COLUMBIA CITY - Katsumi Taki is in the minority. Not just because he's one of only a few farmers in the Yakima Valley growing organic, but because he lives in Wapato - a town where only 65 years ago the slogan of the day was "Show your colors now, white or yellow...THE JAP MUST GO."
Indeed, in an area where hundreds of Japanese farmers throughout Washington once proved vital to West Coast agriculture - after the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II - only a few remain. Some, like Katsumi and his wife Ryoko, relocated here from their native Japan when few here were old enough to remember the prejudice, harassment, violence, dispossession and incarceration suffered by Japanese-Americans in Wapato and elsewhere in the early 1940s.
Life in Wapato was particularly tough for Japanese Americans. In his book, The Burning Horse: The Japanese-American Experience in the Yakima Valley 1920-1942 (Eastern Washington University Press 1995), Thomas Heuterman (himself a resident of Wapato since the 1930s) describes first-hand how a segment of the population was deemed a threat to national security, accorded second-class status and summarily imprisoned.
"We didn't have any idea about that before we moved here," Katsumi told Jenny Kurzweil in Fields that Dream: a Journey to the Roots of Our Food (Fulcrum Publishing 2005). "There are some families, but not as many as there used to be. Before World War II there were lots of Japanese in this area, and they were farming. Then they were sent to the camps and they lost all of their land. Only a few came back."
In her book, Kurzweil goes on to describe how the internment of Japanese Americans during the war destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands and forever changed the face of American agriculture.
"When the Japanese Americans were released, many farmers who had not been able to own the land they worked found their farms in ruins or taken over by their white neighbors," she writes. "The fields were overgrown and the soil unturned, and a generation of work had been destroyed. Only a few Japanese Americans resurrected their farms, and now those generations of people are dying out."
A CHANGED LANDSCAPE
While this sad fact may be true, the Takis persevere and Wapato seems to have changed a lot since 1942. Years ago, when the two had some trouble with regard to their immigration status in the United States, their community rallied around them. Their church started a letter-writing campaign to the Senator and local congressmen, and the town newspaper ran a front-page article detailing their struggle for citizenship. The effort brought everyone closer together and inspired Ryoko to dedicate much of her time to working in the community.
That is, when she's not busy helping Katsumi mind Mair Farm-Taki, a 36.5-acre certified organic farm just north of the Wapato Indian Reservation where the couple grows high-quality certified-organic produce. They specialize in unique Asian produce like Japanese varieties of radishes, tomatoes, plums, greens and cucumbers and cultivate roughly half of the land, leaving the remaining half as a refuge for natural habitat.
The Takis first came to the old Mair Game Farm in 1990 to help Rose Mair, its elderly owner. With the land overgrown and the farm in disrepair, there was a lot of work to do. The two lived and worked there with the widow Mair until she died a few years later. They purchased the farm in October 1994 and renamed it Mair Farm-Taki in honor of its previous owners, Rose and her husband Cyrus Mair.
Since then they have restored the 15 acres of orchards and been certified by the Washington State Department of Agriculture as an organic producer. Fruit is their specialty and they grow many varieties of apples and stone fruit.
You can find Katsumi selling his organic fruit, herbs and vegetables at the Columbia City Farmers Market every Wednesday through October 31, but you'll have to get their quick each week before he sells out of his scrumptious cherries and Japanese plums.
Located in Wapato near Yakima and the Wapato Indian Reservation, Mair Farm-Taki is a popular setting for outdoor weddings and receptions. Visit the certified-organic and picturesque farm on the web at www.mairtaki.com/index.html.
Mount Baker writer Amber Campbell may be reached via editor@sdistrictjournal.com.[[In-content Ad]]
