Support for this program provided by the Japanese American Community Foundation.

And the Civil Liberties Public Education program, funded by the State of California, administered by the California State Library, supporting projects educating Californians about the Japanese American experience during World War Two.

Coming up, powerful stories of Japanese-American farm families whose lives were uprooted at the start of World War Two.

Through firsthand accounts we'll explore the thriving farming communities built before the war, the sudden loss of land and livelihood, and the trauma of forced removal and incarceration.

May 14th, right here on this property, the FBI came and arrested my grandfather, unjustly accusing him of being a spy for Japan.

The year spent in camps far from home, then the multigenerational efforts to return and rebuild.

We'll also see the modern day efforts to reconnect Japanese-American families with their sometimes forgotten farming histories.

There are many silences that are in Japanese American communities, and this helps us bridge them.

And discover how one family's struggle to return to their farm was helped by others, and how their experience overlapped with one of California's and America's most important civil rights legal decisions.

Lets make it a class action suit.

Lets not just make it for your children.

Lets make it for all the children.

These are stories of families who nurtured the land, even as the nation turned against them and the enduring cultural, agricultural and historical legacy these families created and still sustain today.

All next on Return to the Soil.

Even before the start of the 20th century, immigrants from Japan worked tirelessly to achieve the American dream.

For decades, Japanese-American growers were a cornerstone of West Coast agriculture, growing 40% of all vegetables grown in California and nearly 100% of the state's tomatoes, celery, strawberries and peppers.

They had transformed difficult land through intensive cultivation, innovation and deep agricultural knowledge.

And what these Japanese-American farmers did was to really take the most marginal of lands and convert them into really productive land.

A lot of Japanese Americans really invested in the land.

And so they lived very humbly.

Right.

And everything they had was in the soil somehow.

After Japan's attack on the U.S.

at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the start of World War Two, these same families were ordered to abandon everything.

Fields, crops, equipment, businesses and homes, taking only what they could carry.

In a sweeping act of injustice.

The United States government forcibly removed more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes along the West Coast and incarcerated them in camps in remote places.

It's estimated that $100 million invested in the land by Japanese-American farmers was taken away.

This mass upheaval shattered families, communities and livelihoods, none more dramatically than those of 6000 Japanese-American farmers in California alone.

Amanda Mei Kim is the founder and director of the Kansha History Project, an all volunteer community effort that searches U.S.

national archives and university libraries looking for forgotten documents about Japanese American farms throughout the West.

It shows where their families farmed, what they raised, how many structures were on the on the property, the acreage, the location.

The goal?

Helping descendants learn more about their family's farming legacy and the lands they lost.

And when I saw the records, I knew that they were both highly personal and valuable to families who had been searching for for information like this for generations.

The work of reuniting families with their own histories continues more than 80 years after the war's end.

Fewer than half of incarcerated Japanese-Americans ever returned to their original homes after the war, and even fewer were able to reclaim their farms or reenter agriculture at all.

And when you do return home, right, you might find your house has been burned down, all of your belongings are gone, your equipment has been destroyed, your home has been ransacked.

No one's taking care of the fields for multiple years.

And you might not have the resources to start up again.

Despite these immense challenges, some families rebuilt with very little, while others forged entirely new paths.

Let's meet some of them starting with a family whose own efforts to return to the soil happened alongside a landmark civil rights case.

Janice Munemitsus family farm in Westminster, California, played a key role in one of the most significant school desegregation cases in American history.

My grandfather came in 1916.

He was 17 years old, and he came with his parents to work as farm workers in the Torrance area.

So by 1930, my grandfather wanted to farm his own farm, as opposed to work for someone else.

As immigrants from Japan, Janice's grandparents were forbidden from becoming U.S.

citizens or owning land.

But here in Westminster, he found a woman, who was not actively farming, and she had 40 acres.

And so she kindly, let him lease her farm.

and eventually, they were able to purchase it from her.

And while he couldn't own it in his own name because he was not a citizen, my dad, who was the first born son, was able to own it.

And when people would need food, or maybe they were, poor and didn't have money to buy vegetables, he just let them glean off the edges of the crops so that they could take home vegetables.

My dad, on December 7th, he was out, harvesting cabbage with his workers and a car drove up, and some men got out of the car and started yelling really difficult and very violent racial slurs at my dad.

So it was at lunchtime that day that my dad heard that, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor.

