On the wall of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center hangs a picture so small, dark, and faded that you might pass it by without a glance, if you didn’t know to look for it. In the picture, a woman in a full skirt and bonnet sits on the seat of a rusted tractor, orchard trees spread above her head. This woman, Hatsumi Mishimoto, is an Issei (Japanese immigrant to North America) and farmer who settled in the Hood River Valley. This woman worked on the farm all day, took care of the children all day, prepared her family’s food, kept the living quarters clean, faced internment after the U.S. government ordered her removal from her home, and faced continued ostracism upon her return to the Hood River Valley. This woman’s story is not unique.
Sitting down for coffee in Portland with Linda Tamura, author of Hood River Issei and Nissei Soldiers Break their Silence, felt like peering at the past through the bottom of sea-glass jar; her animation bright and reflective. Linda and I had just sat down after viewing the photo at the Nikkei Legacy Center when she began to recount memories from her own childhood spent on her parents’ orchard in Hood River. There she made toys out of boxes and sticks, her growing limbs cushioned by her chair tree whenever they needed respite from their hours of orchard play. I sat and listened to Linda, mesmerized, sipping on a very-Portland almond milk steamer that I had chosen, less than ten minutes earlier, from the coffee shop’s selection of six very-Portland non-dairy milk steamers. Yet, before Linda could finish describing the contrasting memories of this orchard: blisters and sweat for her parents, and a playground for her and her siblings, the barista informed us that the shop would be closing momentarily.
Linda smiled in blithe, unabashed by the surprise closure, and ushered me to the outdoor seating area beside the coffee shop, so that we could resume our conversation. Linda had barely finished describing the story of her grandmother’s immigration when the barista returned, dismissing us from the outside section. Linda smiled again, thanked the barista, and beaming still, beckoned me down the muggy Portland street, where we finished our conversation while leaning against the side of a cinema building. Linda’s sea- glass animation could not be phased by a twist in the plan, bad weather, or a closed coffee shop. After all, she was an orchard kid; and if I could choose one word to describe orchard work, I would choose unexpected.
For her past research, Linda collected stories from Hood River Issei women, many who immigrated to Oregon in the 1920s. Many of these women held romantic views of a luxurious life in the United States, visions fueled by the prosperous men in top hats and crisp suits that returned to Japan after spending five years earning money in the U.S. These women did not know that the vast majority of Japanese men who immigrated to the U.S. were paid a fraction of the wages earned by other migrants, and seldom earned enough after five years to return to Japan and marry. Thus, many men sought arranged marriages with Japanese women, who would then travel to meet their new husbands in the U.S. At nineteen years old, Linda’s grandmother became one of these women, another sort of Issei women in the pictures. A common “picture wife”, Linda’s grandmother sent a series of photographs to a potential husband, and once he decided to marry her, she joined him in the states.
Many picture brides were surprised to discover the extent to which their lives in the United States differed from their expectations. They found that, no matter how hard they squinted, they could not make the America they saw match the image that padded their memories, the returning men who strutted through their streets back home, outfitted in stiff top-hats from the U.S. Instead, these women lived in houses more akin to barns, learned to cook and sew in the early mornings and evenings, worked alongside their husbands on the farms all day, and worried for the safety of their children who often strayed through the farms, unattended, or slept in basinets under the fruit trees as their mothers worked. Most of these women lived down dirt roads, in rural areas, with no neighbors in site, sometimes in love-less marriages, and often with no family members on their side of the Pacific Ocean.
Linda recounted testimonials from women whose husbands scolded them for taking a break in their farm labor. One of these women grew so terrified to halt her work that she toiled in the fields until just a few days before giving birth. A particularly famous Issei woman, Shizue Iwatsuki, used poetry to paint a picture of her anguished new life on an orchard in the Hood River Valley. One evening, Shizue missed her family with such a passion that she prayed to the stars for an image of what her loved ones were doing at that moment, an ocean away. Many of these women replaced dreams of romantic and lavish lives in the United States with dreams of returning home to their mothers in Japan, yet they seldom lacked the financial means to do so.
