Japanese Americans in Colorado

A recent writing project introduced me to four generations of Colorado's Japanese Americans. I found that their contributions to the state's history were surprisingly significant yet largely unknown to most Coloradoans.

Starting about 1900, a small but hardworking wave of young Japanese men crossed the Pacific to disembark at the ports of San Francisco and Seattle, even as millions of westward-bound Europeans were stepping onto Ellis Island in New York Harbor. Unlike their European counterparts who arrived with families in tow, most of the Japanese immigrants were bachelors.

It is obvious that the Japanese bachelors intended to stay. Obvious too that they intended to start families. They called themselves the Issei (EE SAY), meaning the first generation.

Many found work with the railroad companies that were furiously constructing new lines across the West, riding the wave of industrial expansion accompanying the country's growth.

One of those bachelors was Katsubei Sakaguchi (KAT SU BAY   SACK AH GOOCHEE). Among the rail lines he worked on was the Moffat Road, an ambitious project financed by Denver businessman David Moffat. The "Road," actually the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific Railroad, began in the city and was to make its way over the Continental Divide to the Grand Valley and beyond.


Katsubei Sakaguchi worked on the Moffat Road
railway construction west of Boulder, Colorado.
One of the work crews is pictured here in 1909.

A horse-drawn wagon takes
Sakaguchi's vegetables
to market, 1914.

Railroad construction was backbreaking, and Isseis like Sakaguchi hoped and planned for a transition into farming as soon as possible. Railroad work had introduced them to the open fields along the South Platte River north of Denver where many took up sharecropping. To sharecrop one had to find a landowner willing to pay the costs of seed, supplies and farm equipment in exchange for labor. At harvest time, the land owner paid the farmer a share of the profits from the crops, if there were any.

Sakaguchi wrote to his home village in Japan for help in finding a "picture bride." Her name was Hisano. They first met when she arrived in Seattle. Together they settled into farming near Platteville, Colorado. The next year they moved a few miles south to work land near Wattenburg. Frequent moves were common in the sharecropper’s life. From 1915 to 1918 the Sakaguchis farmed east of Brighton before making a final move into farm ownership in 1919 when they were finally able to buy a 160 acre farm south of Brighton where other Japanese immigrants had already settled. The site of the Sakaguchi farm is now marked by the intersection of Colorado Highway 85 and the E470 toll road.

The farm house and yard were circled by cottonwood trees, as well as practical chokecherry bushes and apple and plum trees. Off a ways stood a shed for cucumbers and other vegetables pickled in wooden shoyu barrels. Sakaguchi sold the farm’s vegetable crops to the Kuner Canning Company located in Brighton. For the first few growing seasons, he made the deliveries with a horse-drawn wagon.

The resourceful farmer designed and built a traditional Japanese bath house, called a furoba, for his growing family, which by 1931 included 10 children. In the bath house, he installed a 100-gallon galvanized tank on a cement base. In a hollowed-out part of the base, he burned wood to heat the bath water. In the Japanese style, bathers actually lathered up and rinsed off before entering the tank for a relaxing soak in the hot water. When entering the bath, they had to submerge a floating wood pallet, by standing or sitting on it, to avoid burning their feet on the tank’s hot metal floor. Every Saturday night was furo: bath night.

The Issei farmers were often looked upon with suspicion as "outsiders," especially during World War II when they were unjustly linked to the military forces of Japan following that country's attack on the U.S. Naval Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December of 1941.

It is an understatement to say that Japan’s attack on the U.S. had an immediate, negative impact on all Americans of Japanese ancestry. The Issei - and their children, known as the Nisei (NEE SAY) generation - were suddenly viewed as “The Enemy,”cunning and cruel and bent on world domination. It would be an stubborn stereotype, one that would take a generation to reverse.

I've told the complete story of Brighton's Japanese American community in my latest book Our American Journey: A History of the Brighton Nisei Women's Club and Brighton Japanese American Association. Released on August 28, 2013, the book will be available soon through Amazon.com and local outlets.