From Harbour to Harvest: The Diverse Paths of Japanese-Canadians to Landownership, Farming, and the Making of Community in the Fraser Valley, 1904-1942

From 1904 and 1942, over 2000 Japanese-Canadians settled in the farming communities of Mission and Maple Ridge in British Columbia, Canada.Most first generation Japanese-Canadians, or issei, came to farming after working an average of ten years as labourers, mainly in the resource industries.Drawing on a database of 135 farmers, this study looks at the occupational paths of issei men and women to landownership, farming, and the making of community.It argues that the occupational choices reflect, first, their resistance to the oppressive and discriminatory policies and attitudes of the dominant white society and, second, their assertion of control over their own lives and over the shaping of their rural transnational communities.The first chapter reviews the historiography and background to Japanese-Canadian settlement of the Fraser Valley with an emphasis on the social, cultural, and ethnic contexts.This gradual movement reflected the response of the issei to their experience of work and life in Canada prior to becoming landowning farmers.The second chapter focuses on the occupational paths of issei men and their reasons for gravitating to landownership and farming.It draws on their experience and choices as individuals who were part of a marginalized and racialized visible minority.The third chapter examines the diverse and difficult occupational paths of issei women who shared fully in the establishment and maintenance of the family farm.It also discusses ways in which issei women contributed to the development of Fraser Valley communities and participated in the translation and negotiation of culture within rural society.The final chapter looks at the making of community in the Fraser Valley as an outgrowth of occupational paths and an ongoing dynamic process that was subject to the guidance of issei leaders who spoke English and understood Canadian culture.Occupational paths continued to change and expand to meet the needs of both family and community.Further, the economic interdependence that developed between issei and white farmers, mainly through marketing cooperatives, promoted ongoing interaction, cultural overlap, and cooperation.Secondly, examining the work choices of Japanese-Canadian farmers will help explain why they ultimately chose farming and why they abandoned other types of employment.Because less than three per cent of British Columbia is arable land, the experience and diversity of farmers and their role in the settlement and growth of the province are frequently overshadowed by those involved in larger industries.Tracing the paths to farming will highlight the attractions of farming while shedding light on the shortcomings of other occupations.Also, it can help explain how and why many different paths led to similar occupations in agriculture.Thirdly, studying the migration and settlement patterns of Japanese-Canadian farmers will provide a better understanding and a more complete picture of rural community formation.Too often minority groups, particularly visible minorities, are ignored or marginalized in the histories of small, rural communities in Canada.In British Columbia, these histories often focus on the first white, Anglo-Protestant pioneers and their descendants as though no other groups were p r e ~e n t .~ Contrary to this, Japanese-Canadian transnational communities thrived within larger, white farming communities where they were neither isolated nor insular.Japanese-Canadian numbers ranged from 19-23 per cent of the total population in the Maple Ridge and Mission areas from the early 1920s until 1942."lssei homes and farmlands 9 Examples include: In the Shadow of Mount Cheam, compiled by Heritage Preservers of Rosedale and District (Winnipeg: Inter Collegiate Press, 1988) focusing on the Chilliwack Area and Daphne Sleigh, ed.One Foot on the Border (Deroche, BC: Sumas Prairie and Area Historical Society, 1999).10 For the purposes of this study, the Fraser Valley communities under consideration are Mission and Maple Ridge, which includes the smaller communities of Haney, Hammond, Whonnock, Ruskin, and Albion.The total combined population of Mission and Maple Ridge in 1931 was 8,525 and in 1941, it was 11,151.(Seventh Census of Canada, 1931 and Eighth Census of Canada, 1941 .)The Japanese-Canadian population within these totals was, in 1933, approximately 1,588 and in 1941, approximately 2,109.In both instances, the Japanese-Canadian population grew in proportion to the total population, maintaining 19 percent of the total.See Reginda Sumida, "The Japanese in British Columbia" (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 1935) 296-7and Read, 40.More specific to the Maple Ridge, in 1922, the local newspaper set the local Japanese population at 23 per cent of the total.See Maple Ridge Pitt Meadows Gazeffe, March 23, 1 922, 5.11 Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed.Robert C. Tucker (New York: WW Norton, 1978) 595.to work for low wages or to endure the often transient and rustic lifestyle of unskilled labourers.Hence, workers from a variety of ethnic groups were recruited to fill those jobs.For example, many immigrants from China, Japan, and Italy were initially content to join the labour force in British Columbia because the wages were much higher than what they could make in their country of origin.As newcomers who could not speak English, they were relegated to jobs in the resource industries where the work was strenuous, dangerous, seasonal, unpredictable and offered few of the comforts of home and companionship.More to the point, these jobs promoted social exclusion and isolation.While historian Robert McDonald points out that "the deeply entrenched ethnocentrism then pervading White society forced Asians to the margins of Vancouver's economy," the same was true of the British Columbia economy in general.16Although it was not until 1904 that Japanese-Canadians began to establish farms in the Fraser Valley, the number of landowning farmers steadily increased until the early 1940s.~'This supports a pattern reported by historian Allen Seager who states that "agriculture did not emerge as a vibrant industry in British Columbia until after 1900, but it ranked second only l6 Robert A. J. McDonald, Making Vancouver Class, Status, and Social Boundaries, 1863-1913 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996) 103.17 Although it is generally agreed that Mankichi lyemoto moved to Pitt Meadows in the Fraser Valley in 1903, evidence suggests Kumekichi Fujino of Mission became the first landowning farmer in 1904.See John Mark Read, "The Pre-War Japanese Canadians of Maple Ridge: Landownership and the Ken-Tie" (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 1975) 42-3.See also Michiko Midge Ayukawa, "Creating and Recreating Community: Hiroshima and Canada, 1891 -1 941 (PhD diss., University of Victoria, 1 996), 144, who cites 1904 as the earliest "recorded" date of a Japanese immigrant farming in the Fraser Valley.For the purposes of this study, 1904 is designated as the starting point for farm ownership.This stimulated an ongoing translation and negotiation of a culture that was

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