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Japanese imprisonment during WW II destroyed the livelihood of many farmers.

U.S.

census data shows only about 1 in 3 Japanese American farmers in Washington returned to farming after their forced removal.

Two young farmers are reviving food production on one of the Vashon Island's last historic Japanese-American farmsteads.

One of the very few that survived incarceration.

Strawberries first ripen in these fields in the early 1930s.

After the Matsuda family first purchased the land and began growing the fruit commercially, it was also the first plants Koji Pingry and his partner Lizzie Jansen put in the ground after taking over the land.

This year, they've also planet Japanese cucumbers, ginger and Fushimi peppers.

A big part of why we were interested in taking it on was because we were pretty sure that there were no farmers on island, even the ones that had historically Japanese names in their farm growing Japanese vegetables.

We thought it would be really cool and special to to grow things that maybe that the Matsuda family was growing, but also certainly lik e people, the Japanese-American farmers and the Japanese immigrant farmers who were here.

In 1942 before the Matsuda family was sent to an incarceration camp in California, ownership was temporarily transferred to a local deputy sheriff until the oldest Matsuda son reached adulthood.

Yoneichi Matsuda probably a very pivotal decision for his family to get the ownership transferred into his name as a birthright citizen.

I think that was one of the keys for what allowed them to come back and the stories are that that local sheriff's deputy wasn't particularly reputable in his care of people's property.

So when Heisuke and his wife, Mitsuno, returned, they found the farm in disrepair.

It was a lot for them to bring it back up to production.

State laws at the time barred non-white immigrants, including Japanese immigrants, from owning land.

That in new job opportunities, contributed to the decline in farmers after the war.

Discriminatory practices and law pretty much precluded employment in the mainstream economy, whether it's, you know, civil service jobs, jobs with existing mainstream companies and businesses.

And that drove a lot of Japanese Americans into farming and other small business.

After the war, a lot of those barriers start to fall away, especially for the American citizen, Nisei.

And so many of them were now able to get jobs and in civil service to become teachers and, you know, lawyers.

In 2014, the Vashon-Maury Land Trust bought the land.

Running a farm became too much for the nonprofit.

So they leased the land to Pingry and Jansen, who don't have any connection to the Matsuda family.

They specialize in Japanese vegetables, and have also taken over the stall of a longtime immigrant farmer at the U-District Farmers' Market after he retired.

We took over his booth and we wanted to grow a lot of the same crops that he used to grow, so that his customers could seamlessly sort of keep buying the same things.

So some of those vegetables are this here is a tray of Mizuna.

Mizuna is like a Japanese mustard green that is really popular at the market and something that people really love.

This is another thing that Taki- and only Taki-San used to grow.

This is called moroheiya.

We also love eating Japanese vegetables.

It's a big part of like how I sort of stay connected to that side of my family.

To find the rest of our stories about food sourcing head to Cascadepbs.org.

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I'm Paris Jackson, thanks for watching.