Unbeknownst to the home cooks who were simmering pots of spaghetti sauce on stoves across midcentury America, their sun-ripened, ruby-fleshed tinned tomatoes likely originated from IKI Farms in the eastern Coachella Valley. Owned and operated by Japanese American farming pioneers I.K. Ishimatsu, sons Raymond and Robert, and nephew Jack Izu, Mecca-based IKI was once the largest tomato producer west of the Mississippi.
“Ever stop to figure out how many tomatoes [grow] on a tomato plant?” mused a June 1956 article in Desert Rancher about IKI’s landmark deals with Del Monte and Campbell Soup. “Multiply that by 150 million, and you’ll get an idea of what IKI Farms turns out.”
Such feats of dryland cultivation can be attributed to the minority groups that have kept Coachella Valley farming flourishing for more than a century. The region’s agriculture sector currently rakes in more than $700 million annually, according to the Riverside County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office — that’s more than three times any other district in the county.
I.K. Ishimatsu tends to crops.
PHOTO COURTESY BRUCE L. ISHIMATSU
Discrimination made the prospect of minority ownership arduous. Decades before President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which in 1942 exiled 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese descent — including roughly 30 Coachella Valley families — to internment camps, the California Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited land ownership by Japanese immigrants. But where there’s a law, there’s a loophole: First-generation (“issei”) farmers could place land in trusts held by their second-generation, American-born children (“nisei”).
THE RISE OF SPECIALTY CROPS
Cecilia Tsu, a professor of Asian American history at University of California, Davis, tells of a “racial hierarchy of crops” in which Japanese farmers chose to cultivate products that wouldn’t compete with neighboring grangers who may have seen them as a threat.
“California’s rise in deciduous fruits, citrus, and vegetables in the early 20th century was due in large part to Asian farmers, particularly Japanese,” Tsu says. “They were indispensable in transitioning California from wheat farming to specialty crops that required a lot more hand labor and horticultural expertise.”
In the 2019 book A History of Coachella and Its People, author Jeff Crider points to an emblematic 1920s harvest from issei farmer Asauemon “Joe” Kitagawa, whose “diversified production [included] Japanese peas, okra, sweet potatoes, grapes, and deglet noor dates,” though “peppers and tomatoes [were] his best moneymakers.”
Jack Izu plows a field in sand at IKI Farms.
PHOTO COURTESY CAROLYN IZU
Pat Sakamoto, a third-generation (“sansei”) scion of Sakamoto Ranch in Thermal, recalls farmworkers transplanting seemingly infinite onion starts into the fields by hand, each one uniformly 6 inches from the next. This “intensive farming” method was popular in Japan for producing the highest yield from the country’s characteristically small parcels. Even packing the harvest in wooden crates with tissue paper was an art form unto itself, derived from the Japanese practice of tsutsumi, typically reserved for cherished things.
“The old ways were so labor intensive and time consuming,” says Sakamoto, who cites his grandmother’s hunched back as the anatomical manifestation of a lifetime spent toiling in the fields. “It’s no longer feasible to farm that way. Machines are the way of that world now.”
CARRYING THE TORCH
Of the 23 Japanese families that arrived in the Coachella Valley in the early 1900s to germinate an agricultural legacy, only a few of their farms remain in business. Notably owned by the Kitagawa, Kono, and Musashi families, these small holdings are standing ground against sprawling operations like Grimmway, Prime Time, and Ocean Mist.
IKI Farms and Sakamoto Ranch, which started in the early postwar era, folded in the 1980s and ’90s, respectively. Nisei matriarch Cherry Ishimatsu, co-founder of the advocacy group California Women for Agriculture, spoke to The Desert Sun about the fading legacy of Japanese American farming: “Keeping the culture alive is increasingly challenging,” she said in a 2018 interview. “We need the young people to continue it. They are so westernized, they’re losing touch.”
Given the interminable days, grueling physical demands, and financial uncertainty, farming proved to be an understandably difficult career prospect for sansei. Cherry and Raymond’s son Bruce Ishimatsu, a business-litigation lawyer in Los Angeles, admits that his attempt at a high school job picking oranges on the family farm “lasted about two hours.” (He opted to fold towels at a department store instead.) His second cousin Carolyn Bergmann, Jack Izu’s youngest daughter, is a Palm Desert dentist whose childhood memories of IKI are not of horticulture or related activities, but rather the singular pleasure of hot buttered tortillas, machinemade for laborers recruited from Mexico as part of the U.S.-sponsored Bracero Program.
A photo from a June 1956 article in Desert Rancher shows (from left) Jack Izu, I.K. Ishimatsu, Ralph Walson of Campbell Soup, and Ray Ishimatsu.
PHOTO COURTESY BRUCE L. ISHIMATSU
Sakamoto is the rare sansei who joined the family business after his father passed away in 1980. “It was the best thing for me,” he says. “At age 25, I needed direction.” His tenure on the ranch prepared him for a successful decadeslong career in agriculture with seed company Harris Moran. He retired a year and a half ago.
Meanwhile, the legacy of these important pioneering families lives on in the community. Established in 1984, the Coachella Valley History Museum in Indio contains a Japanese Memorial Garden honoring the area’s issei and nisei innovators. The garden was refurbished and rededicated with a traditional Shinto blessing in 2022. There, a stone inscribed with symbols for prosperity and good fortune implies, in parallel, struggle and sacrifice. Light, shadow. Mountain, valley. With gratitude, Bruce Ishimatsu puts it into perspective: “Our elders gave us the gift of better opportunities.”
