During World War II, This Farmer Risked Everything to Help His Japanese American Neighbors

On the morning of May 29, 1942, Mary Tsukamoto awoke to find her mattress on the floor. Glancing around the bedroom that she shared with her husband, Al, it took her a moment to get her bearings: Today was the day she and her family would lose their freedom. Their bed frame, along with the rest of their furniture, was in storage. “We had broken no law, committed no criminal act,” she later wrote. But “on this day we were to leave our homes. No one knew where we were to go nor for how long we would be gone. … We were labeled as criminals because our faces were Japanese.”

Al and Mary’s daughter, Marielle, who was 5 at the time, clearly recalls that morning. “I remember getting up early, and it was cold,” Marielle, now 87, said to me recently. “I was told to go get my grandmother. She was in her 60s and was in the garden crying because she believed she wouldn’t come back alive.” As her grandmother, Ito, cried in her rose garden, her grandfather, Kuzo, took one last look at the grapevines he had planted 20 years earlier. “It is the darkest day of our lives,” he told the family. “We are about to lose our treasured liberty. Will we ever see this dear place again?” 

Kuzo Tsukamoto had left Hiroshima around 1885, when he was 17. After laboring in the cane fields of Hawaii, fishing for salmon in Canada and repairing railroad tracks in the Northwestern United States, he settled in Florin, an agricultural community nine miles south of Sacramento. Japanese immigrants there had innovated a technique for planting strawberries between rows of grapevines that “proved to alter the economic history” of the town, according to the Florin Historical Society. Soon, Florin was shipping 250 train cars of strawberries per season and calling itself the Strawberry Capital of the World. Kuzo’s wife, Ito, joined him in Florin in 1902, and they had four children—Margaret, Edith, Alfred (Al) and Nami. In 1920, they moved to a 35-acre farm. 

In Florin, where white Americans and Japanese immigrants’ families lived and worked side by side, racism was always present. An alien land law prohibited Japanese immigrants from becoming citizens and owning land, so first-generation immigrants, known by the Japanese word issei, typically had to wait until they had children—nisei, the second generation—before they could buy land. (They either bought land under their children’s names or waited for their children to grow old enough to buy it themselves.) And while some whites were grateful to Japanese farmers for driving the town’s economic boom, others resented their success. “When the Japanese were scarce and we were their customers, they were our friends,” Al Tsukamoto, then 80, recalled in a 1992 interview for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). “But as the Japanese population grew and built their own stores and stopped patronizing [white-owned stores], they didn’t like us.”

The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought that resentment out into the open, now disguised as patriotism. Immediately after the attack, the FBI arrested more than 1,200 Japanese community leaders on the West Coast, identifying them from a list of “suspect enemy aliens” compiled using U.S. Census information. 

In her 1988 book We the People: A Story of Internment in America (co-written by Elizabeth Pinkerton), Mary described how agents “had suddenly appeared at [peoples’] doors and taken them away.” The older issei were the most suspected. One of the Tsukamotos’ issei neighbors, who was recovering from a stroke, had difficulty speaking. After agents interrogated him, he was so afraid he had mistakenly implicated others that he hanged himself.

Politicians exploited the fury against Japan to rally voters, and newspapers used it to sell papers. An op-ed by sports columnist Henry McLemore in January 1942 was representative. It read, in part: “I am for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. … Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it. … I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.” 

Cartoonists, meanwhile, portrayed Japanese people as plotting, bucktoothed buffoons. Theodor Geisel, the editorial cartoonist for PM, a liberal magazine in New York, drew a cartoon showing squinty-eyed Japanese lining up along the West Coast to be given dynamite. The caption read “Waiting for the Signal From Home.” The cartoonist (better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss) never formally apologized for his racist cartoons.

Arguably the most damaging newspaper article was by Walter Lippmann, the widely read liberal columnist. In February 1942, after a dinner with Earl Warren, the pro-internment California attorney general, Lippmann wrote that the Pacific Coast was in “imminent danger” of an attack “from within and from without.” He cited as evidence the fact that there was no evidence: In a case where an “enemy alien” hasn’t committed any sabotage, he wrote, it “is a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.” The column ran in more than 250 newspapers, and the next day, every member of Congress from West Coast states signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt recommending “immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage.”

