Vigilantes, Sugar Beets, and ‘Evacuees’: the Japanese Settlement of the Grand Valley, a story of Both Racism and Refuge

The bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in December of 1941, led directly to one of the darkest moments in American history, when Franklin Delenor Roosevelt signed Executive Order #9066, ordering the evacuation from the West Coast, and eventual internment of Japanese Americans, and immigrants alike. This dark chapter for America holds some light as the Grand Valley willingly played host to many of those displaced by this racist, wrong-headed and authoritarian move by the federal government. History, of course, is in the nuance; and life here in Grand Junction before and during WWII was anything but easy for those of Japanese descent.

“I didn’t think they’d do it, I thought American fair play was there, the Constitution too. And we had the right to the pursuit of happiness. Going to the camp and being evacuated didn’t fit that…this was the only country I knew. But if they picked just the Japanese for an evacuation again, I’d raise holy hell, and I’d sit here until they pretty well shot me,” said Paul Shinoda, a voluntary evacuee that spent some of the war years in the Grand Valley.

Until the end of March 1942, Japanese Americans could relocate on their own accord to the interior of the country. These folks were called “voluntary evacuees,” though they clearly did not volunteer to sell or lease their houses and business for a fraction of their value and sell their possessions on short notice.

Many Japanese Americans and immigrants on the pacific coast, that did get out before internment, came to Colorado. According to William Wei, in his book, “Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State,” they came for three reasons: 1). Colorado, unlike many other inland states, did not have a law forbidding non-citizens from owning land; 2). Colorado already had a sizable Japanese population; and 3). Colorado’s Governor Ralph Carr welcomed the evacuees and railed against the mass imprisonment of law-abiding citizens.

Carr’s welcoming of the Japanese to Colorado was vehemently opposed by almost every newspaper in the state. And was deeply unpopular with the general population of Colorado. The Denver Post’s editorial page telling Governor Carr what he should have said instead, “’Colorado Doesn’t want these Yellow Devils and doesn’t intend to allow this state to be turned into a sanctuary for enemies of the American people.’” The Daily Sentinel was a notable exception, only weighing in on the subject by printing a statement by the Chamber of Commerce expressing “no serious objection,” to relocating Japanese Americans to the Grand Valley adding “we consider it our patriotic duty to cooperate in this and all war measures.”

Those fleeing east saw Carr’s words as a beacon. The War Department estimated that 1,963 Japanese folks relocated to Colorado voluntarily before April of 1942. The April 3rd, The Daily Sentinel reported that Sheriff H. E. Decker had received requests from residents for the recently relocated Japanese as farm hands. ‘Voluntary evacuees’ had to register with local law enforcement. Decker said request had been passed to members of the long-standing local Japanese American community, “at whose homes a number of the evacuees from California are staying.” Decker said there were about 20 evacuees that had moved into Mesa County in the previous weeks. More, like Paul Shinoda, would make their way to Colorado after fleeing to other states like Idaho and New Mexico that were not as welcoming.

The Grand Valley’s level-head response to the relocation of eventually hundreds of Japanese Americans to the Grand Valley is likely due to the valley having a well-established and even respected Japanese American community, but that respect had been hard won.

In 1903, the Daily Sentinel snarked, with no context, “Japanese labor has been tried in Colorado and Utah and is pronounced to be a failure. The Japanese costume fills so easily with snow that the laborer becomes logy.” Three years later, the Sentinel pondered “Shall Colorado labor be utilized in the fruit belt of the state when the harvesting time comes or shall the fruit growers’ associations of the western slope be obliged to resort to the importation of Japanese and other foreign labor…?” The growers’ associations in question opted not to import Japanese labor.

