It all happened swiftly enough. “Aramaki!” yelled a civilian, an official of the War Relocation Authority, which ran the government camp. He handed the young farmer a large brown manila envelope and then shook his hand, grinning as he did so.

  As expected, the envelope contained three items. There was a certificate, under the embossed eagle-and-arrows insignia of the U.S. army and signed by a two-star general named Lewis, attesting to the fact that Aramaki was now a free man and should be accorded all courtesies as might be extended to any other American citizen. There was a clutch of five crisp five-dollar bills, held together with a paper clip. And there was an official army movement voucher, a ticket that was valid for use during the following seven days; it would permit him unrestricted one-way travel by bus or train from this remote spot in the Snake River plains of southern Idaho back to his hometown—and his long neglected strawberry fields—some six hundred fifty road miles westward to Bellevue, in Washington State.

  There was a clutch of buses outside the barbed-wire fences. If Aramaki would go back to his barracks and collect his few belongings, said the guards, one of the buses would take him and other freed prisoners to the Union Pacific railroad depot in Minidoka town, fifteen miles away. His wife and child would have to remain behind, the guards said, without further explanation, other than to tell him it was regulation, and he should not worry unduly. Likewise, his mother, similarly detained, would stay for a while longer, also for unexplained reasons.

  At the train station they wouldn’t be able to board the magnificent Streamliner service, which sped well-heeled passengers from Chicago out to Portland in Oregon, since that train passed by each early evening without stopping. But there was a local train, the Portland Rose, which made a brief stop at Minidoka halt each morning at 11:15. It would be a trying journey, especially in spring, as the high passes over the Rockies were often blocked and his train might well have to wait for a plough to clear the way ahead. But if all went well they’d be in Boise, the state capital, by lunchtime, would cross into the Pacific Time Zone and make a ten-minute dinnertime stop in Huntington, Oregon, to take on water. Then, by following the course of the Snake River the train would make Pendleton by midnight, see dawn at the town of Hood River, reach Portland by breakfast, and finally draw up with a hiss of steam and a squeal of brakes at Seattle’s Union Station terminus at two in the afternoon. A taxi—if anyone at the station would take him; he knew well of the likely hostility felt toward Japanese this late in the war—should bring him to the farm an hour or so later.

  But Akira Aramaki didn’t care how long it took. He was now at last heading home, and if not with all of his family members, he would at least be reunited with the land that for nearly thirty years he and his parents had so patiently tilled and cared for. It was a ten-acre plot which produced fruit crops of such abundance that they had helped make the small town of Bellevue the strawberry capital, so-called, of the United States.

  But what happened next was not quite as he had anticipated. For while he had been absent, unjustly imprisoned by the American government, someone else had seemingly taken his land. Aramaki found he had, or so he thought, been dispossessed.

  The patriarch of the Aramaki family, Hikotara, had arrived in the United States in the late autumn of 1904. He had come from Kumamoto, in southern Japan—a city known today for its tiny sweet-tasting oysters, but which at the turn of the last century was still mired in the traditions—of shoguns, samurai, steadfast isolation—that had been so rudely overthrown by the arrival of Admiral Matthew Perry and the American “black ships” of fifty years before. As a result it was a community somewhat insulated from the modernizing zeal that was then roiling the country. Japan was also not in a good place in 1904, the year Hikotara decided to leave. The Russo-Japanese War was in full force, and such treasure as was in the government coffers was being spent on the conscripted soldiery, not the country, which was as a result widely impoverished. Outlying cities and prefectures were very much harder hit than the larger industrial and commercial centers like Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka. Impoverished men living in the more remote parts of the country—in places just like Kumamoto, where they were endlessly fearful of being press-ganged into the army for service on the Russian front—heard tell of better working conditions in America. Recruiters were also abroad in the countryside, telling of high-paying jobs in this land of promise. And so in the hundreds and then the thousands, men began to venture across the Pacific Ocean in search of improvable lives. Hikotara Aramaki was one such: he was moderately well born, belonging, his family said later, to the samurai class, and found it fairly easy to rustle up the fare for a long sea journey from Yokohama aboard a steamship bound for the only destination he could find: the Canadian port of Vancouver.

