ornamental plum trees in bloom
It’s March in the Bay Area, and everything is in bloom. The flowering trees are at their height this time of the year – ornamental plums, cherries, and crab apples turn into clouds of pink and white. Most of these trees do not bear edible fruit – they’ve been bred for their showy flowers. Here and there however, I spot real orchards in bloom – the flowers are not as profuse nor long-lasting but yield fruit come summer. In front of the Los Altos Library, I found the apricot grove in full bloom, and in my own garden, my baby nectarine and plum trees (planted just last year) are flowering. I wish I could say that all the plants in my garden were drought tolerant, but they’re not – I make exceptions for fruit trees, and why not? After all, the Bay Area is the perfect place for fruit. The Sunset Western Garden Book has this to say about the Bay Area (zone 9): “Deciduous fruits and vegetables of nearly every kind thrive in these long, hot summers; winter cold is just adequate to satisfy the dormancy requirements of the fruit trees.” Admittedly, the weather is a little too warm for some fruits – apples and cherries taste better on the East Coast, but most fruit trees do exceptionally well here. It was not for nothing that the Silicon Valley was once called the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
apricot orchard
Not everyone knows that the Silicon Valley was once full of orchards instead of sprawling technology campuses and start-ups. Del Monte foods got their start here in San Francisco in the 1880s, and ran a huge fruit canning business – remember those canned peaches you may have eaten as a kid, before organic food became all the rage? My mother recalls that in post-war Japan where fresh fruit was rare, Del Monte cans were the ultimate get-well gifts. Until the 1960s, the Bay Area was the top fruit-canning region, not only of the US, but of the world. Talk to some old-timers, and they will tell you of the times when Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose – all of Santa Clara County consisted of orchards and farmland. In my area of the hills where each family has at least an acre of land, it’s easy to tell who’s been here for a long time – they almost always have a number of fruit trees on their property. The first house in the Bay Area in which I lived was in Sunnyvale. It was rented from an elderly couple, and they had an apricot tree (Blenheim), prune tree (Damson, I think), a persimmon tree (Fuyu), two tangerine trees, and an orange tree in a surprisingly small garden, and boy, did they fruit. I was making preserves and dried fruit all year. The prunes that I dried that summer lasted four more years.
So now we come to Japanese Internment Camps. Why do I mention them? Well, it was right around the turn of the century when the canning business was in full swing that the first wave of Japanese immigrants settled in California. When we think of Asian immigrants to the US, especially to the Silicon Valley, we typically think of engineers, but these first immigrants from China (starting in the 1850s) and Japan (starting in the 1880s) were mostly small farmers. They came to the US to become railroad workers and farmhands. It was after the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (immigration ban on Chinese laborers due to anti-Chinese sentiment – anger directed towards the Chinese taking up white Americans jobs and willing to work for lower wages – sound familiar?) that Japanese immigration commenced – basically, Japanese laborers picked up where the Chinese laborers left off. Of course, the same trajectory of racism would descend on other immigrants as well. The immigration act of 1924, shut off almost all immigration from not just Japan, but Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Construction of the Poston War Relocation Center in 1942
Despite the challenges of making their way in a foreign land that was not too friendly, some times outright hostile, Japanese Americans generally did well – they were hard working and competent farmers, and by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, there were about 90,000 Japanese Americans in California, approximately 20,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area including the East Bay. In the “Valley of Heart’s Delight,” many had made their way from farmhands to renting their land, having shops, some lucky ones owning land, and were settling into middle class. All of them were resigned to some hostility from the community as a result of the war, but nevertheless, most were taken aback in 1942 when they were first asked to voluntarily relocate, then eventually forced from their homes into internment camps. After all, many of them were American citizens. From poor farming communities in Japan, they were unlikely to be a military threat, and since immigration had been cut off in 1924, they had already been in the US for two decades or more or born in the US. This little piece of American history is all too often forgotten. The internment camps were internment camps indeed, no more no less – cramped barracks surrounded with barbed wire, with inadequate healthcare, some also serving as sweatshops, but they were not at all comparable to the death camps of the Nazis. Nevertheless, many lives were ruined – over 100,000 Japanese Americans were ordered into internment camps, and most suffered huge financial losses, not to mention psychological scars.
Steamship Inaba Maru at harbor in Yokohama – my great grandmother arrived in the US on this ship
So why did this outrage on civil liberties occur? It was not just war-time paranoia and a threat to homeland security. When it came down to it, it was pure racism and greed masked by propaganda. After all, in Hawaii itself where the attack occurred, most Japanese Americans were not put into internment camps. The Japanese population in Hawaii was so large and integral to the Hawaiian industry and economy, that this would have been impractical. In the Western states (California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona) however, racist sentiments were high along with the desire for the jobs and land that the Japanese Americans occupied, and the population was manageable enough that internment was plausible. Most of the Japanese Americans from the Bay Area were sent to the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. Some sold their homes and businesses at throwaway prices before the relocation. Others came back after their imprisonment to find their homes ransacked and livelihoods lost. Some had sympathetic neighbors who had safeguarded their property, but these were the lucky ones.
My grandfather in MIS language school, located in the Presidio, San Francisco
My paternal great grandmother lost all her property in the war. She arrived in 1917 from Fukuoka, Japan at the port in Seattle on a ship named Inaba-Maru, to join her husband in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was 22 years old (her husband had immigrated in 1907), gave birth to two sons in the following two years, lost her husband, remarried, and eventually made her way to Idaho, then to California. Although she came from a farming community, she went into the restaurant business instead. At the time of the war, she managed two restaurants, having worked her way up from nothing. In 1942, her younger son in San Diego was interned in the Poston internment camp in Arizona. Her older son went to war in the Military Intelligence Service under General Mac Arthur, and became the first Japanese American to be awarded the Silver Star for bravery (my paternal grandfather), but at 50 years old, her American dream was crushed. I believe I was eight or nine years old when the phone rang, and my parents informed me that my great grandmother had passed away. This came out of the blue, as I had not even known that I had a living great grandmother until then (my father was not at all close with his extended family). Perhaps it was just as well that I had not known her, since in her old age – she lived into her nineties – she had grown senile and paranoid. She believed that everyone was out to steal her money. I cannot help but wonder if her experience during the war had left a deep impression on her psyche. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granted $20,000 in reparations to every surviving internee, but for my great grandmother, it was too little, too late.
Blenheim apricot flower
So what did the Japanese Americans do after the war? Many Japanese Americans in the Bay Area came back and started over, although some went to the Midwest or the South. Both my grandfather and his brother settled in the Midwest, one in Michigan, one in Illinois. In the Bay Area, as the canning business started to wind down, some Japanese Americans made headway in the plant nursery business. In fact, we still see many nurseries owned by Japanese Americans in the Bay Area – Yamagami’s nursery in Cupertino, Furuichi Bros in Los Altos, Ogawa-Mune nursery in Fremont, to name a few. I love visiting the Furuichi nursery in particular – they have a small Japanese garden with a koi pond and wisterias in full bloom if you go at the right time of the year. I am able to browse these beautiful plants and have them in my garden because I came to California from the Midwest to attend Stanford, and coincidentally, married a man whose first stop in the US was Salt Lake City, Utah (although he traveled there by plane, not by boat). So we come full circle. I wonder what my great grandmother would have said if she had seen my garden. One hopes she would have smiled.
Garden in the Hills 