California, 1957. Highway 99 southbound between Fresno and Tulare. Kenji Mori, 51 years old, is standing at the edge of a strawberry field he used to own. His family farmed this ground for 22 years before the government moved them to Manzanar in 1942. The field was sold at a fraction of its value while they were gone.
He came back from the war with the Distinguished Service Cross and a Purple Heart and found the field belonging to someone else. He has been farming other people’s land ever since. He is standing at the fence looking at the strawberry rows when a truck slows and pulls to the shoulder. Here is the story. Takashi Mori arrived in California from Hiroshima Prefecture in 1910.
He worked the lettuce fields in the Salinas Valley for 6 years, living in a bunkhouse with 11 other men, sending money home to Japan until he had enough to bring his wife Hana to California and then enough after 4 more years of field work to lease a parcel of uncleared ground south of Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley.
He cleared it himself with a rented mule and a borrowed grubbing hoe and his own hands, working the rocks out of the alluvial soil one by one and piling them at the south fence line where they remain today. He planted strawberries because the soil and the water table suited them and because the Fresno market paid well for them.
And he planted two rows of pear trees along the east fence because Hana liked pears and because the trees would belong to whoever came after him and that mattered to him. By 1930, the Mori farm was 40 acres, all of it under cultivation, producing 12 tons of strawberries a season, and pears enough for the Fresno market and several neighboring families who traded for them.
Takashi died in 1936 of a stroke in the field at 61 years old. His son, Kenji, who was 29 and had been working the farm with his father since he was old enough to be useful, took over the next morning, the way men take over farms when they have been learning the farm all their lives, which is to say without ceremony and without the feeling that anything has changed except the weight of it.
Kenji married a woman named Yuki in 1931. They had two children on the farm. Daniel, born 1940. Lilly, born 1937. Yuki ran the farm kitchen and kept the books and drove the produce to the Fresno market every Saturday in the farm’s Model A truck. The farm books showed a profit every year from 1930 through 1941.
On February 19th, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. On March 29th, the Western Defense Command issued Civilian Exclusion Order Number One. The Mori family had 5 days to settle their affairs and report to the Fresno Assembly Point with what they could carry. They could carry two bags each.
The farm, the equipment, the truck, the pear trees along the east fence, the 40 acres of cleared ground, the 12-ton strawberry yield already in the ground for the spring. None of it could be carried. Kenji found a buyer in 3 days. The man paid $800 for a farm and equipment worth 12 times that, and he paid it, knowing what it was worth, and knowing why the price was what it was.
And he paid it because the order left no room for waiting on a better offer. Kenji signed the papers and drove his family to the assembly point in a borrowed car. They were taken to Manzanar in the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in the desert. He volunteered for the army from the internment camp in 1943.
He was 36 years old, which was old for an infantry volunteer, and the army took him because the 442nd needed men, and because Kenji Mori had been farming since he was 8 years old and had a physical endurance that showed in his hands and his build, and the way he carried himself when he walked. He did not have to volunteer.
Men from the camps could volunteer or they could refuse, and some refused on principled grounds that nobody who was not in a camp was in a position to argue with. Kenji volunteered because he had thought about it for a long time in the camp and had concluded that the country and the government were not the same thing, and that whatever the government had done, the country was worth fighting for, and that he had children who would live in it after him, and he wanted them to live in a country worth living in. He was assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team at Camp Shelby in Mississippi. Every man in the 442nd was Nisei, American-born sons of Japanese immigrants, and most of them had families in internment camps while they trained and while they fought, which was a fact that the army noted in no official document, and that the men of the 442nd
carried without being asked to explain it. He trained there through the summer and fall of 1943 and shipped to Italy in the spring of 1944. The 442nd fought at Belvedere and Saseta and Livorno and then moved north into France in the fall into the Vosges Mountains in October. In late October, the first battalion of the 141st Infantry, a Texas unit, was cut off by German forces in the Vosges and surrounded.