And that's when he pretty much realized, wow, I may have gone to Huntington Beach High School.

I've lived in the U.S.

my whole life, never been to Japan, but my name and my heritage now make me an enemy.

In spring 1942, the Munemitsus were among the more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast.

May 14th, right here on this property, the FBI came and arrested my grandfather, unjustly accusing him of being a spy for Japan.

And, people who knew my grandfather we all kind of laugh at that.

He is not spy material at all.

But that would be the last day that he would see the family for just under three years.

The rest of Janice's family was sent to an American concentration camp and Poston in Arizona on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation.

While, many Japanese-Americans lost their homes and property, the Munemitsus were fortunate to be friends with a local bank manager, Frank Monroe.

He arranged for them to lease their farm to a Mexican American couple, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, who owned a cantina in nearby Santa Ana.

Mr.

Monroe came and told him about “Gonzalo, you're always talking about how you always wanted to be a farmer.

This is a chance for you to become a farmer.

Now you can become that farmer you always wanted to be.

Something horrible has happened.

The Japanese family, my friends, the Munemitsus had to leave and all they could take was what they could carry.

And this is your chance to become a major domo of a farm.” Once the lease was signed and the Mendez family moved to the farm, Gonzalo took the extraordinary step of personally delivering the monthly lease payments to the Munemitsus in the camp in Arizona.

And every, every month, we would drive all the way to Poston, Arizona, to take him the money.

My father wanted to make sure they received the money for the leasing.

At the time, Gonzalo and Felicitas had three young children Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr and Jerome.

When Mr.

Mendez brought his family to Westminster, he, everyone assumed that they would go to 17th Street School just like my dad and uncle and aunties did.

But when they went to enroll in school that September, they found out that because their name was Mendez and they were Mexican, that they would have to go to the segregated Mexican school, which was about almost a half a mile away.

And that's what the superintendent of schools informed my father that.

And he went home and he informed my mother, and my mother said, well, Gonzalo, we have the money.

Let's go get a lawyer.

At the time, more than 80% of Mexican-American children in Orange County were attending segregated schools.

The Mendez family hired civil rights attorney David Marcus, who filed a class action suit on behalf of the Mendez family and four others.

It was Marcus that decided lets make it a class action suit.

Lets not just make it for your children, lets make it for all the children.

While the case proceeded through the courts, the war was coming to an end and the Munemitsu family was eager to return to their farm.

My dad and Mr.

Mendez had one year leases, and in 1944, they signed a lease with an unusual clause.

The clause said that when the Munemitsu family can return, that they can come and return back to the farm and they will live in the workers cottages.

Gonzalo can continue to lease the farm.

He can continue to, get the profits from that crop.

But he would also hire the Munemitsu family, as well as the friends of the Munemitsu family to work on his farm.

But it got our family back on our feet.

It helped our family friends.

And also it helped Gonzalo keep going on this lawsuit that it would take another, two years til 1947, when everything was concluded with that.

In 1947, the Mendez versus Westminster case led to California becoming the first state in the country to outlaw school segregation.

This was all seven years before Brown versus Board of Education in 1954.

After the case was settled, the Mendez family returned to Santa Ana.

and the family had to start over with nothing.

And our family continued to farm this property until about 1950, when the 40 acres was, slated by eminent domain to become two schools.

Which I think brings the story full circle, in terms of the desegregation of the public schools.

And then for our farm to be two schools, is kind of really wraps up.

I mean, you can't plan that, right?

Today, on the site of the Munemitsu farm, Johnson Middle School continues to honor the extraordinary story of these two families.

The gym is named for Sylvia Mendez, and a newly dedicated mural, created in collaboration with the students, depicts Janice's father and grandfather looking out over their lands.

Near the Sacramento Delta, Steve Hiromotos father and grandfather farmed 500 rented acres in Clarksburg.

They were sent to an incarceration camp in Gila River, Arizona.

They really didn't know how long they were going to be there and they really didn't know why they were there.

But true to their roots, the Hiromotos and others began irrigating the arid Arizona soil and eventually grew enough food to feed the camp's entire 13,000 person population, plus the nearby camp of Poston.

Once a farmer, always a farmer, I believe.

And, you know, if youve got ground and looks like you've got water, you, you know, you can do something with it.

Next, the story of a family that entrusted a neighbor to care for their farm during incarceration, but ended up having to mount a legal battle to get it back.