Three months later in June of 1906 the Sentinel reported “One of the most interesting visitors of the week in Grand Junction was a little Jap, H. S Okomura by name who says he lives in Denver where he has an agency of supplying Japanese labor.” He was on his way to Montrose where he was contracting Japanese laborers for the “broadguaging” of the railroad from Grand Junction to Montrose. A work crew of Japanese labor did work for the railroad in 1906, but something happened, and they quit or were fired. This small group, likely less then 20 men, tried to find employ in the orchards in Paonia and Delta, but they were met with angry town folks and forced to move on. These first Japanese folks may have been met with force in Paonia and Delta, it’s hard to read between the lines. These men likely made their way into the Grand Valley where farm labor was desperately needed.

A couple weeks after Okomura’s visit another two Japanese labor agents were in town from the same agency, “arranging for bringing in some Japanese labor to help in the beet fields this summer.” Sugar beets were an up-and-coming industry in the Grand Valley with the construction of Holly Sugar refinery in 1899.

By the 1910s and 20s some of those laborers began buying or leasing their own small farms. A 1910 Sentinel had a blurb about the success of Y. Miya who had planted 60 acres in the lower valley in sugar beets, which netted “1,125 tons for which the Jap was paid the sum of $5,625.” A small blurb in the July 13, 1912, Daily Sentinel illustrates a community putting down roots as it announces, “J. Yamisheta left Thursday for San Francisco to meet his wife, who is coming over from Japan…”

In early February 1911, seven Japanese laborers were confronted by mounted masked-men (white-cappers, or nightriders in the parlance of the time) bearing guns, near the small farming community of Austin. The men had worked less than half a day before the vigilantes attacked and marched the laborers fourteen miles to Delta and “demanded that they leave town and threatening vengeance…if they returned,” according to the Delta Independent. The men’s employer, the labor agency and the Japanese Association of Colorado advocated for the arrest and prosecution of the vigilantes. A month later, eight orchardists were arrested for their hooded attack, but the charges were eventually dismissed for a lack of evidence.

In 1913, the Emperor of Japan died. Shortly thereafter a Japanese diplomat to the U.S committed hair-kari, or ritualized suicide, to express the grief of the Japanese in America. On September 18th, Grand Junction Police were alerted to a suicide pact in progress. They interrupted a secret meeting of fifty Japanese farmers and laborers drawing lots to see who would commit Hair-Kari, to honor the passing of the emperor. Druggists were warned not to sell poison to the local Japanese population. This story was not reported in local papers that survive, but it was picked up and printed in papers around the country and state.

By the 1920s, it was obvious that some of the whites resented the success of Japanese farmers. In 1921, a bill was introduced into the Colorado statehouse, calling for the “banishment of the land-holding Japanese in this state.” the bill’s sponsor feared “American farmers cannot compete with the Japanese and that sooner or later they are going to take the land from Americans.” The bill failed.

By the time of the voluntary evacuation of the Japanese from the Pacific coast, the local community was in the hundreds and well established, owning their own farms. Some of those families are still prominent farmers today, like Okagawas. The local Japanese community served as hosts to ‘evacuee’ families and helped find them work on local farms and in local industry.

One of the ten Japanese internment camps set up by the federal government was constructed near the small town of Grenada in the south-east corner of the state. Those unable or unwilling to ‘voluntarily evacuate’ were round up and eventually interned in these camps. The camp, known as Amache, provided work crews to projects and farms around the state. Crews came all the way to Grand Junction to harvest peaches and thin and top sugar beets.

Jimi Yamaichi came from Amache to Grand Junction in 1943 to help “pick peaches.” He was shocked to see German POWs having free movement around the town, while he and other American born Japanese internees where only allowed to go to town with armed supervision.

The Japanese, most of whom were American born, were eager to show their loyalty and many internees and ‘evacuees’ volunteered for service in the military. Lawson I. Sakai and Manabi Hirasaki both recent ‘evacuees’ to the Grand Valley joined the military in 1943, with the creation of the 442nd Combat Regiment, comprised solely of Americans of Japanese descent. The newspapers of the day regularly printed lists of wounded and killed from Colorado. Many of those names were from Amache.

