Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105i/Section 026/Kosaku Sawada

Kosaku Sawada was a Japanese immigrant who owned and operated a flower nursery in Mobile, Alabama.

Kosaku Sawada

Biography

Early Life

Sawada was born in Osaka, Japan in 1887 to a family of six. After obtaining an agriculture degree from Osaka University, Sawada immigrated to the United States in 1906 after hearing of prosperous job opportunities to be found there. When interviewed about his immigration story, Sawada displayed a strong affinity for his adoptive country: "You see, I no longer belong in Japan. I am American," he said.

Adult Life

Sawada's first job in the States was working in some rice fields in Texas. After four years, Sawada shifted his efforts into growing orange and pecan trees, having noticed the profitability of the trade. Sawada later migrated to Alabama to continue selling tree saplings there. Sawada married a Japanese woman, Nobu, whom he met in San Francisco in 1916. In 1923, Sawada purchased his own plot of land to cultivate his trees in Mobile, Alabama, but all of his saplings were killed off after a hard freeze that winter. Afterwards, Sawada decided to pivot to growing sapling starts to sell to other nurserymen, a process known as 'lining out' in the industry. With that, he founded the Sawada Nursery, which employed around 20 men by 1939. His wife died in 1930, leaving Sawada to finish raising their four children as a single father. Sawada was agnostic, and did not attend church. He believed in social unity, saying "we must cooperate and have forgiveness to each other."

Legacy

By the 1920s, Sawada had become well known within the agricultural community as the top hybridizer of camellias. Due in large part to Sawada's efforts, Mobile, Alabama is now the United States' top grower of camellias and azaleas.

Japanese Immigrants and American Agriculture

Immigration from Japan to the United States increased exponentially at the start of the 20th century. In 1870, only about 55 Japanese lived in the States, but in 1900 alone 12,000 people immigrated from Japan. The worsening living conditions in Japan, compounded by the growing population and the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war, gave immigrants an economic incentive to make the journey across the Pacific. Most of them were made up of single men searching for economic success. Soon after their arrival, these migrants were hired in the agricultural industry because they "had few family ties and property and were therefore less reluctant than the white men to engage in seasonal agricultural work which required migrating from one district to another." By 1909, about 300,000 Japanese worked in California's citrus fruit industry.

Pre-WW2 Japanese Discrimination in the United States

Even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans and Asian immigrants as a whole experienced discrimination derived from economic competition. Known as "Yellow Peril", many West Coast newspapers sensationalized this "fear of racial obliteration of whites by nefarious and devious "Asian hordes,"" which "became a popular image for exclusionists to evoke." The resulting exclusionist movement led to the passing of several pieces of legislation discriminating against Asian immigrants, culminating with Congress' passing of the Immigration Act of 1924, effectively banning all immigration from Asian countries.

Japanese-American Internment in the United States

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, causing the United States to join World War II, Japanese Americans experienced a new increase in discrimination from the government and the people. Two months after the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, calling for the internment of Japanese-Americans. Approximately 112,000 people of Japanese descent were sent to internment camps called "relocation centers", where most remained until the end of the war. About 70,000 of them were American citizens.