  He arrived there in the chill of December—and soon thereafter he set about walking—for reasons unexplained—down to the United States border and then, once across, to the nearby town of Bellingham. He and another Japanese he had encountered en route decided to stay for a while, opting not to head farther south for the city center of Seattle, largely because they had been told of a virulent anti-Asianism that had lately sprung up there. Instead, they both took jobs working for the railroad, with Hikotara, perhaps because of his commanding samurai manners, rising swiftly to become a section foreman. He was much liked by his colleagues down the line: James J. Hill, they called him, alluding to the big railroad boss of the Pacific northwest for whom, ultimately, they all now worked. He soon moved on to work a new branch of the line, just built across on the eastern side of Lake Washington, in a much more raw and wild stretch of countryside. The line served a cluster of villages, and a fair number of other Japanese migrants were already employed by the company as section hands or engine watchmen, performing work that white men didn’t care for and at wages that were no more than a pittance. But these men, many of them having come from farming communities in Japan, immediately saw the potential for performing agriculture—both in the logged lands that lay, partly cleared, on either side of the new railroad tracks, as well as in those razed areas where logging companies had more fully cleared the forests to provide timber for the building of Seattle’s housing across the lake.

  Hikotara Aramaki radiated authority to contemplate leaving the business of railroading and setting out on his own. Once he had come to understand the way things worked in this still somewhat undeveloped, pioneer-suitable countryside, he and some of his similarly ambitious fellow migrants suggested to a gathering of the local landowners—most of them lumber companies—a scheme that they thought could benefit both sides. They would clear the land of tree stumps—a miserable task that, once again, white men were loath to perform—and in exchange would win the right to cultivate the cleared acreage, growing fruits and vegetables on it. They would then rent this land for five-year terms and grow what the rich, damp, and amply mulched earth suggested would be best suited: lettuce, celery, cabbage—and strawberries.

  The arrangement worked exceedingly well. Hikotara Aramaki took to land clearing with a vengeance. A single acre might sport thirty huge stumps, and these had to be sawn down and axed into oblivion and their roots pulled away by horses; alternatively, and more dangerously, they had to be pulverized with blasting powder or dynamite. Not a few workers lost limbs, faces, lives. But slowly the acres became clear, and with ploughing and tilling and raking, so the soil was revealed and prepared for the sowing and growing of crops. Aramaki took both to the local weather—cooler than in southern Japan, but nicely damp—and to the working conditions, with such enthusiasm and energy that by 1910 he had saved sufficient money that he was able to choose Towa Tasaki, a “picture bride” from a book of eligible ladies waiting back home in Japan, and to summon her to meet him in Bellevue. The pair married and three years later they had a child—the aforesaid Akira.

  By now the Aramakis found themselves wedded also to the United States and to their new life in the Pacific northwest. Many of the thirty-odd thousand Japanese farm laborers who had sailed to the western states in those turn-of-the century years, when U.S. immigration policies were relatively liberal, wanted no more than to make money and return home, earned funds in hand. But a significant number bought instead into the idea of the American dream, and if they were farmers, or wanted to be, then to complete the picture, as the Aramakis did, they needed to buy a piece of land.

  On the face of it, however, this was not possible. They were not citizens—they were Issei, a Japanese-sounding colloquialism but in fact an official American designation, signifying that they were first-generation immigrants, and as such could stay and work, but could not get U.S. citizenship. And if they were not citizens, it followed that they could not own land either: at the time, alien land laws were being passed in states all across the union, Washington State included, that firmly forbade Asians from acquiring real property—from becoming legal owners of any morsel of U.S. territory, of any size, location, or quality. The Aramakis certainly had the money to buy—their eight years of scrupulous saving had brought them the wherewithal to purchase a ten-acre piece just outside Bellevue. But the land office staff raised their hands helplessly, no matter how often Aramaki presented his billfold and counted out the purchase price: it was not possible, they said, being strictly against the law.

