Oregon issei – Emma Zimmerman

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.

Linda Tamura, who was so kind to give me not only many stories, but personal words of encouragement, as she was once *just like me*, at the start of her first research/writing project.

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?

There is No Experience

I push the bell on the front door of Bessie’s green, Hood River farmhouse and count to sixty, but am met with no answer. The only audible noise is a faint knocking in the distance, a sound I attribute to the farm workers lining the surrounding country roads. I ring again and wait another minute before deciding to try my luck at the back door. As I walk around, I hear the knocking again, louder this time, and look up to see an old woman with gray waves in her hair and an exasperated frown on her face, holding a cane high above her head and knocking it against the dining room window. She waves towards the back door with her cane, and it takes a couple more charade matches for me to decide that I should, indeed, let myself in. Bessie Assai, a 95-year-old, retired farmer, has every right to tell her guest, a 22-year-old, able-bodied nomad, to let herself in.

Once inside her house, I watch Bessie slowly maneuver towards the kitchen table with her walker. I immediately feel the uncertainty that I often feel with older people, unsure of how much I should offer to help. From a young age, I was taught to help my elders as much as possible, to treat them like kings and queens because they hold more knowledge than I could ever fathom. Yet, I wonder if a woman who spent her entire life relying on the strength of her body might feel disheartened when others question her physical independence. When Bessie doesn’t reply to my offer to help, I watch her maneuver towards the dining room table, and I take the seat across from her.

From the moment of our window-charades, my short visit with Bessie met absolutely none of my expectations. After spending less than an hour in her home, I can find many adjectives to describe Bessie: hardworking, bright-eyed, charming, and collected. Yet, I can also think of one thing that Bessie certainly is not. Bessie is not interested in discussing the political implications of her intersecting identities: the child of two Japanese immigrant farmers, a woman, a farmer on her father’s farm, a wife of a farmer, and a mother. Instead, Bessie wishes to discuss the habitual: the everyday life of her mother and father while managing an orchard in the Hood River Valley, her childhood spent on that orchard, and her adulthood spent on the orchard owned by her and her husband, also located in the Hood River Valley.

Bessie’s focus on the habitual, rather than the political, is especially surprising to me given the historical oppression of Japanese immigrants in the Hood River Valley. Following the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the heavy immigration of Chinese labor subsided, and the Oregon labor market began to rely on Japanese workers. By 1909, over a quarter of the Oregon Issei (Japanese immigrants) worked as migrant farm workers. The Issei population in Hood River, Oregon grew rapidly when, in exchange for clearing brush for other farmers, Issei farm workers could receive marginal land to begin their own farms.

At that time, many of these Japanese farm workers in the Hood River Valley took on the title of independent Farmer. Rather than awarding them respect, this new title caused many Issei farmers to face continuous oppression in the form of state and county-wide legislative efforts to take away their land, for fear of the new competition. Never mind that these Issei farmers introduced new ground crops, such as strawberries and asparagus to the region, as their new land lacked the trees necessary to grow the more common orchard fruits and compete with more established farmers.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, this bigotry reached its precipice. In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, designating the removal of any people of Japanese ancestry from a large zone of the west coast, including Portland and Hood River. All Issei in the area were forced to report to assembly centers, and eventually, concentration camps. In 1945, the war ended and the camps closed, freeing the Oregon Issei to resettle or move back to their homes. The 69 percent of Oregon Japanese Americans who returned to their homes faced exclusion from their communities, rallies to deny them of their citizenship, and other forms of opression. At this time, the Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans) asimilated into the United States culture, likely fueled by the oppression their families faced when tied to their Japanese roots. These Nisei befriended their Caucasian peers, faced less exclusion, and enjoyed diversified options to choose their own life-paths.

Bessie echoes these feelings of Nisei acceptance, as she recollects feeling welcome in her community while growing up on her parents’ orchard. Aside from this reference to acceptance, Bessie focuses on the normalcy of her life on the orchard. When asked about her early days working on her parents’ farm, Bessie responds that no specific memory comes to mind, because everything just came naturally. Her adulthood spend on another orchard evokes similarly non-groundbreaking memories. This later experience was, “just normal,” she explains. Most surprisingly, when asked how her experience as a Nissei affected her experience growing up and farming in the Hood River Valley, Bessie responds, “there was no experience, we just farmed.”

