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Building Community: Japanese Americans
In February 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt, reacting to wartime hysteria, issued Executive Order 9066 requiring all Japanese Americans living on the west coast to relocate to inland areas.
My dad was established farming in the Yakima Valley already and then . . . he was a pretty unhappy trooper all through his life--he was very upset. He got started farming, and he was doing ok, and had the rug jerked out from under you and tell you that you got to leave with the shirt on your back was kind of tough. And then to have to start all over again was pretty trying. Harry Yamamoto, Jr.
Prevented from taking all but a few possessions and their civil rights suspended, many Japanese Americans were forcibly removed to internment camps such as Hart Mountain, Wyoming, and Minidoka, Idaho.
Unidentified Japanese American worker on
the Driggs and Sons farm, c. 1944. Photo courtesy of Nadine
Driggs
Some Japanese Americans were able to obtain permits to work on Moses Lake farms. After the war, many Yakima Valley Japanese American families who had lost their lands resettled in the Moses Lake area. Despite discrimination, these families stayed and became a significant part of the community.
My family was . . . involved in truck-gardening in a small area near the shores of Lake Samamish. When the war started, we were told to either go to internment camp, or to move inland. . . Anything on the east side of [the] Columbia River was the border . . . . My dad was kind of acquainted with the Cedar Green Frozen Foods and they asked us if our family and a few others would move to Quincy to help on their farm. And so, that's how we moved into the Columbia Basin area . . . we lived in Quincy and they had the plant in Wenatchee. Joe Tokunaga