Throughout most of the war the Grand Valley, was tolerant of the influx of ‘evacuees.’ Ads in the Daily Sentinel seeking Japanese farmers to work or lease farms and orchards were common. But late in the war a series of meetings were held by local farmers demanding laws barring Japanese Americans from buying land and seeking guarantees that when the war ends the ‘evacuees’ would not be allowed to remain, and that no more Japanese evacuees should be relocated to the Grand Valley.

Paul Shinoda, recalled that his wife and three children were arrested while ice skating on the Gunnison River in 1944, a guard detained the family and confiscated their camera. Likely they had gotten close to the property that is now the Department of Energy, and at that time was run by the military and was gathering, storing and shipping radioactive ores for use in the still secret ‘Manhattan Project,’ which was developing the nuclear bomb.

Paul, to the relief of the reactionaries organizing to make sure Japanese evacuees left Colorado at the end of the war, and his family had every intention of getting back to California, the last thing Paul told his dad who died here in Grand Junction in 1944, was a promise to get the family “back to California.”

By 1944, according to numbers from J.H. Lewis, the then acting relocation supervisor for the area, there had been 14 Japanese families in the Grand Valley prior to evacuation; Another 18 families relocated during the window of ‘voluntary evacuation,’ prior to April of 1942; by 1944, another 24 families on ‘indefinite leave’ from the ‘relocation centers’ resided in the area. Colorado by this time had 7,700 Japanese Americans residing with-in the states boarders compared to 2700 before the start of the war.

While the Grand Valley remained more tolerant than many communities in dealing with Japanese relocation, not everyone shared that tolerance. A rambling, hate-filled and conspiratorial letter to the editor of the Daily Sentinel published in January 1944, by Gertrude Rader, sums up the reactionaries’ view: “Who wants them for neighbors? When they buy property, the adjoining property has lost its former value…I’ll give them credit for raising good crops but early in the morning and late at night they were salvaging the dumps along the washes and draws and rivers here and selling all the war material back to their beloved Japan to come back and kill our boys…[Our soldiers] will come back to Jap neighbors next door? What do you think they are dying for?…Show me the real estate agent or private owner who is selling to the Japs and I’ll show you why, He either hasn’t a son or anyone he holds dear in this war, or he thinks more of the dollar than he does of anything else other than his own yellow streak.”

The backlash against the Japanese relocation likely cost Governor Carr his political career, he lost his 1942 bid for the U.S. Senate to ‘Big’ Ed Johnson. Johnson campaigned against Carr’s pro-Japanese position. Repeatedly Johnson, also a former Governor of Colorado, reminded voters that he called out the Colorado National Guard in 1935 to evict Mexican and alien laborers from Colorado, suggesting he would have done the same to the Japanese ‘evacuees.’

In October of 1945, with the war recently over, a “fiery cross was observed burning on reservoir hill,” south of the city. The cross burned close to many Japanese owned and leased farms on Orchard Mesa. The Sentinel speculated that it may portend a revival of the KKK which ruled this city and the state, just twenty years previously. With the rising Anti-Japanese sentiment through 1944 and into 1945, it very well may have been a reminder to those Japanese that relocated here during WWII, that they should now leave.

Paul Shinoba returned to California in late 1945. Both Lawson I. Sakai and Manabi Hirasaki upon being discharge in 1946, quickly returned their families to California. But many did stay and to this day Grand Junction has a relatively large Japanese population.

Sources:

Delta and Paonia newspapers via www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org

GJ Daily Sentinel clippings via www.newspapers.com

Asians in Colorado: A history of persecution and perseverance in the Centennial State, By William Wei, 2016.

The Principled Politician: Ralph Carr and the Fight Against Japanese American Internment, by Adam Schrager, 2008.

And Justice for All: An Oral history of the Japanese American Detention Camps, Compiled by John Tateishi, 1984. Chapter 8 Paul Shinado Oral History.

Jimi Yamaichi, Oral history. Densho Digital Repository. ddr-densho-1000-106-9 — Jimi Yamaichi Segment 9 | Densho Digital Repository https://ddr.densho.org/