Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present

24: Five Farmers

F I V E F A R M E R S P A G E 220 Five stories of Colorado JapaneseAmerican farming families are told here. From the sad story of the Tanaka family in Longmont to the outrageous story of Mike Mizokami’s bureaucratic persecution. And then there is the inspiring story of Bob Sakata and his wife Joanna and the unusual story of Sam Matsuda and his brothers, Toshi and Dick. And finally is the story of Jim Kanemoto’s success. The Tanaka story begins with the arrival in America of Issokichi Tanaka (later known as Frank) in 1906 when he was seventeen years old. He moved to Brighton, Colorado, the following year, and in 1908 he began farming on fifty leased acres. He must have been a self-assured young man because that same year he became a cofounder of the Japanese Association in the Brighton and Fort Lupton areas with some 160 members. He married Kimi Fukushima, daughter of a Denver innkeeper, and they had nine children—seven boys and two c h a p t e r t w e n t y - f o u r F I V E F A R M E R S F I V E F A R M E R S P A G E 221 daughters—before he died in 1953. Five of the seven sons—George, Dick, King, Rocky, and Bobby—served in the U.S. Army during World War II. George Tanaka, after farming for a while, moved to Gardena, California, and managed a supermarket produce department. Another son, Tom, went to Oklahoma City and opened a produce market. King moved to Hillsborough, California, and got into the importexport business. Mary had her own flower shop and Ruth married and moved to Fort Morgan. That left Sam, Rocky, Dick, and Bobby to work together to build the 5,400-acre Tanaka Farms south of Longmont, the largest vegetable farm in Colorado—listed by American Vegetable Grower magazine in 1988 as the seventh largest vegetable farm in the southwestern United States—an amazingly efficient rural factory for manufacturing fresh food out of soil, water, sunshine, and sweat. At harvest time fleets of refrigerated trucks would be lined up outside the Tanaka packing shed, waiting to load and deliver Tanaka vegetables all over the West. But ill health doomed Tanaka Farms. First, Bob died of heart problems. Then Sam, the nominal head of the operation, also was stricken with heart problems. Rocky suffered kidney trouble and was largely incapacitated. With three of the four principals lost in short order, it became impossible for the family to supervise every detail of their hugely complex farming and marketing enterprise. In 1990 Tanaka Farms declared bankruptcy and lost their land. Today Dick is the last of the Tanakas still in the vegetable-growing business, running a modest farm south of Longmont. Mike Mizokami’s story is also sad—and outrageous—and there are some mysterious overtones of corruption and a conspiracy to ruin him involving the government. It begins on the evening of July 17, F I V E F A R M E R S P A G E 222 1962, when the telephone rang in the office of his farm just outside Blanca in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Ernest LaBarba, one of Mike’s customers, was calling from Dallas and was almost hysterical. “Mike, what are you trying to do to me?” he shouted. When he calmed down, LaBarba explained that a truckload of spinach from Mike’s farm had been seized by agents of the Food and Drug Administration, presumably on suspicion that it contained some illegal pesticide, and without the spinach LaBarba would have to shut down his distributorship. Mike was baffled. There had never been any question about his produce. The Mizokami family had been farming in Colorado for some sixty years and had an excellent reputation. Fukutaro Mizokami had been one of the first Japanese to farm in the Arkansas Valley near Rocky Ford. He specialized in onions and did well until the bottom of the market dropped out and he had to leave his crop in the fields. After auctioning all he owned, Fukutaro moved his family to the San Luis Valley near Blanca, and began sharecropping, but by the time he died in 1944 he was farming 180 acres of his own land. Farming hadn’t appealed much...