My Family lost their farm during Japanese Incarceration. I set out to find what remains. – Mother Jones

West of SacramentoMy grandfather Shigeki and his brothers Yoshimi and Tadao were farmers in Broderick, a rural community. We were told the land they worked was leased by my great-uncle’s in-laws, the Abe family, who were glad to have the labor of the young and fit Murai brothers. They were quiet, hardworking and skilled. They must have enjoyed the occasional breeze from the Sacramento River, despite the hard work. The Murai brothers are of the Nisei generation. They were born in the United States as Japanese immigrants (Issei). My grandfather was raised and educated in Japan before he returned home to work in this land to earn a living and to build a family. His story is not uncommon. In 1940, 45 percent were employed on the Pacific Coast by Japanese workers. Californian Issei and Nisei farmers It dominatedThe state has both wholesale and retail markets for fruit and vegetables.

I don’t know much about this farm. My family abandoned it in 1942 when my grandfather joined the Army. He and his brothers were also incarcerated during World War II. Although the land was never theirs, the house they left behind was lovingly built with the help of the Japanese community. They were excited to make new memories in the house that was still relatively young when they left. Many of the children they had hoped to raise in that house would grow up in incarceration camp.

This week marks the 80th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which authorized the secretary of war to round up as many as 126,000 Japanese American men, women, and children who lived on the Pacific Coast, after the Pearl Harbor attack stoked fears about Japanese American loyalty. This period was often referred to as Japanese internement for many years. But it wasn’t. term is not adequateIt is a description of the imprisonment of foreign nationals. More than half of those detained were American citizens.

The anti-Japanese sentiment that allowed such a drastic action was not born suddenly after Pearl Harbor. It had been simmering over decades, stoked primarily by white labor and business organizations resentful towards Japanese workers and farmers. Japanese Americans who were forced from their land lost valuable property worth an Estimated $3.7 Billion in today’s dollars, and $7.7 billion worth of income.

However, not all losses can be quantified, even if they are estimated. How can we count the dispersed communities and the disappearance of culture? In the 80 years since, there’s been another loss: the memories of survivors of this forced removal. Some memories have faded, but many others have been kept secret by families who decided not to speak about them. To move on. To insist it wasn’t that bad. The memories that are gone are more urgent. There’s an urgency to collect these stories before there are no more living survivors, a day that is approaching quickly.

The memories of my family are almost all gone. My grandfather, great uncles, and their wives are all gone. My father, my closest connection to this history, and to the Japanese portion of my ancestry was also lost when I was just 2 years old. I never got to speak with him about his relationship with his father, or what he might’ve shared about the farm, his time in the Army, or his family’s incarceration. To avoid losing these memories completely, I reached out to my father’s brother, Uncle Stan, and some of their cousins—some who were very young when their families were detained, others born after. I spoke with them hoping that there’s still a story to inherit.

The disappearance my family’s farm can be traced back even further than the executive order that forced them to leave. In the early 20th century, Japanese immigrants arrived in California. The backlash began immediately in the same vein as the anti-Chinese bias.

The tensions were addressed by the San Francisco Labor Council in May 1900. White laborers were afraid for their jobs. However, the San Francisco Mayor James Duval Phelan stressed that Japanese immigration was more than a labor issue. It was a serious threat to American existence, comparable to the rise that led the fall of Rome. He stated that immigration was “not a labor question, nor a local one, but an American question involving the existence of our Republic.” In a speech applauded by the attendees, Mayor Phelan said he believed that Japanese “aren’t the stuff of which American citizens can be made.”

Though the federal government was hesitant to ban Japanese immigration as it had Chinese immigration because of Japan’s status as a rising global power, pressure from California farm and labor groups led it to strike the informal Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan in 1907. The Japanese government agreed not to issue passports to laborers. Already in California, the Issei started sending for wives from Japan.

California’s legislature passed the Alien Land Law of 1913 to prohibit noncitizens owning land or long term leases. This was done in order to address the Japanese families that were setting down roots. This law was largely ineffective because of its many loopholes. White farmers and business organizations led an anti-Japanese campaign to pass a more restrictive, if not again, law. Somewhat ineffectiveCalifornia Issei accounted for 10 percent of California’s total crop market value in 1920. Cecilia Tsu, a historian at the University of California, Davis, says this second law was particularly important because it “reflected more widespread public opinion that was brewing about the danger of Japanese immigrants settling as families.” She points out that white farmers feared a growing population of birthright citizens, the Nisei, who could not be constitutionally barred from owning land.

