By John Tateishi
October 21, 2011

Printer-friendly version

Several years ago, I spoke at a university where students surprisingly knew a lot about the internment — surprising because this wasn’t on the West Coast, wasn’t in an area where there was a significant Japanese American or Asian American population. This was the University of Kentucky, deep in the heart of bluegrass country.

During a Q&A, someone challenged a comment I had made that the economic impact to JAs as a result of the internment was made particularly harsh by the enormous loss experienced by JA farmers who lost large expanses of valuable farms lands.

The student said he understood how this would be true in places like the Central Valley in California but wondered how that impact could have been felt in metropolitan areas where most JAs resided.

The significance, of course, was that at the outbreak of WWII, most of America was still largely rural: the Midwest, the South, the Plains and Mountain states, and yes, even the West Coast.  

Places like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle were surrounded by family-owned farms, many by JA farmers. I grew up in West Los Angeles where most of the enclaves of communities like Sawtelle (where I lived) were surrounded by farmlands. Places like Mar Vista and Venice and Culver City on the Westside, or south to Gardena, areas like Compton or Lawndale or Inglewood had miles of family farms, much of it owned by Nisei. 

What’s known today as the Peninsula south of San Francisco and the Silicon Valley area around San Jose were virtually all agricultural land, as was the East Bay. From Half Moon Bay down to Santa Cruz and Monterey and Watsonville, and over to Hollister, JA farms gave energy to the agricultural life of the coastal areas. JA family farms existed and flourished in places like Santa Maria, Oxnard, and as far south as the San Diego area.

Consider this: when Nisei farmers consulted with their local farm bureau offices in 1942 to ask about the rumors of an evacuation and whether they should even consider planting their crops, they were assured that they would be there for the Spring harvest and were urged to plant as usual. So they borrowed heavily from their local banks for seed and other necessities as they normally did, anticipating the harvest to pay off those loans.

What I found in my research during the Redress Campaign was that just about all of the JA farming communities were hit with the so-called evacuation notices just weeks before the harvest, and there was no way the Japanese farmers could recover from the enormous losses they incurred by leaving their crops behind untouched. In no way could that have been mere coincidence, especially when you consider that harvest comes at different times based on regional climates. 

Once again, the student acknowledged that the exclusion was wrong and even heartless, but he wondered if the huge economic loss could be attributed to the loss to the farming communities because, after all, these were not huge farms for the most part and were all pretty much family farms. True, but then Japanese farmers in the Central Valley had valuable family-owned properties and had a monopoly on truck farming, a multi-million dollar industry by 1941.

[ SHOW FULL STORY ]

Printer-friendly version