I first became aware of the reverential esteem in which the Issei generation was held within the Japanese American community on the evening of March 31, 1984. On that date, an event was held at the South Coast Plaza Hotel in Costa Mesa, California, that was billed as “A Tribute to the Issei Pioneers in Orange County.” It attracted 660 people to honor the historical contributions of the first-generation Issei, 38 of whom were in attendance.

Moreover, it raised more than $25,000 to support the joint efforts of the Japanese American Council of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County and the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, with particular attention to the bilingual Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project.

In a similar vein, the ambitious volume under review here, which is intended more as a “family photo album” than a “history book,” succeeds through an appealing and informative blend of words and images, filling more than 300 pages, to pay tribute to the Issei of California’s Salinas Valley.

In the process of so doing, however, this publication, The Issei of the Salinas Valley: Japanese Pioneer Families, authored and edited by Mae Sakasegawa, a Sansei, encompasses the full sweep of the Nikkei experience from the late nineteenth century, when the first people of Japanese ancestry came to the Salinas Valley as sugar beet field laborers, up to 1942 when, along with a total of 125,000 Japanese Americans, the U.S. government unjustly removed them from their homes and incarcerated them in concentration camps (which in fact they were, even though they were designated by the U.S. government under euphemistic terms like “assembly center,” relocation center,” “isolation center,” “segregation center,” or “internment center”).

What is remarkable about this volume, a revised version of the original 2007 book, is that the 90 family histories represented in it assuredly communicate an identifiable community portrait without sacrificing the many variations within it on the altar of homogeneity. This diversity is made manifest thanks in great part to the assiduous efforts of the aforementioned Sakasegawa (1928–2021) who, apart from spending World War II in the Poston II incarceration camp in Arizona, lived her entire life in the Salinas area. Saturated with the stories of this region, she was always immensely proud of the tenacity of its multi-generational residents (and most especially its pioneer Issei) to overcome hardships and achieve success.

Accordingly, in the last three decades of her life, she devoted herself to first collecting the personal stories of Salinas Valley Nikkei and then curating them into an inspirational homage to them, one that will enlighten present readers and, moreover, endure for posterity. At a time when studies about Japanese Americans justifiably focus on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, the late author of The Issei of the Salinas Valley chose to emphasize and embody the intergenerational transmission of tenacity and dignity.

The Issei of the Salinas Valley: Japanese Pioneer Families
By Mae Sakasegawa
(Pacific Grove, Calif.: Park Place Publications, 2023, 332 pp., $68.25, paperback)

* This article was originally published in Nichi Bei News on July 18, 2024.

© 2024 Art Hansen, Nichi Bei News