As if these Oregon Issei women had not faced enough anguish, in 1942, they were swept from their farms and ushered onto trains, with no knowledge of their destinations. When the trains screeched to a halt, the women and their families found themselves interned at camps, hundreds of miles from the Hood River Valley. Linda recounted the story of her father, a second generation Japanese-American who enlisted in the United States military. On leave from the military, he would visit his parents at an interment camp in California. When his leave ended, he continued to fight for the very country whose leaders held his family captive.
I could say that, once released from internment camps, the Issei women returned to their lives on the farms. Yet, I would wonder about the accuracy of this statement. Were the lives of Issei women farmers really their own? These grueling, lonesome lives they never signed up for? Instead, it seems that each Issei woman returned, not to her own life, but to some life, some existence, with her toiling body far removed from her own heart.
What would Hatsumi Mishimoto, the woman whose picture hangs on the wall of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, say with regards to ownership of her life? Over email, Hatsumi’s great-grandson explained to me that his great-grandmother came to the U.S. through an arranged marriage, and did not, in fact, want to work as a farmer. Yet, surprised by the demands that awaited her, she made do. What other life could she lead? These Issei women farmers, separated from familiarity by miles and ocean-crossings, unable to speak the language that now surrounded them, and unable to afford the trip back home, simply made do.
I write this in a coffee shop in the center of Hood River, Oregon, a town set within a backdrop of fruit orchards and wine vineyards, with trees that bristle when wind sweeps across the winding Columbia River. I spent much of my weekend working at farmers markets in Hood River and Mosier, selling peaches alongside the woman who manages the orchard where I have worked for the past two weeks. When customers pass our stand, they see a young farmer with a bohemian hair wrap twisted around her dark locks, standing behind boxes of fruit and a jar of dehydrated fruit-leathers, their cylindrical shapes held together by hand-tied twine bows. These customers are drawn in by words like organic and tree-ripened. At produce booths nearby, crisp beet leaves peak out from burlap bags, young farmers in trucker hats, knit-caps, and flannels cut carrot tops, weigh eggplants, and rearrange mason jars of sauerkraut. Customers immerse themselves in trances of home-cured sausage and newly-risen sourdough.
I am guilty of it myself. Well, maybe not the sausage part, but only because I’m a vegetarian. We farmers market customers often hold romanticized visions of sustainable farming, visions painted in the threads of flannels and work boots, in February pantries stocked with jars of local, July berries. We seldom look beyond the market-ready attire and sustainability buzzwords to see the full farmer that stands behind them. We seldom see her 4am morning, her sleepless nights, her cut-up, dirt-studded fingernails, her muscular arms that gained their tone not from hours spent lifting barbells in the gym, but from hours spent lifting boxes of produce, her stress fizzing as she wonders if she’ll grow enough, her stress fizzing as she worries that she’ll grow too much, the last-minute phone calls to the food pantry to ensure that all produce finds a home, her weather destruction, her weather delays, her everything falling into or out of place, always unplanned.
Learning about the lives of pre-WWII Japanese women farmers in the Hood River Valley allows me to consider the romanticized lens with which we often view agricultural work. Sure, many sustainable farmers today would argue that the outcome is worth the grind, and not solely for the monetary returns (those may or may not amount to the work put in). Rather, these farmers remain passionate about creating a better world, about promoting the health of our communities, our people, and our soil. At the end of the day, when all the potatoes are crated up and the spades hung back in the shed, many of these farmers would not choose another profession. Yet the seeds of our sustainable future are planted in soil that is sometimes lonely, sometimes painful, and almost always under-appreciated and under-paid.
Of course, I do not wish to relate the work of todays Hood River Valley farmers with the toil of Issei farmers who faced unfathomable oppression. Rather, by learning about the painful lives of Issei women farmers, I am forced to consider how a trade so romanticized, not only requires some of the longest, hardest work, but also remains grounded in a history of oppression. Now, as I walk through the Hood River Farmers Market, the wind blowing off of the Columbia river and sweeping through my hair, I will remind myself that the same wind bristled through the leaves of the pear trees planted by Issei women. I will stop and wonder how often we glamorize the painful. How often do we romanticize an experience that, at one time, sprouted from roots of oppression?