And so, in the 1940s, my family’s farm was leased to them by someone who could legally own the land. Their last name, Todhunter.

Broderick today is part of West Sacramento. Todhunter Avenue runs along the busy Sacramento Avenue, all the way to its banks at the Sacramento River. It’s a quiet road, lined mostly by single family homes. There’s a church. A school. A large park. I haven’t been able to locate any records to tell me where the farm was, but as I click through the photos of the street named for its once legal owner, I try to imagine it here.

Follow the Sacramento River southeast until you reach Old Sacramento at the riverbank. There is a vacant lot between Capitol and 3rd streets. This was once Japan Alley, which was the heart and soul of a bustling, thriving Japantown in the 1930s. Here, the community came together to shop, eat, celebrate Obon, the Japanese Buddhist festival. I can picture my grandfather, who I’ve been told was the most outgoing of the Murai brothers, telling jokes to the Japanese shopkeepers or teasing the kids hanging outside the pharmacy on 3rd Street.

I can picture him walking these streets, perhaps saying goodbye to the people who accompanied him to the train station three months before Pearl Harbor. My grandfather would eventually graduate the Military Intelligence Service language school at Camp Savage, Minnesota. But that day at the station, my uncle says my grandfather didn’t entirely understand what was happening to him as dozens of family members and friends waved farewell, cheering and yelling “banzai” as he pulled away from the station.

Seven months later, the same family members boarded trains to Arizona and Colorado. They sold most their belongings not knowing when they would return. Hideo’s daughter Doris Yamamoto was about 5 when they were forcibly removed, and she remembers that a trunk stored a beautiful little white outfit that her mother, who was a talented seamstress, had stitched for her. She was devastated when she found out that the trunk had been taken or lost before they arrived at camp in Poston. Nobody was there to wave goodbye.

On February 19, 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt issued EO 9066. The order allowed the secretary of war to “prescribe military areas in such places…from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The order did not specifically name the Japanese, but they alone were targeted supposedly out of military necessity for the safety of the nation.

The Japanese Americans had everything to lose, and in their absence, everything was lost. There was so much to lose.

Austin Anson, the managing director of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association left Pearl Harbor shortly after the Japanese army attacked. His mission was to press Federal authorities to imprison all Japanese residents in the area. Anson spoke to the War and Navy department and all congressmen he could get to hear, emphasizing how dangerous Japanese saboteurs were to the Pacific Coast. It may seem odd that a representative for a farming group would talk about military strategy with political leaders, but Anson wasn’t afraid to say the quiet part out loud.

“We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons,” Anson The Saturday Evening PostIn May 1942. “We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, they stayed to take over…And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either.”

A commission established by Congress and President Jimmy Carter investigated the forced removal of tens to thousands of American citizens in the 1980s. They found that the incarceration “was not justified by military necessity,” but instead shaped by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Though the latter two factors may have been a product of that specific moment in time, the prejudice against the Japanese people was a direct product of the decades of work by anti-Japanese labor and business groups. The Issei and Nisei were successful at what they did, despite the legal barriers they’d faced, and it terrified the agricultural establishment, and that fear was an essential component in instigating an incarceration that was otherwise unjustified.

While Anson was in DC advocating incarceration of Japanese families on the Pacific Coast, they were also there. Their memories are destroyed. Families ripped up photos and destroyed mementos that could have linked them to Japan as FBI agents began taking community leaders away for questioning. I lost heirlooms I don’t even know about. But the exclusion orderIt went up anyway, and it didn’t discriminate between Japanese people who were loyal and those who weren’t.

“The Japanese were never Americans in California,” Dr. C. L. Dedrick, a sociologist and Census Bureau expert with one of the federal agencies tasked with implementing forced removal in 1942 told the Saturday Evening Post. “Now, when they are dispersed, they may ultimately become absorbed in American life, not by intermarriage, but through losing their concentrated identity. This may be their great chance to become Americans.”

At the same time he was “never an American,” my grandfather was a “Human secret weapon.” As a Nisei linguist in the Pacific, he screened the mail of Japanese POWs, including that of General Tojo Hideki. Congress passed a bill in 2010 to honor Nisei soldiers. It included the Military Intelligence Service. Medal of gold for Congress. This recognition came five year after my grandfather passed away. It cannot change the mixed emotions that my uncle expressed about his father’s service while he was still alive.

My grandfather was able, at one point in the war, to visit his family at their camp, Granada Colorado. He was shocked when the train stopped in front of him in what seemed like the middle-of-nowhere. He was then taken by truck to the Amache camp. He smiles beside his sister-inlaw Masaye in the only photo that I have from his visit. My uncle told me that my grandfather was shocked by the experience.

My grandfather remained with the Army until at most 1947, just one year after the closure of the last incarceration camps in March 1946. The rest of the Murais were scattered. During their time in the camp, the Todhunter family, their landlord, sold the property in Broderick where they had once maintained their farm, and sent them a sum for the house they’d built on the land.

Hideo’s family ended up in Cleveland, Ohio, where they were some of the only Japanese people because his daughter needed to be in a hospital there. Yoshimi’s family remained in Colorado for a few years before returning to Sacramento, but he passed away not long after the war. Tadao moved with his family often as he worked various farming jobs. He even leased his farm for a time before finally returning to California.

Other Japanese Americans in the area also returned to Sacramento as soon as possible. In their absence, Koreans, Chinese, Mexicans, Portuguese, and Black communities moved in. Japanese leaders worked hard at rebuilding a Japantown flourishesThese new communities were diverse and, in general, successful. Despite what was lost, the community thrived. However, their return was never truly welcomed.

The white community and city government viewed Japantown and the surrounding multiethnic West End as a “Slum area,” a major PR problem in part because the West End was the gateway to Sacramento from San Francisco. In 1954, the Capitol Mall project was initiated. Finally, implementedDespite protests by the Japanese community, they were accepted. Fifteen square blocks were demolished and half a century’s worth of history were removed; 350 businesses and 92 per cent of the population were also displaced.

Today, the area where Japantown used to be is home to luxury apartments, parking garages, and Class A office building. As for the farmers, the congressional commission studying the incarceration found that those “who had most before the war, also lost most.” Many farmers lacked the necessary funds to start over, and so took whatever jobs they could. Many people, like my grandfather were gardeners for their entire lives.

The details areIt is unclear when and how my grandfather Shigeki returned to California with his bride, Chizuko, a Japanese woman from his hometown. Chizuko was originally from Iwakuni and witnessed the flash and the mushroom cloud when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima while she was walking to work. My family wondered if she was exposed to the bomb when she died from an aggressive and severe form of cancer at the age of 59. I never saw her, but Shigeki wrapped me in a tiny pink quilt that she had made for my older sibling when I was born.

For most of his life, Shigeki didn’t talk about the war or the farm before it. Similar seems to be true for his brothers and many others in the Japanese community. When my family talks about it, they either put a positive spin on it or share funny anecdotes. Ken tells me his mother smiled in the photo of him with my grandfather at camp. She only ever talked about the silver linings: a break from her job, time with friends, and the chance to enjoy her new life. Doris said that she doesn’t remember much about camp and didn’t share any details with her family after they left. As we talk, Doris recalls the Arizona desert heat, the joy of playing outside, and the terrifying memories of being surrounded by armed guards.

1980 saw the creation by the federal government of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment Civilians. This Commission was established to study EO 9066 and incarceration. The resulting 1983 report discussed the Japanese American community’s coping mechanisms. Dr. Tetsuden Kashima, in his testimony to the CWRIC, called the behavior “a social amnesia…a group phenomenon in which attempts are made to suppress feelings and memories of particular moments or extended time periods…a conscious effort…to cover up less than pleasant memories.”

The report also included testimony from more than 500 detainees. The tireless work of Japanese American activists. Their continued organizing, along with the commission’s findings, led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, one of the only times in American history when the government offered reparations and apologies for its actions against a minority group. The Civil Liberties Act provided $20,000 for redress to all survivors of incarceration camps. These checks came with a formal apology letter from President George H.W. Bush.

But the Japanese community’s feelings about the commission and redress are often complicated. When Tadao’s daughter Molly Nakaji speaks about the redress, she reflects mostly about how for her parents and so many others, it was too little too late, as they had passed away before they were able to receive the money or the apology. Lisa Doi is a community organizer. Tsuru for Solidarity, an organization comprising Japanese American social justice advocates and allies, pointed out that the commission’s framing of incarceration as a result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership,” “isolates the incarceration to an anomaly” rather than being “part of a much longer history of racial violence and mass incarceration in the United States.”

She says that even though the government is not righteous, it still has value. “It’s perhaps an imperfect piece of legislation,” Doi says, but “it also serves as a reminder of what the government alongside communities is capable of doing to begin a process of repair.” Tsuru for Solidarity, motivated by the history of Japanese incarceration, works to end detention sites for all types of communities, with a focus on immigrants and refugees. Alongside groups like Nikkei Progressives and Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, Tsuru is now Organising to collect testimoniesFrom the Japanese American community in Support for HR40Federal legislation could create a study committee similar to the CSRIC. Reparations for African Americans.

Although redress was a major victory for the community it did not mean the end of a traumatizing experience that had impacted generations even if they were never detained. Diana Emiko Tsuchida created an oral history project to continue these conversations. Tessaku, Named for a magazineThis was published by Tule Lake, California prisoners. Her grandfather Tamotsu Tsuchida was, as she puts it, “quite a resistor in camp,” and was active in the fight for redress, eventually giving his own testimony to the commission.

To her family The apology letter was “the thing that they needed to let go of the guilt that they felt for being Japanese.” Diana’s grandfather died only a few years after receiving his $20,000. After a life of resistance, speaking out and refusing to forget, he used his $20,000. to pay for part-of his care at a nursing home. “I wish my grandfather knew that someone was going to care about what he went through,” Tsuchida tells me. She funds the oral historian project with her own money, with some support from Patreon. The stories are made available online. She hopes to create an exhibit or a podcast. “I feel like the best way I can honor what he went through is to continue the project,” she says.

Tessaku doesn’t aim to be the only project documenting these histories. Walk the FarmJapanese American farmers founded the organization to raise money for Japanese farmers who had been affected by the 2011 earthquake. Since then, the group has become a non-profit organization. Find out the stories about Issei Farms & Nisei Farms.Many of these were lost when their families were forcibly removed. It has nearly 90 stories, and is now aiming to accumulate 1,000. Glenn Tanaka, a farmer and organizer of Walk the Farm, says that his hope for the project is that it inspires a younger generation to talk to their family members about the incarceration and about their history before it’s too late.

“You know, we are the stewards of this history,” says Tsuchida as we discuss the fast-approaching day when there will be no more firsthand accounts. It is not an easy task, especially in a time where history is being written. Schools actively whitewashed. If we are to understand the incarceration not as an anomaly but instead part of a clear history of anti-Japanese sentiment, and an even greater history of racial prejudice in the US, then we are forced to accept that the story doesn’t end with the camps closing, the survivors passing on, or the family farm disappearing.

I am a researcherAs a fact-checker. The central question of most of my work is “How do you know that?” My job is to read everything a reporter writes and ask, How do I know?? I don’t accept less than the whole answer.

I have tried to check the facts of my family’s lives. I have verified their education in Japan via their internment records. My grandfather’s enlistment from military records. To prove that he was in Air Force, I use patches from his uniform. He was a sergeant.

How do I prove that he was proud of the vegetables he grew with his brothers? What were the keepsakes that they brought back from Japan to the US? How can I tell if his family sent letters to camp? Wondering if they were being screened in the same manner as the mail of Japanese soldiers.

I can’t. A librarian who helped me in researching this article earlier this week emailed to me. He said he found a listing for “Murai Bros.” in a 1941 Sacramento County rural directory; there, they are listed as farmers and property owners. I have pieced together this article from my family’s memories. One cousin’s 97-year-old uncle recalled the land owner “Todhunter.” I have tried to verify what I can. I feel like I am failing to do enough. I wish I could tell my family’s true story. I wish I could tell the whole story of my family, that farm, and my grandfather. I can only guess. From the anecdotes I’ve heard, I project the funny, kind, and loving man my mother describes to me onto the oral histories I read, wishing so badly that I could read his words too.

When I spoke to Glenn Tanaka, he asked me to submit my family’s story to the Walk the Farm database. I told him that I’m afraid I don’t know enough about it. There are too many details missing, so much lost that I can’t confirm. But he tells me, “I’d like to have a story like that,” because our farm was real, too.