Shortly afterward, the president signed Executive Order 9066, which permitted the U.S. military to remove citizens from designated zones. This allowed the U.S. military to relocate anyone of Japanese descent living in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii to one of ten barbed-wire-encircled camps. These camps were situated in some of the most inhospitable land in the country, such as the sunbaked Arizona desert and the fetid swampland of Arkansas.

The Tsukamotos learned that they would still be required to pay the mortgage and taxes on their farm during incarceration. If they didn’t, California law permitted banks and the state to take over “abandoned properties.” Al and Mary considered reaching out to the Florin Fruit Growers’ Association (FFGA), the local farmers’ cooperative, for help. But Al came to suspect that the association, whose leadership was dominated by white farmers, was not making deals in the best interests of Japanese American families. 

Instead, the Tsukamotos turned to a state agricultural inspector named Bob Fletcher, who certified fruit and produce in California and Arizona. A taciturn man, Fletcher had nevertheless become friendly with the Tsukamotos in the course of his work. Al proposed an arrangement: If Fletcher could tend their farm and pay their bills, he could keep the profits. And not only the Tsukamotos’: Al asked Fletcher if he would also work the farms of two other Japanese families, the Okamotos and Nittas, and pay their bills as well. This would mean tending 90 acres of Tokay grapes for an unknown duration of time. 

Fletcher, who had no experience raising grapes, said he needed to think about it. Within a week, he gave his answer: He would help, and because he would have to quit his job to handle the work, he would need to keep some profits, he said. But he refused to take them all, insisting they split them—half for himself and half for the families.

As the Tsukamoto family prepared to be taken away, a number of other “wonderful Caucasian friends” lent support, Mary wrote. One, Mary McComber, brought them casseroles and cakes. The town’s former high school principal, Roy Learned, offered to store their possessions. “Did we ever consider not obeying?” the order, Mary asked in her 1988 book. “Never. … It was our duty, and we had better be there on time.” She added: “How we ached to prove our loyalty to the only country we had ever known!” 

Her daughter, Marielle, told me recently that the widespread compliance with relocation was cultural but also practical. “You had elderly parents who didn’t speak much English, couldn’t write and didn’t have citizenship. My dad did all the banking and the business. My grandfather couldn’t do that. So if the adults fought back and got themselves arrested, what would happen to the rest of the family?”

On May 29, 1942, the Tsukamotos made sure to be at the Elk Grove train station by 9 a.m., as they had been instructed. (Al’s other sisters would also be on the train with their families, along with Mary’s parents, Taro and Kame, and Mary’s siblings—Jean, Julia, Ruth, Isabel and George.) A small group of white friends “braved criticism” to see them off, Mary wrote, bringing them sandwiches and cookies for the trip. George and Margaret Feil took them to the station, while Bob Fletcher drove away their belongings. “We were all on the train crying,” Marielle recalled. “We were hungry, we were hot, we wanted to go home. … About half of us were children. … Were we going to get killed? Were we going to be used as slaves? Nobody knew anything.”

If they did manage to make it through whatever came next, all their hopes for the future rested on one man: Bob Fletcher.

When Robert Emmett Fletcher Jr. died in 2013, obituaries saluted his courage. But I was surprised that his story was not more widely known. So I set out to learn more about him. I found his granddaughter Jill Stowers, who was living in Idaho and who had unearthed a journal, never before published, in which Fletcher wrote about the major events of his life. Between the journal and other new discoveries, I realized there was more of Fletcher’s story to tell.

As soon as the Japanese families were moved to the camps, Fletcher took over their farms and, per his agreement, began to save money for them. In the process, he angered community members who supported internment. At one point, someone fired a shot into the Tsukamotos’ barn. Interviewed years later about why he agreed to help, Fletcher was characteristically humble. “I don’t think I did anything,” he told Elizabeth Pinkerton in an interview for the JACL, in 1995. “It was just something that needed to be done.” As to the anger he faced in the community and the shooting attempt, he added, “I was too busy to even think about it.”

Fletcher was born in 1911, the only child of Robert Fletcher Sr., a farmer, and Olive Fletcher, a schoolteacher. His grandparents had come to California on wagon trains in the 1850s from Pennsylvania and New York. His paternal grandfather, John Fletcher, had been one of the “California 100”—Californians who wanted to fight for the Union in the Civil War and traveled to Massachusetts to form an all-California battalion. These cavalrymen participated in the Third Battle of Winchester, a key victory for the Union. 

