The first Japanese-American mayor in the U.S. was elected in Edmonston in 1927, decades before other Nisei served on the mainland.

But that’s just one of the improbable details of the life of Kinjiro Matsudaira.

Matsudaira was born in Pennsylvania in 1885, the son of a a Japanese engineer who had fallen in love with an American woman while studying at Harvard.

A member of a noble family related to the Tokugawa shoguns, Tadaatsu Matsudaira was disinherited as a result of the marriage.

After Tadaatsu died of tuberculosis when his son was only three years old, Kinjiro was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Virginia, who put him to work on the family farm.

Either unable or unwilling to take care of him, his grandparents placed him in an orphanage, and he ran away to join the circus, managing a trio of “novelty comic acrobats.” He later worked as a department store clerk, receiving a patent for a fire detector he designed in his spare time.

In 1909, Matsudaira married store clerk Ellen Chisholm, and the two moved to Hyattsville, where he spearheaded a movement in 1924 to separate the town of Edmonston from East Hyattsville, serving as one of its first city council members.

Elected as mayor on a platform of improving the town’s infrastructure, Matsudaira made international news, with stories in the New York Herald Tribune, Japanese-language newspapers in San Francisco and Hawaii, the South China Morning Post and the Kaigai Shimbun in Japan.

Matsudaira was elected mayor again in 1943, even as Japanese-Americans were being sent to internment camps.

As a mural on Decatur Street in Edmonston notes, this sent “a message of community and acceptance of diversity in a difficult time.”

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