Questions regarding Bessie’s gender identity produce a similar response. When asked how her identity as a woman affected her experience farming in the Hood River Valley, Bessie replies that it affected her “in no way.” Yet, I can’t help but realize how the affects of Bessie’s gender on her farm work emerge at other moments in our conversation. When discussing her mothers’ life on the farm, and how it differed from her fathers’ life, Bessie tells me that her mother did not, in fact, work on her parents’ farm. Instead, she got pregnant soon after coming over to the United States, and had to take care of the children, rather than farm.

Bessie experienced a similar phenomenon, and while she grew up working on her parents’ farm, her farm tasks did not carry over to the farm where her and her husband lived. Bessie’s reiterance of the fact that “all things were natural, nothing different” between farming in childhood and adulthood, more applies to her husband, also the child of Japanese immigrants, who completed the farm work on their orchard. Maybe Bessie’s life on her new orchard can be called “natural, nothing different”, but if so, it was only a “natural, nothing different” carry-over from her mothers’ life, rather than her own childhood spent farming with her father. Similar to her mother, Bessie had children soon after marrying and moving to the new farm, and taking care of the children became her primary job.

After speaking with Bessie, I wonder why she does not consider the different, expected tasks of her and her husband as indicative of a connection between her gender identity and her experience as a farmer. Most woman farmers I know are quick to describe the implications of their gender, and how it affects their work and treatment as farmers. They cite memories of colleagues suggesting that they ask their husbands before making a business decision, or inadequate respect from other farmers in the region. Yet, most of these women are less than 50 years old, and while I would not guess it from her bright eyes and playful smile, Bessie is 95.

I cannot help but wonder if Bessie’s dissimilar response to the gender question holds generational, and possibly cultural, roots. Maybe, Bessie’s answers implies a sort of generational acceptance. Perhaps Bessie, her mother, and other women of their generations and culture, believed that there was no alternate option but to cease farm work and other income-generating activities once the children were born, as they had become accustomed to this practice. With little precedence for questioning this expectation, Bessie simply accepted it. Of course, I will not delegitimize the decision to play the role of full-time parent, one of the most draining jobs in the world. Plus, Bessie could have easily grown accustomed to women with dual farmer-mother roles from neighbors, friends, etc., and decided that she wanted to focus on the later half. * Yet, I wonder how Bessie’s answer would have changed, and whether she would have found a connection between her gender and work, were she born twenty years later.

As for Bessie’s answer to the questions regarding her Japanese identity, I am not sure why she strayed from the political. Was the Nisei assimilation into United States culture so strong that it overshadows any memories of her parents’ oppression? Or, did the memories of this oppression leave Bessie with such a sour taste in her mouth that she no longer wants to talk about them? Or maybe, Bessie simply remembers the habitual more strongly than she remembers the political. Maybe, she remembers the day-to-day planting of strawberries, the harvesting of asparagus that grew from her parents’ trees, and the bundles of juicy pears her husband would collect from their orchard.

Regardless of the reasons for Bessie’s apolitical focus, I hope that she can look back on her life as a farmer, a mother, and the work she has completed with her own two hands, and smile. I hope she can think about the legacy she passed on to her son and grandson, who continue to farm, and gloat. I hope she can reflect on the ability she has awarded all of her children to receive a college education and choose their own paths, and sense nothing but pride. Yet, if I were to ask Bessie whether she feels proud, she would likely tell me that her experience isn’t one of pride or shame. She would tell me that her experience just is.

*During another interview, soon after my conversation with Bessie, I learned that many women in the Hood River Valley, even women from Bessie’s mother’s generation, played the dual mother-farmer role, as well as the role of housekeeper, organizer, etc., etc. Likely, Bessie was accustomed to women who took on the mother-farmer role, but this dual-role was not common in her family, and thus, was not habitual to her. Of course, this introduces an entire other conversation, still relevant today, about “super-women” and the expectation that women do literally all the things, and how only mothers are made to feel guilty when they don’t parent full-time and work full-time and cook healthy meals and run marathons and organize the PTA and do all the things, but that is a whole 5,000 other blog posts!