Those who knew Fletcher described him essentially the same way. Lean and 6-foot-2, he was stoic and unwaveringly polite. Marielle said he “looked like a cowboy” and “kind of reminded me of Gary Cooper.” He was a man of high ideals who believed in hard work. “Grandpa would come in from working the fields and say hello,” Jill Stowers told me of childhood visits to her grandparents. “And then go right back to work, and we wouldn’t see him again until dinner.”

Stowers’ father (and Fletcher’s son), also named Robert, born in 1946, emphasized his father’s work ethic as well—but noted that his dedication kept the two of them from seeing much of each other. “He was so busy. He’d come home from wherever he was working, change his clothes, go out in the fields and either cut hay, rake hay or bale hay. … I didn’t really get a chance to talk to him. I spent most of my time with my mom and grandma.” As for any life lessons he learned from his father growing up, he said, with a laugh, “He made me work.” 

A Vietnam veteran, Robert Fletcher III worked in steel production, then for a lumber company, then the postal service, before starting his own freight company, in Idaho, which he ran until he retired in 2013. When I asked if, growing up, he was aware of what his father had done for the Japanese families, he said yes, but mainly from discussions with others; his dad didn’t discuss it much until later in life. 

While the arrangement between Fletcher and the families was nominally a business deal, the people I spoke with insisted that, for Fletcher, it wasn’t about money. “He didn’t want the money, just enough to cover him,” his son told me. “So when they came back from the camps there was a little cash flow for those people.” Stowers agreed. “I just remember him always saying it was the right thing to do, the neighborly thing to do.” 

Marielle was the most insistent. “Bob knew we were just like any other Americans,” she told me. “He was a man of few words but he always did what he thought was right.”

I also spoke with Karl and Brian Okamoto—sons of Sam Okamoto, a neighbor whose farm Fletcher also saved. Neither brother ever met Fletcher, but they heard his name many times. Fletcher “was like a legend in our family,” Karl said. “He was the guy who preserved the property so that there was something to come back to after World War II.” 

He added that he’d heard of a Florin man named George Carlisle who also helped pay the bills for multiple Japanese families while they were incarcerated. This was corroborated by a JACL interview I found with Percy Nakashima, another farmer in Florin, who asked Carlisle to tend his farm and two other farms while he and his family were sent to the Manzanar camp in the California desert. That arrangement was a formal business deal, and while Carlisle does not appear to have split the profits with the families, Nakashima’s gratitude is apparent on the recording—his voice breaks when he describes Carlisle as “our most trusted Caucasian friend.”

Fletcher’s journal consists of 27 pages of handwritten notes. While they are not introspective, several shine more light on how he accomplished his feat and how he felt about it. In his first few journal entries, Fletcher recalled his earliest memories, including “going to town to shop with my mother in a horse and buggy,” “helping drive cattle with my father” and “riding my horse to grammar school.” In 1924, his family moved to a 20-acre farm in Brentwood, California, where his dad planted barley and almonds. Fletcher studied horticulture at the University of California, Davis, where he also ran track and played basketball. After college, he worked as the foreman of a peach ranch in Red Bluff. A couple of years later, he got the position as an agricultural inspector.

In the entries titled “1942-1945,” one wishes Fletcher had more to say about the war, his work on the farms and what was happening in Florin. But a couple of entries are telling. In one, he notes how he got through the harvest season: “This was a very difficult time, but I was able to get people to help in the harvesting and packing of the grapes. During the harvest we [were] able to get about 15 people to help. Some days we were able to get packed between two and three hundred boxes of Tokay grapes and later ten tons of grapes to the winery.”

I discovered more unpublished information about Fletcher in a trove of audio interviews at California State University, Sacramento. The files included interviews with Japanese Americans, including a number of Florin residents, conducted for the JACL and focusing on the war years. One interview with Mary Tsukamoto from the 1990s provided evidence that Fletcher, in working the three farms, sacrificed more than had previously been known. 

In Mary’s JACL interview, she mentioned that Fletcher had had a first wife named Clara (a fact I was able to confirm with the Sacramento County recorder’s office). In Mary’s view, that marriage had collapsed because of his long days working the three farms. Marielle told me that Clara had been helpful to their family while they were incarcerated, often sending items they could not acquire in camp.  

