The Fraser Valley: The Farms They Left Behind

Japanese farmers in the Fraser Valley helped each other to clear virgin land.

The tumbling Fraser carried silt from the mountains, depositing it as she met the rolling Pacific tides, creating the rich sediment of the Delta region. For fifty miles along either bank, and the islands within, stretched the fertile Fraser Valley, home for more than 550 Nikkei families before the 1942 uprooting. The Delta, chiefly Lulu Island, was a prime fishing and farming area that included Steveston, and extended as far as New Westminster.

Beyond New Westminster lay the Upper Fraser Valley, the heart of the berry industry in which the Japanese farmer excelled. A short distance upstream, a hired hand at Pitt Meadows broke ground in 1904 for the Japanese; others followed as word spread that they were hard, reliable workers. But it was to the mills and logging camps dotting the Valley that the Issei flocked. Some engaged in contract logging or operated shingle and tie mills. Whonnock Industries, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, is an outgrowth of a sawmill begun by Zentaro Shin (1926). When depleted forests and depressed markets closed the mills, many decided to stay to farm rather than to move on.

But no Issei was content to remain as a migrant labourer drifting from farm to farm. Coming from rural Japan, he yearned to possess his own plot. But what could he acquire with meagre resources or by sharecropping? Eventual ownership was usually of raw, marginal, often sloping land that was difficult to cultivate. It was cleared stump by stump, stone by stone, a patch at a time. If he could not afford to hire a horse for pulling up stumps or for ploughing, his wife could wield a pick or sink a shovel. There were occasions of premature labour in the field.

Until he had sufficient acreage planted, other income was needed to sustain his family. Many of the early years were spent working on established farms,' at a sawmill or any other employment. The remaining energy was exhausted, after-hours, on his tract. The night sky was usually lit with the bonfires of burning stumps, brush and debris from the Japanese holdings.

They favoured the Fraser's north bank where wild acreage was cheaper and more plentiful than the lowlands of the south. The earliest Japanese farms were acquired around Port Haney in the Maple Ridge District. Ryuhei and Masayo Yamamoto, whose daughter, Hatsuko, was the district's first native Nisei, and Hawaii emigrants, Yazaemon and Yuriko Tamura, accompanied by their Hawaii-born son, Mort, the first Nikkei to be educated in Haney, were the pioneering families. Another pioneer was Jiro Inouye, whose leadership and influence was to filter throughout the Valley.

Pioneer family of Ryuhei & Masuyo Yamamoto taken in 1912, Girl next to mother, Hatsuko, was the first Nisei born in Haney, B.C., 1908.

From Haney, the Japanese fanned out to wherever land was available, spilling into the adjoining districts of Pitt Meadows to the west and eastward into Mission. The Japanese farming community around Mission City grew to rival that of Haney in size and productivity. One of its pioneering families, that of Tashiro Hashizume, possessed 80 acres, the largest Nikkei farm on the north side of the Fraser.

Most farms were of modest proportions, usually less than ten acres, but suitable for the intensive cultivation to which the Japanese were accustomed. Although they grew a range of crops and also raised poultry, strawberries became the domain of the Japanese. Their properties were suited to soft fruit, and their stature was another key factor. Crouching was so onerous a posture for the large-framed white farmers that they preferred to avoid the earth-hugging berry with its crawling runners. The shorter, more agile Japanese, accustomed to stoop labouring in rice paddies, weeded, hoed and picked the ripe fruit with relative ease.

As the ranks of the Nikkei farms swelled, a cooperative association became desirable, indeed, essential. For marginal and small-scale operators, cost-sharing economies — in the joint renting of equipment, purchasing and marketing — were vital to their survival. Before the advent of refrigerated trucks and freight cars, the problem with strawberries, which ripened during a very short season, was to rush the freshly-picked fruit to market or to the cannery. This, a cooperative could solve. An affiliation could prevent ruinous price-cutting as well as provide guidance in testing new varieties or advanced techniques. These potential benefits gave birth to the Japanese farmers' cooperative or the nokai.1

The nokai was more than an alliance of growers responsible in matters related only to the soil. Equally important, it was a benevolent society catering to members' needs: their social lives, their children's Japanese education, and lending comfort and aid to those facing a crisis or a tragedy. Deaths due to premature explosions while dynamiting stumps and young boys drowning in the Fraser, were some of these occasions.

