U.S.A.
October 1, 2018
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
Keepsakes reveal clues of life for Japanese in Yakima area
By Tammy Ayer
Yakima Herald-Republic
AKIMA, Wash. (AP) — Yoshiko
Hide Kishi gazed at the small
buckskin moccasins in her cupped
hands as she recalled her early childhood
in rural Toppenish.
Her father and mother, Mantaro and
Kiyo Hide, were farmers with five
children, Yoshiko their youngest. Her
father raised several crops and Kiyo
helped him amid her household duties,
which included making dresses for
Yoshiko because money was tight.
The moccasins came from their
landowner, George Adams, a citizen of the
Yakama Nation in White Swan. They are
soft, with little adornment — ideal for a
toddler learning how to walk.
“I was seven, eight months old,” said
Kishi, 82.
She has photos taken in 1936 of her
wearing them, one as she stood outside in a
walker and the other sitting in a high chair
inside.
Kishi received other gifts from the
Adams family, including two small beaded
bags that her mother carefully packed
away with the moccasins. One is round
with bright geometric patterns on each
side; the other is heart-shaped, with a
scene of two deer. That was her favorite.
“It’s really worn because I probably
carried it around and played with it,” Kishi
said.
Like others in the Lower Yakima
Valley’s Japanese community, the Hides
enjoyed a close relationship with the
Yakama Nation citizens from whom they
leased land.
When Japanese immigrants began
coming to the Valley in the early 1890s,
they cleared land, dug canals, and worked
on the railroad. But due to legislation
collectively referred to as alien land laws,
they could not own or lease land in most
areas.
The sovereign Yakama Nation, though,
was not subject to those laws.
“The (Yakamas) were the only people
willing to rent land to Japanese immi-
grants in the area,” Wapato native Isao
Fujimoto notes in his book, Bouncing
Back: Community, Resilience & Curiosity.
“As a result, thriving Japanese immi-
grant communities arose around the
towns
of
Yakima,
Wapato,
and
Toppenish.”
Those immigrant communities included
dozens of Lower Valley farms and several
businesses in each city — hotels, stores,
laundries, restaurants, and barber and
beauty shops. Yakima, Wapato, and
Toppenish were each home to a Buddhist
temple and a Japanese school.
The signing of Executive Order 9066 by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt on
February 19, 1942, about 10 weeks after
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, changed
those communities forever. It set in motion
the World War II incarceration of more
than 120,000 west coast residents of
Japanese descent.
Y
That included 1,017 people from the
Yakima Valley, two-thirds of whom were
born in the United States. Transported
from the Yakima Valley to the Portland
Assembly Center in early June 1942, they
were detained there for three months until
they were taken to the Heart Mountain
Relocation Center in Wyoming. It closed in
November 1945.
Only about 10 percent returned to the
Valley, almost all to Wapato. The Hides
moved to California, where Mantaro and
his sons began growing wholesale flowers,
specializing in long-stemmed mums.
Kishi, who lives in Seal Beach,
California, was in Yakima in August with
Patti Hirahara of Anaheim, California,
who was honored as grand marshal of the
Pioneer Power Show & Swap Meet in
Union Gap.
During her visit, Kishi donated the
moccasins and one of the beaded bags to
the Yakima Valley Museum, home to the
exhibition “Land of Joy and Sorrow:
Japanese Pioneers in the Yakima Valley.”
Her brother, Tom, was deeply involved
with the exhibition, which opened in 2013,
and a related reunion. The Brownie
uniform she wore at Heart Mountain is on
display, along with items that he donated
that included her family’s mochi pounding
set, clothing, other Heart Mountain items,
and photographs.
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“The only reason I came twice before was
the museum exhibits and the reunion,”
Kishi said.
Just six years old when her family was
forced to leave, Kishi doesn’t remember a
lot about their farm, which was near the
intersection of East Branch and Oldenway
roads on property crossed by the Wanity
Slough. The house burned years ago.
“We were out in the boonies. I have
pictures of the house, packing shed,
chicken coop ... my mom took them all,” she
said. “I remember when I was older, five or
six, I was the one to go in the coop and
collect the eggs.”
Her father grew sugar beets, onions,
potatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe, water-
melon, and tomatoes and, for his horses,
hay.
“Dad plowed the field with horses. I was
sitting on the horse while dad went
plowing,” she said. “Growing up, I did have
an affection for horses.”
Like the Adams family of White Swan,
Ken Hoptowit’s family leased land to
Japanese Americans, including the Honda
family, he recalled during a tour of
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PIECES OF HISTORY. Yoshiko Hide, 82, who
grew up in Toppenish and Wapato, donates family
gifts from Yakama Nation landowners to the Yakima
Valley Museum in Yakima, Washington. Japanese
immigrants and Yakama Nation citizens go back de-
cades, to the earliest years that immigrants came to
the Valley to help clear the land, dig irrigation canals,
and work in agriculture. The Yakama Reservation of-
fered a unique opportunity for the immigrants to lease
land because as a sovereign nation, it was not subject
to the anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese laws imple-
mented by the state. (Amanda Ray/Yakima Herald-
Republic via AP)
Yakima’s Japan Town in 2017.
“My grandfather Charlie had farmed
900-plus acres in the Lower Valley,”
Hoptowit said then. “A lot of (Japanese
Americans) farmed with my grandfather.”
Growing up on reservation land,
Fujimoto would often see Yakamas
walking by their house as they cut across
his family’s fields, he wrote in Bouncing
Back.
“A Yakama named Old Tom lived in a
small cabin on the plot of land we rented.
The older Yakamas still spoke (Ichiskiin).
The Japanese immigrants, unsur-
prisingly, primarily spoke Japanese,” he
wrote.
“Since neither the elder Yakamas nor
the Japanese families on the reservation
spoke English, I later asked my mother
how she had communicated with Old Tom.
‘Oh, we used our hands,’ she replied.”
Kishi has no recollection of her family’s
landlord and hadn’t thought about the
moccasins and beaded bags until a
grandson who lives in Berkeley,
California, took a closer look at his family
history for a class project.
“When he had to follow grandma’s path
during the school year last year, in fifth
grade, that’s when they had to tell about
their family. Now he has some
background,” Kishi said.
She went to a trunk packed with family
heirlooms for information for his project
and rediscovered the moccasins and
beaded bags. Her mother probably had
that trunk shipped to Heart Mountain,
Kishi said.
“After my mother passed, I had the
trunk,” she said.
It also held a pink silk dress and knit
bonnet and matching cape, all made by her
mother. Kishi wore the dress for a family
portrait taken at Fern Studio in Toppenish
in April 1942 and the cape and bonnet for a
picture of her taken at Jackson Studio in
Seattle in 1949.
Kishi donated those items to the Yakima
Valley Museum, but one of the beaded bags
— her favorite, the one with deer — is
staying in the family. Her grandson’s
family history project sparked a new
appreciation for that in her daughter, too,
who asked if she could keep one of the bags.
“She’s going to frame it,” she added.
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