Discover Nikkei Logo

https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2025/7/3/tanaka-farms/

Tanaka Farms Carries on a Cherished Legacy in Irvine, California

comments

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japanese American farmers flourished on the West Coast. Many Issei and Nisei who came over from Japan in search of opportunity found it in farming, which at the time offered good wages and the promise of prosperity. Before World War II, two-thirds of Japanese Americans on the West Coast were working in agriculture, and in California, 70 percent of greenhouse flowers and 40 percent of commercial vegetables were grown by Japanese Americans.

Today, very few of those historic Japanese American farms remain. Racist legislation, culminating in the WWII incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, destroyed many of those farms, and the rise of big agriculture in the coming decades further eroded the community. Across the country, however, a smattering of historic Japanese American farms are still operational, as their Sansei and Yonsei owners strive to both preserve and carry on their legacies.      

Tanaka Farms
              

Issei Roots 

Among this select group is Tanaka Farms, located in Irvine, California. Their proud history dates all the way back to the early 1900s, when Takeo Tanaka immigrated to California from Hiroshima, Japan. His son George was born in Dinuba, California, in 1922, while Takeo and his wife worked as farm hands on a small farm. When George came of age, he acquired his own truck, with plans to ship produce in La Habra. Those plans were quickly curtailed, however, by the issuing of Executive Order 9066 in 1942.

Great-Grandfather Takeo, Grandpa George, and Auntie Terry Tanaka, 1950.

The Tanaka family, wanting to avoid incarceration, decided to decamp to Utah, where they had some friends willing to assist them. There, George met his future wife, Chris, a Utah native. After the war, George and Chris returned to California and settled in Fountain Valley, where they farmed tomatoes, vegetables, and strawberries on various properties.

Great-Grandpa Takeo holding baby Glenn, 1957.

It was there that Sansei Glenn Tanaka, current owner of Tanaka Farms, was born in 1957.

“I never had a job outside the farm,” recalls Glenn Tanaka. “On holiday weekends, I’d be working on the farm. It was never really said that I was taking it over, it was just kind of understood.”

He credits his father with showing him a warmer and more appealing side of the farming community by bringing him to the coffee shop where other farmers hung out. Tanaka was one of the few farmers’ kids who got to see the social side of farming, not just the work side, which is very demanding. “I guess he did a pretty good job of brainwashing me,” he laughs. “I like to think that’s what it was about anyway.”

Grand Ambitions

Tanaka went on to graduate from Cal Poly Pomona with a degree in agricultural business. There he met his wife, Shirley, who had grown up on a small farm in Riverside. Shirley knew how much work was involved in running a small farm, and she didn’t want that for herself.

Glenn Tanaka

Tanaka, however, had grander ambitions: He wanted to be a large-scale farmer.

“So it was expand, expand, expand,” Tanaka says. “We were growing strawberries and tomatoes at the time, and we started doing our own sales and shipping our produce across the country. I tell people it took me about eight years to screw things up. Got in debt up to here, had a couple bad years in a row, couldn't get any more money from the bank.”

The farm struggled through the late 80s and the 90s. When the Tanakas’ only child Kenny was born in 1983, the couple didn’t want him to become a farmer because it was too much of a struggle. One day, however, it was a visit to Tanaka Farms by Kenny’s preschool class that would change the farm’s fortunes forever.

 

Pivoting to Agritourism

Picking carrots

“We invited Kenny’s preschool class out to the farm and my wife gave them a tour, teaching them about farming and showing them around,” Tanaka says.

“They really liked it, so next year they came back, and then they told some other teachers about it, who told their friends, and soon other schools wanted to come out. Through the 90s, we kind of built up this clientele of schools, and by 1998 we had maybe 80 to 90 schools. The students loved coming to a real farm, and we started growing pumpkins for them around pumpkin season. They could visit our vegetable patch and pick their own vegetables.”

At first, the Tanakas simply thought of the school program as a community service. Their ongoing financial challenges, however, forced them to get creative and develop new income streams. They added more features to the school tours, such as a wagon ride and a petting zoo, and started charging more. The schools loved it and the program became even more popular. The Tanakas added a pick-your-own strawberry patch tour as the final stop on their program and by about 2005 they were welcoming school groups to their farm twice a year. At long last, the farm began to turn a profit.

Picking strawberries  

“Today, we don't do any wholesaling, it's all direct retail,” Tanaka says. “About 25 percent of our business comes from the produce we grow and sell and 25 percent comes from the school groups. Our real income, about 50 percent, comes from the families that come out on weekends and the pumpkin patch. It turns out that people will pay good money to be entertained, while they tend to scrimp on basics such as produce. So I guess we’ve really changed our model, we’ve moved into what they call ‘agritourism.’”

