Farming the Home Place --

Farming the Home Place -- Tilling the American Land, Before and After Internment

In 1909, nearly half of the immigrant Japanese population within the United States worked in agriculture. These farmers were often called Issei farmers, a Japanese word that came to specifically designate these first-generation tillers of the soil. (Masumoto, p.23) Learning of this community's tie to the land made the later internment and displacement of Japanese-Americans, which wrenched these farmers not simply from their personal homes, but also from the regional area of the United States that was the source of their community's livelihoods, seem particularly unjust and poignant. Even early on in their life in America, first-generation Japanese farmers faced tremendous discrimination and opposition to their efforts. For example, Sakaguchi Mashu, a "picture bride" and her husband, were forced to continually move so they could make their living tilling the land, because the mandatory, legally enforced tenure of every Asian farmer was only three years, according to the alien land laws designed to limit Japanese farming. (Matsumoto, pp.17; 23) However, even during this early period of legal discrimination, because of the construction of collective agricultural organizations, like the Cortez Growers Association (CGA) the Japanese-American farmers had a sense of community, a sense of community cruelly displaced by internment.

Given the history of tremendous struggle during the pre-internment period, the social and economic damage created by internment was a psychological as well as an economic blow. For example, many "picture brides" initially experienced difficulty making the transition between the more secure community provided in their Japanese homeland. Picture brides went to a foreign land to marry men they had never met, in marriages arranged by their families. Despite the inevitable culture shock, these Japanese farmers were determined to prosper. There was tremendous hostility on the part of large farms and labor unions representing the workers at such farms, against smaller, Japanese farmers. (Matsumoto, p.24) This economic divide became racially coded, and the tensions these bodies felt was vented in explicitly anti-Japanese terms, which led to legal limits upon Japanese immigration and farming that were to foreshadow the later internment efforts. This hatred provides evidence, were further evidence needed, that the executive order permitting the internment of Japanese-Americans was rooted in racial hatred, not national security needs. The War Relocation Authority and Executive Order #9066 creating the camps and allowing the displacement and internment was not merely a terrible fate -- it was an act that specifically declared the civil rights of American citizens null and void, on a federal level, simply because of their place of national origin, despite the contributions these farmers had made to America in the form of agriculture, and the legal obstacles they had already weathered. (Matsumoto, p.93)

The key to the community' survival during the leanest years of early economic development, a time of toil, lean meals of miso soup, and constant anxiety about economic survival was a strong sense of community involvement and common ethnic solidarity in an otherwise hostile land.

The land was harsh in terms of its arid ecology and also in terms of how other Americans regarded these farmers as outsiders and interlopers. The Cortez Growers Association (CGA) provided some community structure and cohesion to the life of the farmers. Membership in the organization was contingent upon board approval and the payment of fifty dollars. From its origins, it evolved into a diversified structure, encompassing the marketing of produce, the shipping of goods, the purchase of farm supplies on a collective basis, even the drying of fruit. (Matsumoto, p.49; 53) However, far beyond a purely business related collective of farmers, the CGA created an important cultural institution. It staged traditional Noh plays for the community and provided English language and Sunday school instruction, although some members of the community retained their devout Buddhism, despite the efforts of Christian missionaries. The CGA showed how these farmers could retain their Japanese culture and still function as loyal Americans

Ironically, the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act that limited the number of Japanese immigrants reduced some of the hostility to the members of the community for a time. But after the outbreak of World War II, much of this changed. The FBI questioned and seized the holdings of Issei leaders based upon their racial identity alone. (Matsumoto, p. 91) Many Japanese farmers, as a result of their displacement, lost their leases to their farms. The CGA cushioned some of the blows that internment provided to this still-fragile, but once-flourishing community. It arranged for the supervision of the land while the Japanese-Americans were away. The CGA and the knowledge that the lives they had worked so hard to build were not completely at an end provided some comfort to Japanese-Americans, forced to sleep in community settings in barracks-like structures, and live on 45 cents a daily ration of food. Still, the conditions of the camps forced ordinary, innocent people to live criminals -- toiling at enforced agricultural projects, eating at a canteen -- there was even a barber shop, again, much like a prison. (Matsumoto, pp.121-11) After the war, the tension and cultural divide that had been created between Japanese-Americans and their non-Japanese neighbors was not so easy to heal.