The ōgakkōNihon Shōgakkō fire, or Japanese mission school fire, was a racially motivated arson that killed ten children in Sacramento, California, on April 15, 1923, at the dormitory of a Buddhist boarding school for students of Japanese ancestry. Fortunato Valencia Padilla, a Mexican-American itinerant from the Rio Grande Valley, admitted to committing the arson after his arrest in July 1923. Padilla confessed to at least 25 other fires in California, 13 of which were committed against Japanese households and Japanese-owned properties. Padilla was indicted on first-degree murder charges for the school fire on September 1, 1923, in Sacramento, with the prosecution seeking capital punishment. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was incarcerated at Folsom State Prison and later San Quentin State Prison; he died in 1970.
Background
Sacramento's Nihon Shōgakkō was established in 1903 for children of immigrant families whose parents worked in agriculture in the area. The school dormitory was located at the Sacramento Buddhist Church, which was founded in 1899, and is believed to be the second-oldest Buddhist institution in the United States. The buildings were located in the heart of Sacramento's Ofu, or Sakura City, which by the 1920s was the fourth-largest Japantown in the United States.
English-language newspapers covering the incident in 1923 usually called it the Japanese mission school fire or the Buddhist mission fire. Nihon Shōgakkō (), meaning Japanese grammar school, is the name reported on the school's website. The school, which had 450 enrolled students at the time of Japanese-American internment, later changed its name to Sacramento Gakuen and still exists as of 2022 as Sakura Gakuen Japanese Language School.
School fire
The Nihon Shōgakkō fire broke out shortly after midnight in the three-story wood-frame building located at 418 O Street, killing ten children. A Buddhist priest or teacher-caretaker named K. Kanada, and a visitor named Y. Yano, are credited with saving the thirteen children that survived. According to a contemporary news report, "Kanada made four trips down an outside stairway, each time carrying a child. Yano guided the other children through the smoke-filled hallways."
The day of the fire had been the "annual picnic of the Japanese in this county", celebrated in a grove in West Sacramento. One report said the ten victims had little chance of escape in part because they were unusually weary from a "long trip and picnic" earlier in the day.
The victims, who were said to have died from asphyxiation, were found on the second and third floors of the building; seven in a room on the third floor, two in one room on the second floor, and one in a different second-floor room. The victims ranged in age from five to seventeen, according to one report, or from seven to eighteen years of age, according to another. Two of the victims were brothers from Yolo County, California: K. Cage, age 18; and C. Cage, age 17.
Three days after the school fire, there was an attempt to burn down a Japanese boarding house two blocks away.
The dormitory was never rebuilt, but the fire-damaged Buddhist church building was replaced in 1925.
Investigation
Authorities initially believed the fire was a result of accidental combustion, despite the community's insistence from the beginning that the fire was of criminal origin. After moving forward with an arson theory, two men who were employees of the Southern Pacific shops in Sacramento, N. B. Coats, a black man, and John Golden, a Mexican foundry worker, were initially charged, circa late April 1923, with starting the school fire. Coates had "broken down under severe grilling" and confessed that he had acted as a lookout while Golden, also known as "Mexican Pete" (last name sometimes listed as Gilden), lit the blaze. Golden was said to have been motivated by "hatred of the Japanese as a result of a quarrel with a Nipponese." Coates said Golden told him he "had no use for Japanese or Hindus." When other fires of suspicious origin continued to break out in Japanese-American neighborhoods, the headline was "Japs Victims of Arson Gang".