The 442nd was ordered to rescue them. The fighting in the Vosges was close and brutal, ridge by ridge, tree by tree, in cold rain that turned to mud and mud that turned to ice. The 442nd lost more men rescuing the lost battalion than the number of men they rescued. Kenji Mori was wounded on the third day of the Vosges fighting, a German shell fragment that went into his left shoulder and was removed in a field hospital.
Advertisements
And he returned to his unit 12 days later and fought through the end of the campaign. He received the Distinguished Service Cross in a ceremony in April of 1945. The citation described actions on a specific ridge on a specific morning in October of 1944 in terms that were accurate and that did not convey what it had been like to be on that ridge on that morning, which no citation for any award has ever managed to do.
He was 28 years old when he received it. He came home to California in November of 1945. The farm was owned by a man named Carlyle who had bought it from the man Kenji had sold it to in 1942 and who had been farming it since and who had no interest in selling it and saw no reason to discuss it with a man who had lost the right to complain about the price of a transaction he had entered into voluntarily.
Which was what he said to Kenji in the kitchen of the farmhouse, standing in the kitchen that Takashi Mori had built with the pear trees visible through the window. Kenji drove back to Fresno in silence. He filed a claim under the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act of 1948, which allowed former internees to submit claims for property losses sustained during the evacuation.
He had the 1941 farm tax assessment, which put the property value at $9,600. He documented the equipment losses separately, the tractor, the harrows, the irrigation pipe, the Model A truck. He submitted the full claim to the government with the supporting documents his father had kept in a cedar box under the kitchen floorboards, which was the one thing Kenji had insisted on taking from the farm in the 5 days before Manzanar. The government paid him $410.
He leased a smaller parcel south of his family’s old ground and farmed it. He planted strawberries because the soil and the water suited them, the same way it had suited them on his father’s ground. And he paid the lease from the yields and kept the farm running and sent Daniel to the Fresno City schools and did not speak of the farm his father had cleared or the war he had fought in unless someone asked, and very few people asked.
In the spring of 1957, Carlisle decided to sell. He was 64 and tired of farming, and his children had no interest in the land. He listed it at $14,000 with a broker in Fresno. The broker mentioned it to Kenji, who was known in the area, and who might want the land back. Kenji had $2,100 in the farm account.
The gap was $11,900, and the broker had three other interested buyers, and a 2-week window. On a Thursday afternoon in June, Kenji drove out to the highway and parked on the shoulder and stood at the fence, and looked at the strawberry rows his father had planted 38 years earlier. The rocks his father had pulled from the soil were still along the south fence.
The pear trees his father had planted for Hana were along the east fence, taller now, heavy with June fruit nobody had asked for. A truck slowed on the highway and pulled onto the shoulder behind Kenji’s car. A man in a tan Stetson got out. He walked to the fence and stood beside Kenji. He looked at the field.
He said, “Good ground.” Kenji said, “Yes.” He said, “My father cleared it in 1919.” The man looked at the pear trees. He said, “Those his, too?” Kenji said, “He planted them for my mother.” He said, “She liked pears.” They stood at the fence. A produce truck went past on the highway going north, loaded high with San Joaquin strawberry flats, heading to the Fresno market.
The man looked at the strawberry rows, and then at the fence line, and then at the rock pile along the south side that Takashi Mori had built one stone at a time. He said, “What happened to it?” Kenji told him. He told it the way he had learned to tell it over 12 years, which was briefly and without the parts that did not translate.
The five days and the two bags and the $800 and the camp in the desert and the field in the Vonge and the kitchen where Carlyle had told him there was nothing to discuss. He told it in about 4 minutes standing at the fence looking at the rose and then he stopped and did not add anything to it because there was nothing to add.
The man was quiet for a moment. He said, “442nd.” Kenji said, “Yes.” The man said, “Voges.” Kenji said, “Yes.” The man looked at the field for a while. Then he said, “Where is this Carlile?” Kenji looked at him for the first time since he had come to the fence. He said, “I cannot ask you to do anything.