Fletcher met his second wife, Teresa Cassieri, when she and her mother were hired to help work the Japanese American farms. They tied the grape vines, and when Fletcher would pick them up in his truck, he told Pinkerton: “She always got in first and sat beside me.” Bob and Teresa married in June 1945, shortly before the Tsukamotos’ return. They had their only child, Robert Fletcher III, the following year. Neither Fletcher’s son nor his granddaughter Jill Stowers was aware that he’d had an earlier marriage.

While Fletcher was caring for their farm, the Tsukamotos were trying to settle into their new life. Most of the main camps were not ready right away, so their first destination was the Fresno Assembly Center, which operated between May and October 1942. It was located on sprawling fairgrounds a few miles outside the city and consisted, Mary wrote, of “row after row of ugly, black tar-paper-covered buildings in the barren desert,” with “not a single green tree to be seen.” At its peak, the Fresno center held more than 5,000 Japanese Americans, with some incarcerees kept in horse stalls. 

For the Tsukamotos, life in Fresno was awful. Their first shock was the armed guards. One government rationale for internment was that it was for the incarcerees’ own protection. A common retort in the camps was: “So why are the guards pointing their guns at us?” There was no privacy, the barracks were cramped, and the food was often literally sickening. The bathrooms were abominable. Incarcerees had to line up at the toilets in rows, in full view of each other. The first time Mary used the bathroom, she vomited after raw sewage almost splashed on her. Meanwhile, Mary, as executive secretary of Florin’s JACL, was often falsely accused of providing her own family with perks that others did not receive. This resulted in loud, ugly arguments. “The worst in us was exposed as we were forced to give up our dignity,” she later wrote. 

Still, their lives settled into a routine. There was a newsletter, the Grapevine, that shared news from inside and outside the camp, including updates on the war. There were baseball leagues, and Al got a job as a recreation director, which paid $12 a month. Mary helped organize a summer school program for 1,200 children, and she taught public speaking to grade school kids as well as basic English to the issei. In fact, Mary first discovered her formidable talents as a teacher in Fresno. 

In October, just as the Tsukamotos were settling into Fresno, they were moved to the Jerome Relocation Center, in Arkansas. Mary later recalled how, during the train ride, the Black porters treated her family and the other Japanese incarcerees “with warmth and understanding and seemed to have a special sensitivity to our unjust treatment.” But looking out the window, she was shocked by the “hovels” that Black Americans lived in. In her JACL interview, she added that even though the Japanese were locked in camps, they “realized we were better off, in a way.”

At Jerome, there were big challenges from the outset. Many of the bathrooms were non-functioning, and the chamber pots were late in arriving—just as an attack of dysentery hit the camp. One peculiar issue was that some facilities—closets, toilets, tables, tubs—were unusually small. When the families asked a camp construction worker, he said he’d been told to build facilities for “little brown people.” On top of all that, many in the family were suffering from ongoing health problems. Al had pleurisy, his sister Nami had tuberculosis, and his sister Margaret, mother to seven children, nearly died from an attack of appendicitis. Mary had such painful arthritis that she needed her sisters to type her letters to friends in Florin, including Clara, Bob and the Feils, the couple who had driven them to the train station when they left for the camps. 

Despite all this, the Tsukamotos found a way to carve out a life. They sent their children to schools, organized sports leagues and partook in the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, chess and checkers clubs, sewing groups, and ping pong clubs, as well as patriotic American groups like the United Service Organizations and the Red Cross. Marielle told me that many incarcerees wanted to help the war effort; they rolled bandages or wove camouflage nets. Mary was the coordinator for all the girls’ and women’s organizations. Al was again a recreation director, and Mary’s father, Taro—also interned at Fresno and Jerome, along with her mother and her siblings—was a head cook.  

Mary’s book is filled with passages about their efforts to create a life in the camps they could be proud of while remaining loyal Americans. “We began to feel a great responsibility,” she wrote. “Here was a laboratory of life, a miniature society, so to speak, that teemed with all sorts of possibilities. Acts of thoughtfulness, kindness, neighborliness and caring were contagious. We had a rare opportunity to turn this adversity into a positive force in our lives.”