Leroy Morishita and his cousins, Ken and Judy, were among nine cousins who grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Fresno County.

It was not until he was in college that Leroy learned that the family farm had almost been lost during World War Two.

So we're in Del Rey, California.

This is the farm that, our parents, raised us on, and, 40 acres of land here that we grew up living here.

Leroy's grandparents were Japanese immigrants who bought the farm in 1937, in the names of their American born children.

GHI is the family brand.

Stands G for George, my father, H for Harry, Leroys father, and I for Kens father, Irving.

When I was nine, I was working on the farm, and my dad gave me my first paycheck for a summers work of $25.

For the first summer.

The second summer I got twice as much $50.

We worked very hard but I don't think we complained too much because we see, we saw how hard our families, our parents, worked.

And I think we had fun, too, working together.

My father, really wanted me to go to college, and I said, you know.

So, and I said, why?

And he said that he wanted me to, go into college and be anything I wanted to be, but not to be a farmer.

As a student at the University of California, Berkeley, Leroy learned for the first time about the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War Two.

And I went home and I told my parents, I said, are you in these camps?

And they said, yes.

And I said, why didn't you ever tell us?

And because they had never said a word about them.

And they, said that, they didn't know what we could do with anger that we would have when we heard this story.

Once Leroy started asking questions, his parents shared their wartime experiences for the first time.

And so when Pearl Harbor, occurred, then, they were then going to be forced to evacuate.

So because my father owned the land, he asked the Albrechts, Albrechts next door if they would pay the property tax while they were gone, that they could harvest whatever crops were ready to be harvested, and that as long as when they were gone, they would pay the property tax, they could use the property.

I'm really glad to be able to share with you some records that I have from your family.

And, these are from these are War Relocation Authority records.

What these records do is they show who the original owner was of the farm and that's the Japanese-American owner.

And then it also shows the substitute operators.

So that's the person who took over the farm.

No one's really seen these.

So you're, you're the first.

So this is my father, Masao.

Masao Harry Morishita.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

See.

And then here's the Ed Albrecht's name on here leasing the tenant of the property in 1942.

Oh, this is amazing because I have no record of what had happened.

So this is very exciting.

The Morishita family was first moved to the Fresno Fairgrounds Assembly Center, and then to an American concentration camp on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona.

Eventually, Leroy's mom and dad were allowed to leave the camp to join relatives in Colorado and then Missouri, where a White family hired them to cook, do housework, and maintain the home.

That's where they received disturbing news.

My parents got a letter from the Albrechts, the lawyers for the Albrechts telling them that they wanted to take, that they had abandoned the property.

So they wanted to take over our land here by eminent domain.

So the family that my parents worked for was called the Bellair's.

And the woman's name, the wife's name was Minnie.

But they got their attorney to write a letter back to the attorney for the Albrecht's telling them that my parents had not abandoned the property.

They were, they were forced by the government to leave California, but when the war ended, they had every intent to return to the property here in Del Rey.

So cease and desist.

So fortunately, they did.

Thanks to the friendship of the Bellairs, the Morishitas were among the Japanese Americans who had a farm they could return to when the war ended.

After the war, the Morishitas continued to operate their farm.

Eventually all the cousins moved away.

The farm was sold to the Garza family, who owns it today.

I really appreciate all the people who are still working on their farms.

Having grown on this farm and working as, up to being a teenager, I really appreciate, how how much work it is, or I appreciate that the people that are in the fields now.

They put food on our plate.

Some Japanese-American farmers returned to the soil.

Let's meet one California grower who transformed his land.

In the heart of Central California's grape growing region lies a small plot of land that has held the dreams of the Mikami family for decades.

You can touch those dreams today, or rather, taste them with the boutique wines made by Jason Mikami and his spouse, Mitzi Onizuka.

Grapes have been grown on this land for decades.

When Jason grew up on this farm, his father, Jim, grew mostly Tokay grapes.

And the Tokay grape is a or was a table grape, meaning it was, grown for, consumption, for eating consumption.

the Tokay was very popular because of its flavor and its, and its taste.

But it had seeds, unfortunately.

And so in the 1970s and early 80s, when the flame seedless variety came out, the Tokay variety, fell out of favor.

So the Mikami's turned to wine grapes.

That transformation came as Jason took over the farm.