  Except that there was, for the Aramakis and for many other equally frugal Issei in the region, a way around the rules. There was a loophole.

  In 1921, the year that the Aramakis had rustled up enough cash to buy the plot, their son, Akira, was eight years old. Under the official designation he was Nisei, a second-generation Japanese, a child of Issei immigrants. But he was also something else. By virtue of having been born in the United States, and under the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, he was an American citizen. He was what is called a birthright citizen—and by being so, he now had a greater claim upon the country of his birth than did his parents, since they were both born in Japan. And so it transpired that even if they, as Japanese immigrants, could not buy land in Bellevue, Akira most certainly could. He might not to be able to sign his name to a deed nor swear an oath before a notary public, but he could become the owner of a tract of land, notionally and, indeed, actually.

  Which is how young Akira Aramaki came to be the legal and indisputable possessor of this ten-acre plot of stump-free and otherwise cleared farmland in an area of Bellevue called Midlakes. Once the paperwork was complete and the money handed over, then his parents, Hikotara and Towa, set themselves to work. Having cleared the land, they now began to cultivate it, initially growing small crops of vegetables, tomatoes, and vines, to bring in some income and to get the soil ready for the more complicated business of growing strawberries.

  It took a couple of summer seasons before the fruit growing started to take off—but by 1923 it was doing so, and the Aramakis began to enjoy a certain very modest prosperity and some degree of standing in the community. Like so many of their neighbors and friends—and by some family estimates there were ten other Japanese families with property close by, such that almost all of Midlakes could fairly be said to be Japanese-owned—the family would either truck the glistening red berries across the lake to the markets in Seattle, have them sent down south to premium-paying customers in Portland or even San Francisco (although California soon imposed a strict quarantine on imported fruit and vegetables), or else sell them more cheaply in the local markets to the increasing number of summer visitors.

  Life for the Aramaki family in those early years may well have been hard, but it nonetheless now held promise—not least because of the basic fact that the family now owned a tiny piece of the American countryside, a matter of inestimable meaning to any immigrant. And tough though their lives were, Hikotara Aramaki proved to be an industrious and inventive farmer, like so many of his neighbors, whose produce sold exceptionally well, being of good and reliable quality and—important for strawberries—sweetness.

  The success of Japanese farmers in Bellevue led to an annual festival—with the election of a Strawberry Queen and her princesses—five young aspirants here—and the staging of classically American street parades.

  Japanese farmers in America had form. Japan at the time was still an overwhelmingly agricultural nation, with smallholdings clustered in the fertile plains and a population well versed in the practices of small-scale farming. Not for the Japanese the business of managing waving prairie fields of golden grain; back home it was small rice paddy farming that dominated, as well as the growing of root vegetables for pickling, or the green-leafed legumes that were both so central to the local diet, and so restorative to the local soil.* All these growing skills they brought to the American west, and by doing so helped transform the local agricultural scene while propelling the western states into the vanguard of the nation’s food producers.

  However, the land as the Japanese were legally able to buy or lease—just like the stump-filled barrens of Bellevue—was generally marginal, much of it floored with poor-quality soils generally disdained by the existing farmers. The newcomers encountered all manner of natural adversity—blight, floods, locust invasions, near starvation—but in a singular fashion managed to come through them all, to the astonishment, admiration, and envy of many of the white farmers nearby. Yet envy can and did have poisonous consequences. A significant number of these white farmers fell prey to the burgeoning phenomenon of anti-Asian racism. Bodies like the Asiatic Exclusion League and the Native Sons of the Golden West, together with lawmakers from both main political parties, tried to put a crimp on the agricultural efforts of the immigrant Japanese.