The incarcerees put on such a brave face that it frustrated Ansel Adams, the famed landscape photographer, when he visited the Manzanar camp near California’s Death Valley National Monument in 1943. His goal was to generate opposition to the camps by sharing their plight in his photographs, but the incarcerated families insisted on dressing up, cleaning their barracks and smiling for the photographs. The resulting pictures seem to depict families in cramped but contented circumstances—doting relatives beaming at a child, a man reading a newspaper, spectators watching a baseball game against a backdrop of mountains. Years later, when Adams donated his collection to the Library of Congress, he wrote, “The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.” But his portraits of camp life didn’t convey that sense of injustice and loss. Instead, as Richard Reeves pointed out in his 2015 book Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II, Adams’ photographs ended up reinforcing the government’s portrayal of the camps as an extended vacation.

One group of incarcerees did unabashedly enjoy its time in camp. As Marielle put it, “high school kids had a blast.” In their daily lives back home, she explained, Japanese American teenagers typically had to work the fields in the morning, go to school during the day, and in the evenings do chores and homework. On weekends, they’d be back in the fields. In the camps, teenagers didn’t have such responsibilities. Instead, they “started bands, played sports and had dances,” she said. “The kids were like, ‘Hey, this is freedom.’” 

There was an ugly side to this, however. The incarcerees were forbidden to speak Japanese in camp meetings. So in cases where parents and grandparents of teenagers did not speak English, the teenager suddenly became the family leader. “So the older Japanese who had been the community leaders no longer had power,” Marielle explains. “They were sort of cast aside.”

When I told my family and friends that I was researching Japanese American internment, many asked a version of the same question: Why didn’t America lock up Germans and Italians? In fact, some people of German and Italian ancestry were locked in camps overseen by the Justice Department. However, only first-generation immigrants were targeted—not their American-born children or naturalized citizens—and only a fraction of those. The total number of interned Germans and Italians was around 14,500. While this number is minuscule compared with the 125,284 Japanese incarcerees, racism does not appear to have been the only factor behind the difference.

As Susan H. Kamei points out in her book When Can We Go Back to America?, Germans and Italians were the two largest foreign-born populations in America at the time. There were 1.2 million German-born Americans, and more than 5 million Americans who had two German-born parents. There were even more Italians. The sheer numbers meant their mass internment would have been a logistical nightmare. And unlike Japanese (and Chinese) immigrants, Germans and Italians were allowed to become American citizens, which meant that they made up an enormous voting bloc. Neither politicians nor military leaders wanted to risk alienating them. 

According to Marielle, after her family arrived at Jerome, her father and other adults volunteered to work with farmers near the camp for free. But the farmers refused. Later, after Jerome became a holding camp for German POWs, these same farmers accepted help from German soldiers and not only paid them but in some cases also allowed them to live in their homes. 

At the same time, thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry had been serving in the U.S. Armed Forces—some 5,000 at the time of Pearl Harbor. In January 1942, all Japanese Americans were classified as “enemy aliens ineligible for the draft.” Soldiers of Japanese descent were discharged.

In January 1943, the U.S. government announced that nisei would be allowed to enlist in the Army again. An all-nisei combat unit was being assembled, and the military was recruiting from the camps. While many incarcerees met this news with excitement—Al Tsukamoto wanted to enlist but couldn’t because of his pleurisy—it resulted in confusion and contention. Incarcerees at all the camps over age 17 (even those who didn’t plan to enlist) were forced to fill out a loyalty oath—and two of the questions were often misinterpreted. One asked if the internee was prepared to fight for the United States wherever ordered. The other asked if they would “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States” and disavow any allegiance to Japan. As Marielle put it, “If you’re 80 years old and asked, ‘Are you willing to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces wherever ordered?’ what are you supposed to say?”

About 12 percent of incarcerees answered no to the “unqualified allegiance” question or gave a qualified “yes.” This created paranoia and suspicion between incarcerees and authorities, and also among the incarcerees themselves. In some cases, incarcerees did, in fact, remain loyal to Japan in some capacity. “The emotional struggle was a great one,” Mary wrote. “Many of us were on the verge of mental breakdowns.” The pressures and lack of privacy weighed so heavily on Mary’s sister Jean that she had to be institutionalized.

The late winter of 1943 was the most difficult period for the Tsukamotos. The cold brought depression, the loyalty questionnaire brought division, and a number of friends and extended family members died or became ill. Mary and Al worried about the toll that camp life was taking on Marielle’s development. “We were down at the bottom of the pit,” Mary later said. 