The foundation of that decision was laid long ago.

My family's story starts, back in 1896, when my grandfather Teruichi Mikami immigrated from Japan to the United States.

He farmed grapes on land he couldnt own because of Asian exclusion laws.

When World War Two broke out, the Mikamis were sent to an American concentration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas.

Jason's father, Jim, was a young man at the time.

When the war ended and they were released from the camp, grape farming drew them back to the land.

Eventually, Jason's grandfather and father could both buy farms about a mile from each other.

Jason and his older sister grew up on this farm.

Jason's family background is unusual.

His father was nisei.

That is second generation Japanese-American.

His mother, Aiko, was a hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bomb in Japan.

Often mothers are the carriers of culture.

And Jason's immigrant mother taught him to care very much about his heritage and his family.

Jason earned two degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, one in electrical engineering and computer sciences, and the other in Japanese, studying for a year in Japan.

Then he went to UC Davis for his MBA.

I was able to take viticulture and enology classes, at at Davis to really understand how to, manage and how to how to raise grapes, though I did have some of that obviously, growing up with my father, I learned a lot through osmosis from growing up on the vineyard.

But Jason wasn't quite ready to start making wine.

He married Mitzi Onizuka, also from a farming family, and he had a career in technology.

It was time for me to start figuring out what we would do with the vineyard if my if my father passed away.

After a bad fall from a ladder, Jim did pass away a few years later.

The farm had become overgrown.

If we were going to continue growing grapes, I wanted to start thinking about how we could actually make wine because, not only would that recognize my family's history, but you can earn more by trying to create wine than just by simply producing grapes.

We decided that we would redo the vineyard and pull out all of the Tokays and instead plant wine grapes.

It was a hard decision to decide to revamp the vineyard, but one that I think, ultimately was the right decision to allow us to, you know, to start this next chapter for our vineyard.

In the beginning, I was involved with everything as far as pruning and shoot thinning and, testing, harvesting, and my daughter was as well.

We used to take her out of school one day out of the year when she was in elementary school to do harvest with us.

So she would wake up at 5:00 just like us, get out there by 5:30.

The Mikamis sell 12 acres of their grapes to other wineries.

That makes it financially viable for them to set aside the other 20% for their own boutique wines.

For our wines that we're producing under our name, we wanted to be able to better control exactly kind of how we were going to grow those grapes.

And so, we're really staying focused on today, the three acres.

Those three acres are harvested by hand.

When Jason and I first started in 2008, we only did one barrel of wine, 25 cases.

Jason kind of wanted to take it nice and slow and see what that one barrel could produce.

And it was such a successful one barrel, he was able to sell it out in a matter of weeks.

Today we bring our fruit up here to, Napa, specifically Mount Vetter.

And, we work closely with Fontenella Family Winery here to, to do our crush and, and make our wine with Kian here.

As Jason revitalized the vineyard, he was able to utilize his training as an engineer.

And this is the result.

This is the way that we give back to our community.

Jason and Mitzi share their premium wines at community fundraisers and wine tastings like this one.

It's a foundation built on the past and Jason's father's care.

It means a lot for me to be able to honor him by producing the wine with our last name.

And so, it's really about, honoring just the the sacrifice that he made for for us by really dedicating all of his time to this small vineyard to help, help raise his family.

Memories are preserved and the future secured in other ways, too.

Here in Clarksburg, this 1883 schoolhouse was one of the few integrated schools teaching students of all backgrounds.

Thanks to local volunteers like Steve Hiromoto, it's been restored and is now an interpretive center.

I'm proud to be a member of this community, and, proud to be of Japanese heritage.

I'd like to keep that story alive and pass it down to generations.

Meanwhile, with the Kansha History Project, the work continues.

It's history that has a soulful purpose and a purpose that's oriented around care and love and appreciation.

As we honor the triumphs and resilience of Japanese Americans who returned to the soil and remember others who were never able to reclaim what was taken, the lessons of that era are not confined to the past.

These stories remind us how fragile justice can be when fear goes unchallenged.

History urges us to preserve the stories of the families who built their futures from the soil, and to work to ensure the injustices they faced are never forgotten nor repeated.

Support for this program provided by the Japanese American Community Foundation.

And the Civil Liberties Public Education program, funded by the State of California, administered by the California State Library, supporting projects educating Californians about the Japanese American experience during World War Two.