Japanese American 

Farm History

In the 1880’s, many of the first Japanese immigrants, the Issei, traveled to Hawaii and the West Coast and worked in agriculture as farm laborers. In 1909, half of the Japanese labor force in the United States - roughly 39,500 out of 79,000 - worked in agriculture, three-fourths of them in California (Farming the Home Place by Dr. Valerie J. Matsumoto.) Farming families faced intense racism such as from the Alien Land Act of 1913 which banned “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning or leasing land, forcing them to move every three years and abandon the fruits of their labor. The Immigration Act of 1924 barred all Asian immigration into the U.S. Because of this, Issei placed the title to land in their American-born Nisei children’s names. During WWI, their farms grew and prospered. By 1920, 5,152 Japanese farmers held 361,276 acres in California and produced crops valued at $67 million(Farming the Home Place by Dr. Valerie J. Matsumoto.) This led to the formation of Anti-Japanese Associations and increased animosity towards JA farmers.

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor during WWII, over 110,000 Japanese and their American-born children were unconstitutionally forced to leave their homes and farms and sent to concentration camps without due process. It would take until 1988 when President Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that the U.S. government would acknowledge that race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership were the reasons for the incarceration, stating that a grave injustice was done to both citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and internment of civilians during WWII. After the war, many JA farmers who had lost farms, equipment, businesses and more returned home or moved to a different state, creating a JA diaspora. They were forced to start their lives anew with courage, dignity and determination. We are proud to share their stories: