By Jake Whitney

On the morning of May 29, 1942, Mary Tsukamoto awoke to find her mattress on the floor. Glancing around the bedroom that she shared with her husband, Al, it took her a moment to get her bearings: Today was the day she and her family would lose their freedom. Their bed frame, along with the rest of their furniture, was in storage. “We had broken no law, committed no criminal act,” she later wrote. But “on this day we were to leave our homes. No one knew where we were to go nor for how long we would be gone. … We were labeled as criminals because our faces were Japanese.”

Al and Mary’s daughter, Marielle, who was 5 at the time, clearly recalls that morning. “I remember getting up early, and it was cold,” Marielle, now 87, said to me recently. “I was told to go get my grandmother. She was in her 60s and was in the garden crying because she believed she wouldn’t come back alive.” As her grandmother, Ito, cried in her rose garden, her grandfather, Kuzo, took one last look at the grapevines he had planted 20 years earlier. “It is the darkest day of our lives,” he told the family. “We are about to lose our treasured liberty. Will we ever see this dear place again?”

Kuzo Tsukamoto had left Hiroshima around 1885, when he was 17. After laboring in the cane fields of Hawaii, fishing for salmon in Canada and repairing railroad tracks in the Northwestern United States, he settled in Florin, an agricultural community nine miles south of Sacramento. Japanese immigrants there had innovated a technique for planting strawberries between rows of grapevines that “proved to alter the economic history” of the town, according to the Florin Historical Society. Soon, Florin was shipping 250 train cars of strawberries per season and calling itself the Strawberry Capital of the World. Kuzo’s wife, Ito, joined him in Florin in 1902, and they had four children—Margaret, Edith, Alfred (Al) and Nami. In 1920, they moved to a 35-acre farm.

In Florin, where white Americans and Japanese immigrants’ families lived and worked side by side, racism was always present. An alien land law prohibited Japanese immigrants from becoming citizens and owning land, so first-generation immigrants, known by the Japanese word issei, typically had to wait until they had children—nisei, the second generation—before they could buy land. (They either bought land under their children’s names or waited for their children to grow old enough to buy it themselves.) And while some whites were grateful to Japanese farmers for driving the town’s economic boom, others resented their success. “When the Japanese were scarce and we were their customers, they were our friends,” Al Tsukamoto, then 80, recalled in a 1992 interview for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). “But as the Japanese population grew and built their own stores and stopped patronizing [white-owned stores], they didn’t like us.”

To read the entire article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/during-world-war-ii-farmer-risked-everything-help-japanese-american-neighbors-180985441/