Guayule Blog

If you live in the Los Angeles area and want to learn more about guayule’s history in WWII as a source of natural rubber, attend this October 18 event. Frank Akira Kageyama will speak about the Guayule Rubber Project at Manzanar, one of ten concentration camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were imprisioned during World War II.

Kageyama, who is the brother of Mary Kageyama Nomura, known as the “Songbird of Manzanar,” was among a group of several dozen Japanese American chemists, horticulturists, and machinists at Manzanar, who made a unique contribution to America’s war effort during World War II, despite being imprisoned at Manzanar. To alleviate America’s wartime rubber shortage, they worked under the guidance of Dr. Robert Emerson, in partnership with the California Institute of Technology, to develop methods of cultivating, harvesting, and extracting rubber from guayule, a desert shrub native to Northern Mexico and Southwestern Texas.

Kageyama, 92, is one of the few remaining members of the guayule project. After the war, he and Hugh Anderson, the business manager for the project, traveled the world promoting the production of guayule as an alternative source of natural rubber.

The event is free and open to the public. The event will be held on Saturday October 18, at 1:00 PM, at Merit Park Recreation Hall, 58 Merit Park Drive, Gardena, California, 90247-3840 (parking is on 158th Street or at Pacific Square, a short walk to the Recreation Hall on Merit Park Drive).

To RSVP or for more information, please call Louise Sakamoto at (310) 327-3169 or send e-mail to lsakamoto@sbcglobal.net.