  And yet the Japanese managed to come through it all, hardworking, determined, united, and generally optimistic. The statistics say much: in 1920 there were 3.5 million people living in California, of whom some 71,000 were ethnically Japanese, 2 percent of the population. They managed to produce fully 12 percent of California’s total farm products, crops valued at some $67 million. By 1941, on the eve of war, their share of the truck farming crop of the western states had risen to an astounding 42 percent—even though they were still at no more than 3 percent of the population. Japanese farmers, working on holdings that seldom exceeded forty acres, produced 90 percent of the American west’s snap beans, celery, peppers, and strawberries; and 25 to 50 percent of the area’s asparagus, cabbage, cantaloupes, carrots, lettuce, onions, and watermelons. They had 30,000 acres laid to grapes, as well as 19,000 acres of plums, peaches, apricots, cherries, and almonds; they raised chickens in great abundance; and to top it all, they had control of some 65 percent by value of the flower market business. And all this was being raised and grown on the least fertile land in the states—a reality that, as supporters of the Japanese farmers were quick to point out, kept the prices of all these goods down, for the ultimate benefit of the western-states consumer.

  But supporters of Japanese in those interwar days were vanishingly few in number, and the the drumbeat of opposition was growing steadily. Rival white farmers were now facing competition like never before, and bodies that represented them—the Farm Bureau Federation, as well as a national fraternal organization called the Grange—did their level best to head off the Japanese challenge. The Los Angeles County Farm Bureau lobbied the government to retract Japanese rights to lease, rent, or own not just farmland but “any land whatsoever.” Valentine McClatchy, a wealthy and influential Sacramento newspaper proprietor, a prominent local landowner, and member of the more specifically named Japanese Exclusion League, was especially virulent. In 1920 he filed a court brief arguing that

  the Japanese possess superior advantages in economic competition, partly because of racial characteristics, thrift, industry, low standards of living, willingness to work long hours with expensive pleasures, the women working as men etc. Combine with these characteristics extraordinary cooperation and solidarity, and the assistance of the Japanese Government, through associations acting for it or in its behalf, and the Japanese, concentrating in communities or industries, are easily able to supplant the white.

  Such sentiments were not entirely new, and McClatchy himself had been voicing them since before the First World War. By that conflict’s end, passions were starting to rage,* such that by the 1930s, with the job-destroying Depression now affecting so many sectors of American life—but not, notably, the Japanese farming communities on the West Coast—suspicion and hostility directed toward these people (who were now being called by some “agents of the proud Yamato race”) became the leitmotif of the age. The new American president, Franklin Roosevelt, harnessed the FBI to look carefully at the Japanese population—by now swollen to a combined 120,000 in the four far western states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona—and charged officials to draw up files and keep tabs. Transpacific geopolitical hostility was in any case starting to grow; the possibility was arising, as McClatchy and his like began to claim, that the Japanese farmers were no more than “a peaceful invasion force” financed and directed from Tokyo and bent on the single aim of colonizing the American west. They had to be watched, their every move investigated, their land grabbing—or other, more sinister—ambitions comprehensively thwarted.

  Hikotara Aramaki fell ill and died in 1936—mercifully missing most of this. His son, Akira, by then twenty-three years old, continued to work the strawberry fields that he owned, along with his mother, Towa, who, while forty-six, was still fit and able. Life progressed more or less normally. Bellevue by now had developed into a sizable town, with many Japanese-owned businesses—grocery stores, furniture emporiums, druggists, barbershops. Mother and son would have been aware of the growing tensions between the United States and the Japanese empire, aware too of the vituperative and hostile sentiments of many of their white neighbors, but probably quite unaware that the FBI was watching them and their fellow Japanese. In October 1941, they would certainly not know that a special section of the FBI was drawing up a formal Custodial Detention List, categorizing Japanese into three levels depending on their perceived risk to the security of the United States. The Aramakis, quietly getting on with their lives, would be quite unaware that they were fast standing into danger.