In 1939, 19-year-old Roy Hattori was diving for abalone off the coast of Point Conception when he saw something different. He cut the odd-looking shell off the rocky bottom of the sea and brought it all the way back to his hometown of Monterey. There, he brought it to the attention of a shell specialist. Just as he had suspected, it was a brand new species. Hattori was excited to feel like a part of history – but when the time came, the new species was named without his discovery being considered.
Hattori’s discovery is the research subject of Tim Thomas, local historian and tour guide at the Monterey Bay Wharf. Thomas received the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary 2023 Ed Ricketts Memorial Award, alongside Linda Yamane, for his lifetime of work in history and education in Monterey Bay. He gave a lecture on his research about Hattori’s story on Wednesday. This story is not only his research, but deeply personal to Thomas. He knew Hattori and understood how the erasure of Hattori’s part in the discovery impacted him.
“The only time I would ever see him get angry is when he talked about World War II, or when he talked about the white abalone,” Thomas said.
When Hattori brought the unusual abalone back to Monterey, he reached out to his friend and shell specialist, Andrew Sorensen. Sorensen couldn’t identify it, and with a letter crediting the young Japanese-American diver ,Hattori, as the one to discover it, he sent the shell to Dr. Paul Bartsch, a malacologist at the Smithsonian Institution.
Bartsch would go on to publish a paper naming the new abalone species in 1940, naming it Haliotis sorenseni, after Andrew Sorensen. Letters sent back and forth to the Smithsonian from Sorensen showed how he felt guilty that it was named after him, but the damage was done.
Two years later, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, ordering the incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals, and Hattori lost everything.
Forced to sell his fishing equipment and relocate to an incarceration camp in Arkansas before being drafted into the military, it would take years before Hattori could return to Monterey. By that time he had a new family to take care of too – a wife and a baby.
But what he found wasn’t the same as when he left.
“My grandfather tried to continue to do abalone diving,” says Tommy Hattori, grandson of Roy and son of the last baby born at the Rohwer relocation center in Arkansas, “And so my grandfather came back, he borrowed some equipment and did a little bit of searching (of the ocean floor) and was like, ‘it’s just totally different down there.’”
Abalone habitat had changed. Construction along the shore for Highway 1 had impacted abalone habitat in the years prior. Hattori knew he couldn’t make a living off of it anymore. He turned to other ventures – working at a dry cleaner and eventually learning to be a watch repairman. It was only when Thomas spoke to Hattori, interested in the history of abalone diving, that the story about his discovery of the white abalone came to light.
“So much of it was tied up with the war and with the camps,” says Tommy Hattori, “it was very clear that there was a profound sense of loss,” surrounding the abalone.
Now, Thomas is trying to right one of the many injustices in Roy Hattori’s life. He believes scientists should add on to the scientific name of the white abalone – changing it from ‘Haliotis sorenseni’ to ‘Haliotis sorenseni hattorii.’
But the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which maintains international scientific names, has been historically hesitant to change any name. Their code does state that whoever discovers the species gets to name it, regardless of who publishes the paper describing it. The addition of Hattorii may be a long way off.
Still, some are already working to make Roy Hattori’s story known. The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History has worked with Thomas as they update their abalone exhibit to show Hattori’s critical contribution to the white abalone.
“Truth is truth and history is history and science is science,” says Thomas. “I think we should add Roy’s name to it.”
