Devoted Farmers Nourish a Fading Japanese American Tradition
Before the sky shows its early morning blush, Jimmy Otsuka is already crouched in the middle of his beloved strawberry fields, carefully tending to newly planted seedlings.
It will be dark before he’s done. Wedded to the rhythms of farm life, this third-generation Japanese American farmer still works the five-acre patch in Santa Ana that his father bought in 1947.
Today, however, the short furrows of his field quickly end in asphalt. The farm is surrounded by fences and tract homes. Cars whiz by on busy Fairview Street, shattering the pastoral illusion.
Urbanization has swallowed up the orange groves and vegetable fields of Orange County, leaving only the odd slice of farmland sandwiched between business parks and subdivisions.
Otsuka is painfully aware that five decades of development and the sheer force of economics--pressures that make the land more valuable than what’s grown on it--may soon bring an end to the only life he’s known.
“I think I’m going to be the last generation,” he said, a tinge of melancholy crossing his broad, tanned face. “My whole life’s been farming, but it’s just getting too hard to survive. Honestly, I’d encourage my boy to do something else.”
Otsuka, 46, is one of the small number of remaining Japanese American growers in Southern California and one of even fewer who still own their land. Once, thousands of such families farmed the coastal region from Ventura County to San Diego County.
Their slow disappearance reflects the demise of family farms throughout the nation. But for Japanese Americans, an ethnic group that made its name in farming California, it’s a bittersweet close to an immigrant story that began more than 100 years ago.
“It’s really the end of an era,” said agricultural economist Desmond Jolly, director of the University of California Small Farms Program.
“Back then, that’s what they [Japanese Americans] knew how to do and that’s where the opportunities were,” Jolly said. “My sense is that with the younger generations, other opportunities became available, and they chose to enter fields like medicine or engineering. For the older people, if your kids aren’t interested in farming, then there’s no point in hanging on to the land.”
The few who remain, working small plots in otherwise suburbanized neighborhoods, juggle more than their parents ever did. They use computers as well as tractors and struggle to carry on a way of life that seems more of a relic than a viable career.
The loyalty that agriculture inspires can be puzzling to those who aren’t part of it, said David Mas Masumoto, a third-generation farmer in the Central Valley and author of books chronicling his life on the land. Although selling out means exchanging a hard life for easy money, farming carries with it a powerful tradition of different values.
“It’s so hard for the rest of the public to understand that--because, as a society, we’re so driven by economic definitions of success, status and power,” he said. “But farmers work with the land, and we nurture things and watch them grow. It’s wonderfully humbling to work with nature.”
In choosing to follow his father’s and grandfather’s paths, Masumoto knew from the beginning that it would be a difficult life.
“It was going to be a struggle. You were never going to really make money, but there are other values just as important,” he said. “That’s the spirit I see that gives hope for the future. There’s going to be a percentage of people who make the choices I made.”
The recent death of farmer Hiroshi Fujishige highlighted the difficult choices that face the dwindling numbers of farming families today. Fujishige was patriarch of an Anaheim family that became known for holding out for 20 years against multimillion-dollar offers for their 56-acre strawberry farm near Disneyland.
Walt Disney Co. had made offers over the years for the parcel, which it wanted for another theme park, but Fujishige steadfastly refused. Other developers also had eyed the land, now valued at up to $90 million, according to some real estate experts.
In recent years, though, the longtime farmer had indicated that he would consider parting with the property. In August, his family announced that it would sell most of the land to Disney, keeping only 3.5 acres and a produce stand along Harbor Boulevard. Fujishige had been involved in that business decision, said close friends of the family. He died in September at 76.
Community observers marvel that the Fujishiges held firm for so long. The pressure to sell is intense when land prices skyrocket beyond what farmers can make in a lifetime.
It was just before the turn of the century that Japanese by the thousands crossed the Pacific to labor on fertile U.S. farmlands. From 1885 to 1924, 239,000 left for Hawaii and 196,000 more left for the mainland to work on plantations, ranches and farms, says historian Masakazu Iwata in a book about Japanese American farmers.
Despite prejudice and legal discrimination that kept first-generation immigrants from owning land until 1952, it was the sweat and labor of ethnic farmers that transformed California, producing the fruits, vegetables, livestock and flowers that made the state an agricultural powerhouse.
Already known as hard workers, Japanese Americans quickly gained a reputation for being gifted in farming, landscaping and horticulture. They dominated specialty produce, and by 1910, 80% of the people in strawberry farming--a high-profit, labor-intensive industry--in Los Angeles County were Japanese.
“There were a large number of second sons who weren’t going to inherit land at home,” said Masumoto. “So they came seeking a better life here.”
But the years surrounding World War II marked a turning point because many families lost the land they’d been farming after they were sent off to internment camps. Some chose not to return to farming. It was the beginning of the exodus from agriculture.
As racial bias eased, succeeding generations chose other fields that weren’t open to their parents.
The vast majority of the three dozen or so Japanese American families currently in the farming and nursery business in Orange County lease the plots they cultivate. The handful who are owners frequently receive purchase offers.
“Every time there’s a real estate upswing, I get people coming by to make me offers, and I have to say I’ve been tempted,” said Otsuka, the Santa Ana strawberry grower. At the height of the real estate boom in the 1980s, his property at Fairview and Civic Center Drive was drawing offers that exceeded his annual income by as much as 20 times.
Almost all the counties in Southern California have been steadily losing farm acreage. From 1982 to 1992, Los Angeles County, which along with Orange County had been the primary base for Japanese American farmers, saw farmland shrink 42%, from 317,757 acres to 183,569.
In Orange County, the numbers are just as dramatic. In 1982, 165,262 acres were being farmed. A decade later, only 37% of that--60,740 acres--was still in use. About a third of the 574 farmers in business during that period got out.
In many ways, farming remains the grueling, all-consuming task it’s always been. Planting begins in early fall for strawberry farmers like Otsuka; during harvest season, which runs from January through June, it becomes a seven-day-a-week operation for him, with the help of 18 to 20 laborers.
Otsuka said he knows his long hours are draining on his family, but he makes a concerted effort to be there for his wife, who works with him, and three children.
He conceded, though, that balancing family and farming can be difficult at times: “If you don’t love it, you can’t do it, because you’re surely not in this for the money.”