By spring 1943, however, things began to look up. The War Relocation Authority decided to allow incarcerees who were deemed loyal Americans to find jobs beyond the camp. For those who did not get jobs, trips outside camp were occasionally allowed. Mary, for example, was permitted to take a bus ride to Jackson, Mississippi, to attend a YWCA leadership conference.

In the fall, the government began allowing incarcerees to leave the camp for good, though they still weren’t allowed to return to the West Coast. Al was able to leave in September for a job prospect in Chicago. Unhappy there, he moved on to Kalamazoo, Michigan. He landed a job at the Peter Pan Bakery, whose owner was hiring workers from the camps. In November, Mary and Marielle were allowed to leave Jerome to join Al in Kalamazoo. “We got off the train, and Al came running to meet us,” Mary wrote. “Happiness sometimes defies description. Our new life in Kalamazoo had begun.”

By the spring of 1944, Mary’s father, brother and sister Julia all joined Al at the bakery. Al seemed to enjoy the work—in his JACL interview, he boasts about his cake-making prowess—but the owner insisted that Japanese Americans work night shifts so no customers would see them. Julia found it humiliating to be hidden from customers, so she asked for and was granted a day job. When a customer spotted her and launched a boycott, she was sent back to night shifts. This had a profound effect on Julia, who had long suffered from depression. She later took her own life.

While the family was in Kalamazoo, Bob Fletcher wrote with the sad news that Uppie, the family dog, had run away only a few months after the Tsukamotos departed. Marielle was devastated, assuming that Uppie had gone searching for them. But Fletcher had good news, too: The price of grapes was soaring, so the families would have savings when they returned.

On December 17, 1944, President Roosevelt revoked the West Coast exclusion order, allowing Japanese Americans to go back to their homes there. Some returned home immediately, only to face vigilantes and violent confrontations. “Going home turned into a frightening mistake for them,” Mary wrote later.

The Tsukamotos finally set out for Florin in the summer of 1945. Al arranged to acquire a green ’42 Dodge from white friends back home, which they used for the return trip. They got seven flat tires along the way. As a rule, they followed the most direct route and avoided stopping for fear of confrontations, as Mary later wrote in her book, even if that meant traveling “over the high mountains, along dangerous cliffs.” They did, however, stop to give rides to American servicemen. Mary believed it was their “patriotic duty as good American citizens.” This became impossible, however, after they stopped in Gila, Arizona, to pick up Al’s sister Edith’s family, the Ouchidas; the Dodge was crammed with seven people and their belongings, along with Marielle’s new dog, a Scottie named Inky. 

The family finally reached town before dawn on July 10, 1945. They had been gone for three years and 42 days. But their happy homecoming was tempered by the town’s shocking appearance: businesses boarded up, cars and tractors stripped of parts, houses burned to the ground. The onetime “Strawberry Capital of the World” looked like a ghost town. 

The Tsukamotos dropped off the Ouchidas and headed toward their farm. (Kuzo, Ito and Nami, along with Mary’s parents and her sister Jean, would later return to Florin by train.) When Al turned onto their street, he cut the headlights to avoid attracting attention. Pulling into their driveway, no one spoke. The main house out front, the barn leaning against the walnut trees, the two old cabins by the bathhouse—all appeared as they had when the family was forced out in May 1942. Al, Mary and Marielle each got out of the car and raced around the farm, touching things to make sure they were real. Then, Marielle told me, they entered their home to find Bob and Teresa Fletcher waiting—with smiles, hugs and a meal on the table. “They were just so welcoming,” Marielle said.

In a rare emotive passage in his journal, Fletcher expressed pride in what he did for the Japanese American farmers. “I was always glad … when the families came home in 1945 and found [their] ranches in fairly good shape, which wasn’t the case for many of the families that returned.” Indeed, the Tsukamotos were among the lucky ones. Vandalism, theft and mismanagement were widespread in Florin. In Mary’s JACL interview, she spoke about the irresponsible tenants the FFGA had hired to oversee local farms. Many “hadn’t even paid the taxes,” she said. “They’d use [the family’s] tractor and ruin it. … The grapevines were half dead because they hadn’t watered [them] enough.”

One Florin farmer named George Miyao had his truck stolen and tractor stripped of parts. In a JACL interview, Miyao spoke of another family whose tenant refused to leave the house upon their return; after the family kicked him out, he burned their house down. Percy Nakashima had had a friend whose supposed caretaker “sold the ranch at the first opportunity and kept the money.”

