned with the
crest of the Yamagata, her father's family.

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Eventually, for example, the Yoshino family chose a cherry blossom motif for its crest, since the district of Yoshino in Yamato province was renowned for its cherry trees, she said. Likewise, Goto, Naito, Kato, Ando and other families with the word fuji in their names (the word to is fuji in Chinese) indicated their Fujiwara ancestry with wisteria designs, although "not all families with the particular word in their names belonged to the great clan."

It's this kind of background information that workshop participants will get as they learn how to go about finding out what their own kamon might be.

It helps to know ahead of time what prefecture your family came from, Hirai said, since participants will break up into prefecture groups. Invariably, in Hawaii, the Hiroshima prefecture draws the biggest number, usually followed by Yamaguchi and Kumamoto, Hirai said.

A warning, however: Not everyone will find a family crest. Before the Meiji era, there was a definite class separation, Hirai said, and commoners did not even have surnames.

But all's not lost. The search for a kamon can only help someone learn about where they came from. "It really is easier to come up with information on someone's roots and genealogy than to ascertain a family crest," Hirai said.

Besides, the purpose of tracing your genealogy is "not to see if you're samurai," Hirai said. "We want to see where the blood lines are connected."

Even with farmers and commoners, "if you look hard enough, you will be able to find something," she said, because "Japan is the greatest recorded country. There is very detailed documentation as to who worked this plot and who worked that plot."

But while "everyone is interested, no one knows how to approach" the research, Hirai said.

For Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, the logical places to begin a search are: The State Archives, which will have ship manifests from the 1800s recording the names of passengers; the state Department of Health, for birth, death and marriage certificates; the Immigration and Naturalization Service; the public library; city directories; the Bureau of Conveyances; and the Japanese Consulate.

Information can pop up in unexpected places as well.

Hirai was translating old logs from the Kobayashi Hotel for the Bishop Museum when one name caught her eye -- her grandfather's. It noted the date and the fact that he had arrived from Japan, "validating other information" she had already collected.

Hirai said she is constantly surprised at what she learns about her ancestral country, both through her own research and from other people searching their own roots.

She's heartened to see so many more younger people "trying to hark back." It's important for people of her generation to give information and insight, because, "If we don't do that, who will? Our children have no idea, so it behooves us to get this going," Hirai said.