Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N P A G E xiii This book is about a people from a rocky string of islands who journeyed eastward across the vast Pacific Ocean and came to Colorado in search of a future for themselves and their children. It is the one-hundred-year history—a significant, warm, and sometimes sad story of hardships, defeats, and successes, of laughter, tears, and ultimate triumphs—of Colorado’s Japanese Americans. The book can trace its origins to one October day in 2003 when my friend Kimiko Side came to see me in her role as president of a public service organization, the Japanese Association of Colorado. She told me the association would be observing the one hundredth anniversary of its founding and a committee had come up with the idea of publishing a book about its history. And, she said, the association wanted me to write the book. Why me? I have lived in Colorado for more than fifty years but I N T R O D U C T I O N I N T R O D U C T I O N P A G E xiv never paid much attention to the Japanese Association. Too many other things to do. But, she argued, you are a writer. Well, yes, sort of. And, she went on, we are not thinking of a book about the association itself. We’re thinking about the people, the Coloradans from Japan and their descendants, the story of their experiences. In other words, a human story. That was more interesting. Go on, I said. Among your books, Kimiko continued, was Nisei, which did a beautiful job of telling about the Japanese American people in the whole country. Why not a book specifically about Japanese Americans in Colorado—who they were and what they did and why they did the things they did and the problems they faced as Coloradans and how they overcame them? Interesting idea. Nisei was the first of about a dozen books I have written, some of which were on the Japanese American experience. Nisei had focused on the people in the West Coast states, where perhaps 90 percent of Japanese Americans were living in 1941. It told of their travails during World War II when they were hustled into U.S.-style concentration camps as a result of the federal government’s hysterical and tragic assumption that race equated mass disloyalty. Kimiko pointed out that there wasn’t much in Nisei, or any other book, about the experience of Japanese Americans in the interior of the country and suggested it was time their story be told. What was their story? The vast majority of Japanese immigrants eventually had settled in California and Washington with a smaller number in Oregon. But on their arrival, with no knowledge of the English language or Ameri- I N T R O D U C T I O N P A G E xv can ways, the first jobs for approximately one-third of them were working as unskilled laborers in the inland West maintaining the railroads that stretched to the endless horizon. Not many remained in these jobs for long. The deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah were too hot; winters in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, too fiercely cold for youths from the temperate Japanese homeland. Seeing only a bleak and unpromising future in these states, most headed back to sink their roots near the coast. Only the hardiest few remained inland. Eventually they started farms, which required little in capital but much hard work and love of the soil, and began families. In 1940, just before tension between Japan and the United States flared into war in the Pacific, the federal census showed 126,947 “Japanese ” in the United States, not including Hawaii, which had yet to achieve statehood. Of those, 79,642 were American-born, Americaneducated Nisei who were U.S. citizens by birth. And 47,305 were Issei of the immigrant generation who remained aliens because the law denied the privilege of naturalization to Asians. Their numbers were never replenished because of the 1924 ban on further immigration from Asia. California was home of the largest number by far of ethnic Japanese. Colorado’s Japanese population had not grown significantly since the 1910 census when 2,300 were shown to be in the state with...