Incidents like these were common across the West Coast. One high-profile case involved Mary Masuda, who had been interned in Gila, Arizona. Masuda returned to her farm in Orange County, California, to find squatters. The Native Sons of the Golden West, who were notoriously anti-Japanese, swooped in to defend the squatters and warned her to leave the county immediately. Unafraid, Masuda contacted the press and moved back into her house. Her story attracted widespread sympathy because it turned out that Masuda’s oldest brother, Kazuo, had been killed while fighting with the 442nd Infantry Regiment, an all-nisei combat unit that became one of the most decorated regiments in American history.

Of more than 90,000 Japanese Americans from California who were incarcerated in the internment camps, most would never return to farming. Total losses to Japanese American property and income may have been as high as $4 billion. Richard Reeves, in Infamy, cites a government estimate that West Coast Japanese Americans lost 75 percent of their assets. 

So where did the people go? Some remained where they had gotten jobs back East. (Margaret, her husband and their seven children stayed behind in Michigan, and the Tsukamotos considered staying there as well.) Others moved to cities that had emptied of white workers during the war. Before the war, only a few thousand Japanese Americans lived east of the Rocky Mountains. Afterward, most nisei moved primarily to seven states: Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota and New York. 

In Florin, where 2,500 Japanese residents had been incarcerated, the strawberry industry would never return to its golden years. Many returning Florinites sold their farms immediately or worked them a few more years before selling. Percy Nakashima switched to tomato farming. When this didn’t work out, he got a job with Del Monte Foods in Sacramento. George Miyao sold his farm in 1952 but stayed in Florin to work as a gardener. Harold Ouchida moved to New Jersey to work for the Bird’s Eye frozen food company. According to Mary, Bird’s Eye actively recruited Japanese American former farmers because of their skill in handling vegetables. 

But for many former incarcerees it was difficult to get back on their feet. Mary wrote of Florinites living in “barns or shacks” and working menial jobs to survive. Reeves described how many destitute Japanese were forced to live in “shoddy towns, trailer parks and abandoned Army barracks” after the war. And then there were the issei who resisted going home at all—afraid of white people, angry with America. Some died by suicide. Some returned to Japan.

Al and Mary decided to tear out the grapevines that Kuzo planted all those years ago. They sold the farm in 1949, and Mary got a job as a teacher in the Elk Grove Unified School District, while Al worked for the Sacramento Army Depot repairing communications equipment. Marielle, meanwhile, thrived outside the camps. In grade school, she was a Girl Scout and sang in the church choir. (The family were Methodists.) In high school, she was a radio reporter, student body secretary and officer of various clubs. She attended the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and followed in her mother’s footsteps by embarking upon a distinguished teaching career.

In the 1980s, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which concluded that internment had been a “grave injustice” born out of “racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” Just ten people had been convicted of spying for Japan, and all had been white. Mary Tsukamoto was a driving force behind the redress movement. Upon retiring as a teacher in 1976 after 26 years, she was the executive secretary of the Florin JACL Redress Committee. In 1981, she testified before a House subcommittee hearing in San Francisco. “My life was never the same,” Mary wrote, about speaking at the hearing. “The urgency of my bold commitment took precedence over everything else in the days that were left for me on this earth.” In 1983, Mary launched the Time of Remembrance program for the Elk Grove Unified School District, which brought together students and former incarcerees. She also created the Japanese American Archival Collection at California State University. In 1987, the year before she published her book, she helped the Smithsonian curate artifacts for an internment exhibition titled “A More Perfect Union.” In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which provided $20,000 in redress to each camp survivor. Mary and Al were at the White House for the signing, and Mary went on to receive a National Humanitarian Award. An elementary school in the Elk Grove district was named after her, and she was among the first two people honored as a Notable Californian by the California State Senate.

In her JACL interview and in her book, Mary repeatedly expressed gratitude to Bob Fletcher. She called him “one in a million” and “our faithful friend.” For their part, after the Tsukamotos returned, Bob and Teresa bought a 54-acre ranch on which they raised cattle and hay. Their marriage was a happy one, by all accounts. Stowers said that Teresa complemented Bob’s stoicism with a gregarious personality. She was a jokester, and her grandpa “mellowed out” as he aged. 