The agritourism model is also highly rewarding for them because it enables them to be involved with the community in a variety of ways. Now that they’ve been doing these tours for over two decades, Tanaka is happy to see that some of the parents bringing their kids today attended tours themselves when they were kids. The farm also enjoys working with local nonprofits, hosting fundraisers and other events on their grounds.

Hilltop Lucheon
                    

Giving Back to the Community

Windmill

Tanaka Farms’ ultimate act of community service may be Walk the Farm, an ambitious annual event that began as a fundraiser to help Japanese farmers who were devastated by the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck the Tōhoku region of Japan in 2011. Event attendees take a 1.5-mile walk around the farm, sampling freshly harvested fruits and vegetables, taking in musical and cultural performances, and participating in interactive kids' crafts along the way.​

In its first five years, the event raised more than $1 million for Tōhoku farmers. The Tanakas then expanded the charity to support scholarships for students wishing to study agriculture at Fukushima University in Japan, as well as Japanese American farmers impacted by natural disasters.

Walk the Farm also doubles as a tribute to the history of Japanese American farming in America. The legacy of the Issei and Nisei farmers is important to Tanaka, so he sought to preserve and commemorate that legacy by reaching out to farming families and asking them to send their stories and photos, which Tanaka would build out into a display, both at the farm and on the Walk the Farm website. So far they’ve managed to collect about 100 stories but they are in the process of enlarging their story committee and doing another push to collect more stories.

Tanaka loves being able to amplify Japanese American history and finds talking about it with the general public very satisfying. “We get a lot of educators coming through and seeing these stories. Sometimes a non-Japanese educator would see them and go back to their school and tell their Japanese American colleague about it, and then that person would make a connection with their own family history. To be able to touch lives like that, and educate people about our history, is really nice.”

        

A Legacy and a Future

The Tanaka Family. Top Row L-R: Farmer Glenn Tanaka, Mrs. Shirley Tanaka, Christine Tanaka, Farmer Kenji Tanaka, Farmer Kenny Tanaka. Bottom Row L-R: Farmer Landon Tanaka and Farmer Kaylee Tanaka (October 2022)

Today, Tanaka Farms welcomes thousands of students every year. It is the only remaining family-run farm in Irvine that hosts educational and pick-your-own-produce tours, and it regularly appears on lists of “top things to do in Irvine.” The farm even thrived during the pandemic—schools dropped other field trips but they kept coming out to the farm.

“I think our farm tours should be able to continue on for decades to come,” says Tanaka. In addition to the entertainment value, he notes that there is also a nostalgia factor for the old days when “going out to the family farm” was a common outing for many Japanese Americans.

Yonsei Kenny Tanaka, who graduated from California State University, Long Beach, with a degree in finance, now runs the agritourism side of the business, picking up the family legacy right where Sansei Glenn left off. And since Kenny himself has three children, all of whom have already been given the title of “farmer,” the future of Tanaka Farms looks to be in good hands.

All photos are courtesy of Tanaka Farms.

* * * * *

JANM is hosting the Members Summer Fête at Tanaka Farms on Saturday, July 12. JANM Members and their family and friends can learn about organic farming with Glenn Tanaka, take a wagon ride and farm tour, and enjoy a sensational buffet dinner complete with raffles, photobooth, fresh produce, and a beautiful sunset. Tickets must be purchased by a JANM Member by Friday, July 4.

 

© 2025 Carol Cheh

business economics families family-owned businesses farmers farms Irvine management Tanaka Farms
About the Author

Carol Cheh is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles.

Updated July 2025

Explore more stories! Learn more about Nikkei around the world by searching our vast archive. Explore the Journal

We’re looking for stories like yours!

Submit your article, essay, fiction, or poetry to be included in our archive of global Nikkei stories.
Learn More

New Site Design

See exciting new changes to Discover Nikkei. Find out what’s new and what’s coming soon!
Learn More

Discover Nikkei Updates

DISCOVER NIKKEI PROGRAM
July 12 • Burnaby, British Columbia
Join us for a book talk, reception, and panel discussion on Japanese Canadian history. The panel discussion will also be live-streamed via Zoom!
NIKKEI CHRONICLES #14
Nikkei Family 2: Remembering Roots, Leaving Legacies
Baachan, grandpa, tía, irmão… what does Nikkei family mean to you? Submit your story!
SUPPORT THE PROJECT
Discover Nikkei’s 20 for 20 campaign celebrates our first 20 years and jumpstarts our next 20. Learn more and donate!