The nokai was uneasy. With restrictions in other fields, such as the reduction of fishing licenses issued to Japanese, plus a desire for an enduring family life, more and more Nikkei were seeking parcels of land in the Valley. A rumble of fear and hostility was mounting as many whites felt menaced by surging competition. Sniffing votes, some politicians urged the passage of laws such as the Alien Land Act of California (1921) which excluded nationals of Japan from owning property in that state.

A duty of the nokai was to mend fences and to defuse any racial tensions. A complaint against the Japanese was that they worked too hard and too long. To counter this, the nokai laid out a suggested code of work practices. Members were to refrain from labouring openly on Sundays; one man was reprimanded for dynamiting on the Sabbath. They were cautioned about overworking their horses. Women were instructed not to carry out heavy chores, or cultivate with infants strapped on their backs.

The north belt of the Fraser, stretching from Port Coquitlam to east of Mission City, split into four nokai spheres. Haney Nokai, considered the model, counted more than a hundred members before the break-up, while Mission, the second largest, operated its own jam factory. Others were located at Whonnock and Port Hammond, which included Pitt Meadows.

The Japanese farms on the south side were organized separately, and more loosely. Although spread over a wider territory between the Fraser and the U.S. border, they were considerably fewer. Only the Strawberry Hill- Kennedy strip straddling the Delta and Surrey Municipalities, south of New Westminster, could be defined as a Japanese concentration. Beyond were lesser clusters of no more than twenty families, each around the nokai at Coghlan, Mount Lehman and Clayburn. Others were dispersed around Cloverdale, Langley and Abbottsford. Furthest inland, at Rosedale, east of Chilliwack, were the pastures of Ai Adachi, the only Japanese dairyman in the entirfe Fraser Valley.

Stawberry pickers start out early in the morning, ready to harvest the ripe fruit to be sent quickly to market or the cannery.

The outlying farms were generally larger, some in the quarter-section (160 acres) class, nor did they depend heavily on berries. Vegetables were favoured for the rich black loam of Aldergrove. A Langley farmer nurtured top-grade asparagus, while another grew acres of Japanese radishes which he pickled for Lower Mainland consumption. Belying its name, Strawberry Hill was chicken country where a familiar morning sound was the scraping of the floor below the roosts to collect the droppings for fertilizer. Nihei Otsuki's hatcheries with their breeder stock were highly regarded. His prize hens regularly captured top honours at the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver.

Like Maple Ridge, earliest Japanese forays into the region were by timber men. One was Kimata Ogata, who before landing at Victoria (1895), dallied briefly in New Caledonia in the South Pacific where he learned to speak French. After shunting about, he reached Mount Lehman in 1907, as camp foreman, and remained as the first Japanese farmer south of the Fraser. "Charlie" Ogata became a town fixture who, through connivance of political friends, though contrary to B.C. laws, had the right to vote and was known to have cast a ballot at the last federal election before evacuation.

Year by year, the Japanese growers in the Valley continued to add to their acreage by purchase, lease and clearing virgin land, thereby increasing production. During the peak season the household could no longer cope with the increased load and they hired temporary help, mainly out-of-town students. The farmers built greenhouses to grow tomatoes and cucumbers as they had about reached the saturation point with strawberries; the market was glutted and sluggish, and prices unsatisfactory. So they sought other crops.

Picking hops, which are essential in the brewing of ale, at Whonnock in the Fraser Valley.  Nikei farmers were just beginning to grow hops in quantity when they were driven from their farms.

The nokai saw their future in hops, the essential ingredient in the brewing of ale. With the pickup in the economy due to the threat of war in Europe, the demand for fermented brew was soaring. Hops were being grown around Chilliwack, a region hardly penetrated by the Japanese, but they noted that the cash yield per acre was considerably higher than that of strawberries. After field trips across the border and trial cultivation (1938), the nokai was convinced. A kiln was built in Mission and hops were planted in earnest.

But the sure-fire crop was not to be. The first marketable harvest was set for the summer of 1942, but the bottom fell out of their future before even a single keg was produced from their fields. Some families were permitted to remain to finish the harvest. It was the final act of the 560 dispossessed farming families before their flight from the Fraser Valley, on which they had staked their lives.

- Nikkei Legacy: The Story of Japanese Canadians from Settlement to Today (1983). pp. 68-70.