Unsurprisingly, Fletcher kept busy after the war. He helped create the Florin Fire Protection District, in 1953, where he served as chief for 12 years. In 1959, he helped found the Florin County Water District, to protect the water rights of local farmers. In 1985, he was involved in creating the Florin Historical Society, where he served as president and board member.  

In 1996, Mary said of Fletcher: “He’s still our best friend. And he’s still alive, so we’re very happy we can tell him that over and over again.” Fletcher said, “I don’t think there’s anyone I like better than Mary.” Three weeks after Mary died in 1998, U.S. Congressman Robert Matsui paid tribute to her on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. He honored her “personal strength and determination in … pursuing justice and promoting the heritage of all Japanese Americans.” He added, “Her impact on our national heritage and the very fabric of who we are as a country will be felt for many generations to come.” In 2011, Matsui’s wife, Doris, who succeeded him in office, had the opportunity to honor Fletcher on the House floor, saluting his many decades of civil service and his “ability to look past racial barriers and help save the farms of three Japanese American families.”

On a blustery morning this past February, Marielle Tsukamoto, who now lives in Elk Grove, about ten miles south of Florin, stood in the lobby of Sacramento’s California Museum, waiting for a group of fifth graders. She was there to act as a docent for an exhibition called “Uprooted,” which tells the story of Japanese American internment. The students were from Florin Elementary, and their teacher had assigned them to read about Marielle and watch all the interviews with her he could find online. When they spotted her, they treated her like a celebrity.

“There she is!” one girl yelled, giggling and jumping. “Can I take your picture?” another shouted. The students were a diverse group from a low-income area, and Marielle happily posed for selfies. With curly brown hair and glasses, she was dressed in a black jacket over a pink turtleneck with a Polynesian sun necklace. Not even five feet tall, she was about the same height as most of the students. She was astonishingly energetic, and her commentary held the students rapt.

The show included an interactive display where visitors could ask questions of Marielle and other former incarcerees, bringing up videos of prerecorded answers. It also included a life-size replica of a camp “apartment.” The apartment was bare-bones—they were typically 20 by 25 feet and held as many as eight people—with a chamber pot between the beds. Marielle paused in front of a large black-and-white photograph of Bob Fletcher standing in a field, part of a display honoring non-Japanese Americans who helped interned families. He wore a floppy cap and a suede jacket, surrounded by wooden posts and vines. 

Before Fletcher died in 2013, at age 101, he donated five acres of his land to the town of Florin. On that land now sits a park as well as Fletcher Farm Community Center, which displays old artifacts from Florin, including items related to internment, and hosts community meetings and events. That afternoon, Marielle and I visited the center and drove past Bob and Teresa’s old home, a modest ranch. Other stops included the Florin Buddhist Church, built in 1919, as well as the original location of the Florin Japanese Methodist Church, from around the same time. During the internment years, both buildings were used to store the possessions of Japanese American families who had been sent away.

But Florin, like almost everywhere else in America, has been highly developed since the 1940s. Its main drag is crammed with housing complexes, strip malls, gas stations and two used car dealerships. When Marielle recognized an area where a piece of her family’s farmland had been, it was a parking lot belonging to an industrial company. 

There were several stretches that remained flat and green enough that I could imagine old Florin. I thought of what Kuzo might have seen when he first arrived there. Early settlers, awestruck by the area’s wildflowers, named the town after the Latin word for flower. The region’s beauty may have played a role in Kuzo’s decision to settle here. It was the American dream come true, until it wasn’t.

I also thought of Bob Fletcher, toiling in the vineyards. He had quit his job, lost a wife, made enemies and worked 18-hour days to keep up. Once, during the Tsukamotos’ incarceration, he received a letter from Mary that read: “We should be the ones to send you courage and strength and cheer as you undertake this great struggle. … Sometimes it is hard to write a cheerful letter because we get so self-centered here. But it isn’t very bad. Much depends on our attitudes. I think we are strong enough to take it.”

One can imagine Fletcher reading Mary’s words of resolve and vowing to stay the course, no matter the duration, no matter the difficulties. If Mary could take it—and Al and Marielle and Kuzo and Ito and George Miyao and Percy Nakashima and tens of thousands of other Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated—then he sure as hell could, too. 

As Marielle told the schoolchildren that day, Fletcher was an “honorable American” who deserved recognition even though he didn’t seek it. “When people asked him why he helped us, he always said, ‘Oh, I didn’t do anything special. It was just the right thing to do.’”