I first noticed the legacy of Japanese-Americans in California over a meal of burgers, fries, and apple pie.
I was in Auburn, a town around an hour away from Sacramento. Think farms, flat land, and a small clump of buildings. I was on my way back from Tahoe with some friends, and we were having lunch at this burger and pie joint just off the I-80.
The place was jampacked with patrons, no doubt eager for big burgers and freshly baked pies before continuing the long drive back to the Bay Area. The restaurant initially just seemed like any other solid burger and pie joint you’ve been to until you looked a tiny bit closer.
You first might do a double-take at the poke bowls that were being advertised alongside the bacon cheeseburgers. Then, you might notice the furikake they were selling next to the register as you were checking out. At that point, you’ll probably realize that Ikeda’s, the name of the restaurant, is likely of Japanese origin.
Interestingly enough, none of the employees were Japanese, nor were any of the patrons. This made sense given that Auburn and much of Northern California are overwhelmingly white. But I did get curious. How did this Japanese family end up with arguably the most popular American restaurant in a 25-mile radius?1
More broadly speaking, I became more curious about the Japanese-American experience in California.
Sure, in high school, I learned about Japanese-Americans being placed in internment camps in World War 2. But what got these Japanese-Americans to move to the States in the first place? And after internment, where did they go?
It turns out that Japanese immigration to the States really picked up in the early 20th century. With the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese laborers could no longer immigrate to the States, and Japanese immigrants eagerly filled the void. By the dawn of World War 2, Japanese-American farmers had made a big impact on California’s agricultural industry and were producing over 40% of California’s vegetables.
The story of Japanese-American farmers would have been a textbook example of the American Dream gone right if we hadn’t thrown them in internment camps for three years2.
While we do mention the internment of the Japanese in our US History books, the internment is really all that we mention.
We don’t talk about how the vast majority of Japanese farmers ended up losing their land after the war because they couldn’t pay taxes or mortgages on the land. It turns out that being wrongfully imprisoned3 for three years can really impact your ability to pay the bills.
The future must have looked bleak for Japanese-Americans at the time. In addition to the land seizures that they had to endure, anti-Japanese discrimination continued well after the war.
In Sacramento, around an hour away from Ikeda’s, the city council passed a resolution, opposing the return of Japanese-Americans to the city because of their “treachery, faithlessness, and untrustworthiness.”
It was around seventy years after that resolution was passed that I first visited Ikeda’s. Given the long lines and cramped parking lot at the Japanese-owned burger joint, it seemed as though the Sacramento city council’s resolution was a relic from the distant past.
Now, this is where I’m supposed to say something about time healing all wounds, America coming together after the war, yada-yada. But honestly, I think it’s just really hard for any American to hold grudges for very long when they’re being served juicy burgers and warm apple pie.
A controversial answer to this question would be what I call Japan’s “In-N-Out” culture. Here in the States, we tend to cluster restaurant menus by cuisine type. An Italian restaurant will serve an assortment of 50 Italian dishes. A Chinese restaurant will offer over 100 dishes on its menu. In Japan, meanwhile, it’s very common for restaurants to just serve one type of dish. You’ll have a restaurant that just does gyoza. Or, a restaurant that just does takoyaki. These restaurants in Japan focus on one thing and do it really damn well. Ikeda’s, with its focus on pie and burgers, is reminiscent of that.
James Madison had anticipated that America’s government might be tempted to jail people without trial during wartime, so he made sure that our Constitution explicitly prohibited this. Despite Madison’s best efforts, our federal government decided to give in to the trendy totalitarian tendencies of that time by jailing over 100,000 Americans without trial because of their ancestry.