Strawbery Days

I read David Niewert's Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community in response to the recent stupidity at Bellevue College.  The book is a series of partially overlapping essays that tells the whole history of Bellevue, WA through the prism of the lives of the Japanese American farmers who initially cleared and settled the area.  It's well written, and besides suffering from the profusion of proper names that always forces one to flip back and forth trying to remember who was who in a history like this, it's quite a quick read.  If you'd like the short version though, the basic story is summarized in an article Niewert wrote in response to the recent events.

The really shorter version is basically that power and prejudice have a real strong tendency to feed on and reinforce one another in a way that propagates both down through the generations.  Many early 20th century Japanese immigrants, very poor, constantly discriminated against, legally barred from owning land or becoming citizens, ended up as tenant farmers in the then rural East-side suburb of Seattle.  Bellevue at the time was a landscape consisting exclusively of huge stumps left from the turn of the century clear-cutting of old growth forest.  The Japanese immigrants, and soon their Japanese American children, ended up with the brutal task of dynamiting those stumps and turning the land into productive vegetable farms.  As a result of their efforts, the area became known especially for its strawberry farms, to the point where there was a hugely popular Strawberry Festival that attracted crowds from all over.  Despite becoming central to the local economy, the Japanese were still distinctly marginalized by a racist white society.  Stop me if you've heard this story before ...

The most notable of the long-time fomenters of anti-Japanese sentiment in the area was none other than Miller Freeman, a local businessman and land owner who many regard as the founding father of Bellevue.  He was instrumental in getting what is now the I-90 floating bridge built across Lake Washington in 1940.  The bridge cut the travel time between downtown Seattle and Bellevue from over an hour to 15 minutes.  Now that the Japanese farmers had already cleared so much land, Bellevue was perfectly positioned to transform into what it is today -- a soulless Seattle suburb with a stick up its butt about how its not just a suburb.  In fact, Bellevue is still basically a large mall with a small and crappy city attached to it -- straight out of Dawn of the Dead -- and this is even 40 years after Microsoft landed in close proximity.  Once the value of the land was measured in potential houses and not strawberries, Freeman's anti-Japanese tirades really kicked into high gear.  And of course they turned out to be perfectly timed to coincide with the hysteria of the war.  

The rest is gut-wrenching history.  You can read about it in lots of places, but Niewert does a fine job of covering the facts and even helps you feel a little of what it meant (though a more personal and poetic history would be When the Emperor Was Divine).   In 1942, FDR imprisoned all people of Japanese ancestry who were living on the West Coast.  They remained in these concentration camps for the duration of war.  When they were finally released they were given $25 and train ticket so that they could return to find their homes burned to the ground, and their farms looted during their 3 year absence.  That was the end of the strawberry days in Bellevue.

The not at all funny punchline of the whole story is that somewhere along the way Miller Freeman ended up owning a big chunk of valuable former farmland in Bellevue.  His son turned that very land into the mutli-billion dollar mall that sits at the geographic and spiritual heart of today's Bellevue.  His grandson became a WA state congressman and today continues to manage the family mall.  And, as the recent events I mentioned at the beginning make clear, you still don't want to be a person of Japanese ancestry on the wrong side of the Freeman family.  Faulker's famous line has never been better illustrated: "The past is never dead. It's not even past".