Farming the Home Place -- Term Paper

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The Cortez Growers Association (CGA) provided some community structure and cohesion to the life of the farmers. Membership in the organization was contingent upon board approval and the payment of fifty dollars. From its origins, it evolved into a diversified structure, encompassing the marketing of produce, the shipping of goods, the purchase of farm supplies on a collective basis, even the drying of fruit. (Matsumoto, p.49; 53) However, far beyond a purely business related collective of farmers, the CGA created an important cultural institution. It staged traditional Noh plays for the community and provided English language and Sunday school instruction, although some members of the community retained their devout Buddhism, despite the efforts of Christian missionaries. The CGA showed how these farmers could retain their Japanese culture and still function as loyal Americans

Ironically, the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act that limited the number of Japanese immigrants reduced some of the hostility to the members of the community for a time. But after the outbreak of World War II, much of this changed. The FBI questioned and seized the holdings of Issei leaders based upon their racial identity alone. (Matsumoto, p. 91) Many Japanese farmers, as a result of their displacement, lost their leases to their farms. The CGA cushioned some of the blows that internment provided to this still-fragile, but once-flourishing community. It arranged for the supervision of the land while the Japanese-Americans were away. The CGA and the knowledge that the lives they had worked so hard to build were not completely at an end provided some comfort to Japanese-Americans, forced to sleep in community settings in barracks-like structures, and live on 45 cents a daily ration of food. Still, the conditions of the camps forced ordinary, innocent people to live criminals -- toiling at enforced agricultural projects, eating at a canteen -- there was even a barber shop, again, much like a prison.

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(Matsumoto, pp.121-11) After the war, the tension and cultural divide that had been created between Japanese-Americans and their non-Japanese neighbors was not so easy to heal.

In her analysis of Japanese farm life pre, during, and post internment, Valerie Matsumoto does not idealize Japanese culture. She notes in particular, even before life in an internment camp: "The work of Japanese women stretched from dawn to dusk. In addition to fieldwork, they scrubbed laundry on washboards, cooked meals on wooden stoves and over outside fires, washed dishes, and heated water," for the Japanese baths, as well as tended the children. (Matsumoto, p.47) However, Matsumoto's book Farming the Home Place also reveals the importance of community life and structure and above all the ties to one another and to the land, a legacy of these early years that was often forgotten. For these farmers, land, and working the land meant home, and leaving this land meant leaving everything -- work, family, livelihood, and a new, fragile identity as Americans who still loved their home culture, but were loyal to their new, home country.

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