” The man said, “I know.” He said, “Where is he?” Kenji told him. The man walked back to his truck. He could have driven on down the highway to wherever he was going which was San Diego and a production meeting that had been on his calendar for 2 weeks. He could have said something respectful about the 442nd and gotten back in his truck.
He could have written a check to a veteran’s fund from his office in Encino and considered the matter addressed. Instead he drove to Carlile’s farmhouse which was 3 miles east on the county road and pulled into the yard and knocked on the door. Carlile answered the door and recognized the face and did not say anything for a moment.
The man said, “You have a farm for sale.” Carlile said, “Yes.” The man said, “$14,000.” Carlile said, “That is the listed price.” The man said, “I will pay it.” He said, “Today.” He said, “Cash or certified funds, your choice.” He said, “One condition.” He said, “The deed goes to Kenji Mori.” He said, “Not through me.
” He said, “Directly to Mori with my name nowhere on it.” He said that is the one condition. Carlyle looked at him. He said, “Why?” The man said, “Because his father cleared that ground, and those are his mother’s pear trees, and he came home from France with the Distinguished Service Cross and $410 from the United States government, and that is not a sufficient accounting.
” Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. Carlyle looked at the man for a long time. He was not a man who had thought of himself as having done something wrong. He had bought a farm at the price it was offered at, which is what buyers do.
He stood in his doorway and looked at the man and thought about it. And then he said, “All right.” The deed was drawn up in Fresno the following morning. Carlyle signed it. The man paid $14,000 by certified check from a Fresno bank, which he had arranged by telephone the previous evening. The deed listed the grantee as Kenji Takashimori.
The man’s name was not on it anywhere. The broker called Kenji that afternoon and told him the farm had been purchased, and the deed was in his name, and that he should come to the office in Fresno. Kenji drove to Fresno and sat in the broker’s office and read the deed and read it again, and asked who had bought it.
The broker told him a man had come in and paid cash, and had asked not to be identified. Kenji held the deed and did not say anything for a while. Then he asked if the man had left any message. The broker said he had left one sentence, which the broker read from a notepad. “Tell him go for broke” was not just a motto.
Kenji Mori farmed his family’s ground for the rest of his working life. He planted new strawberry rows in the fall of 1957 and brought in his first yield in the spring of 1958. Daniel Mori enrolled at the University of California, at Davis, in the fall of 1957. He graduated in 1961 with a degree in agricultural science and came back to the farm and worked it alongside his father.
Lilly Mori taught school in Fresno for 31 years. Yuki Mori died in 1972 in the farmhouse at 67. The pear trees his father had planted for Hana were still along the east fence and still producing every June. Kenji Mori died in 1983 at 77. He is buried in the Fresno County Cemetery, 2 miles from the farm.
His headstone gives his name, his dates, and two lines: 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Go for broke. Daniel Mori donated three items to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 1990. The first is the original deed from 1957 conveying the Mori farm to Kenji Takashi Mori. The grantor’s name on the deed is a Fresno real estate holding company that dissolved in 1958.
The second is the Distinguished Service Cross in its original case with the citation from April 1945. The third is a photograph taken by Yuki Mori in October of 1957, 2 weeks after the strawberry planting. It shows Kenji standing at the east fence beside one of the pear trees holding a a pear in his right hand.
He is looking at the camera. Behind him, the field runs south to the rock pile along the south fence line that his father built one stone at a time in 1919. The display is in the museum’s permanent collection on North Central Avenue in Los Angeles. The placard reads, “Kenji Takashi Mori 1906 to 1983 San Joaquin Valley, California 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
He farmed his father’s ground. He fought for the country that had taken it. Then someone handed it back. The afternoon light comes through the museum’s east windows and crosses the deed and the medal and the photograph for about 20 minutes every day. Then it moves on. If this story reached you, pass it on.
Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. There are more stories coming. And unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.
