Tsuneyoshi

Tsuneyoshi

June 18, 2014

As a very young boy, Tsuneyoshi Tokuno spoke only Japanese at home. When he first went to school in Palermo, he had a very difficult time learning in English, but he was eventually able to master it and helped teach his younger sister and brothers. There were no special programs to help the children of immigrants learn to speak English in those days, so poor little Tsuneyoshi had to struggle mightily in school where the other little children could not even pronounce his name. They called him “Tony,” because that is how his name sounded to them. He not only kept the name, but later legally changed his name to “Anthony Tsuneyoshi Tokuno.”

Tony grew to be a quiet young man, very dutiful to his responsibilities as the first born son. From 1922 through 1952, he kept a very careful diary in which he recorded his daily activities. On September 25, 1925, for example, he killed a rabbit after school and sold it for $4.37. There are frequent notations about killing ducks, shipping plums or pears, picking watermelons, and tanning rabbit skins that made it very clear that his youth was kept very busy learning his responsibilities on the farm. He was not only very industrious, but also very careful and methodical in his work.

Although he was very intelligent, he proved not to be a scholar, graduating from Oroville High School in 1926 and entering a lifelong career as a farmer. He declined to go to college even after his high school teachers encouraged him to pursue higher education. He did like to read, recording what he read in his diary. In 1930 he wrote that he had read 9 books, in 1931, 8 books, and so on, usually listing the titles. He also loved to fish and found time to do it even when he was interned in the relocation camps.

After finishing high school, he tried to see what else he might do away from home. He spent a brief period working for a grocery store in Oroville. In the fall of 1927 he went to Sacramento to work at Inaka’s Hardware Store. That lasted until January of 1928. By then, he was back to farming with his family, working the property of the Kister Ranch in 1929. It is clear from his diary that Tony loved the work on the farm, as hard as it was. This is probably why he came back after trying to do other things. There was always something to do around the farm. With his brothers, Tony would prepare the hot beds in February so that the tomatoes could get a head start and flourish by summer. They had to make their own barn for their animals; spray the crops with insect poisons, prune the trees, build sleds to haul tree stumps out of the fields, and even make their own boxes to pack the fruit. Tony took the lead on all of this as the eldest son. Soon he would start a family of his own.

Tony had been introduced to Michiko Uyeno, through the time honored tradition of Japanese arranged marriages. Usually, this means that a third party suggests a marriage to both sets of parents of the prospective bride and groom. In this case, the “go betweens” were the Karakawa family, who knew the Tokunos, and the Goda family from Marysville, who knew the Uyenos. Both sets of parents agreed to the match, so Tony and Michiko (whom we now know as “Mary”) were engaged. Two years after their engagement, they were married in December 1934, at Marysville Methodist Church. The reasons for the long engagement were explained in the last entry. It was also explained in the last entry that the Tony Tokuno family had three sons. The oldest, Albert Tsuneyuki, was given a Japanese name that carried on the Sano Clan tradition of using “Tsune” as the first part the eldest son’s name. It was a significant event in the family for Tony, a first born son, to have a first born son to carry on the family name.

When Bunda died in 1933, Tony wasted little time in filling his father’s shoes. Early in 1934, he began the major project of renovating the house. He leveled the floor throughout the house, expanded the kitchen and added shelves, put in indoor plumbing (to include a bathroom), and added a bedroom. It was only the first of several improvements necessary as his family began to grow. By 1935, Tony realized that the small plot of land around the house would soon be inadequate to support his family, even with the money they made from their contracted laborers. He began to spread his efforts further, leasing land nearby to grow other crops, such as melons, squash, tomatoes, and of course strawberries. He was quite successful and he and his younger brother Ted were kept very busy delivering truckloads of crops to the stores in Oroville, Quincy and other neighboring towns. They coined the name “Tokuno Brothers Farms” and painted the trucks with their sign.

In the winter months, they continued to hire contract laborers to pick their neighbors’ orange and olive trees. They made repairs to the various outbuildings and equipment they had to maintain for the farm. There was not much time for rest, but the winter allowed Tony to do a little fishing. In the winter of 1938, he also took time to do the some more remodeling of the house, extending the living room and adding a fireplace and two bedrooms.

With war and relocation, the brunt of the responsibility for the family fell on Tony. He made the best of it as recounted in the previous entry. Still, life in the camp was not to his liking at all. He, of all the sons of Bunda, was closest to the samurai tradition and did not wish to spend his days a virtual prisoner. At first he tried to find ways to busy himself. He built shelves for storing their clothes when they found no closets in their huts. He built screens so that they could divide the rooms and have some privacy. He even made a hat stand and some clothes hangers out of scraps of wood he found. Soon after their arrival in the camp, he found work as one of the camp “wardens,” spending some of his time assigned to guarding the front gate. Still, he did not like the dull routine and missed farming. He whiled away his time whittling on scrap wood that had been brought in for starting fires. He carved chopsticks out of pieces of ironwood that he found in the desert. A few of those pairs are still in use at the old homestead in Palermo.

The boys, being boys, thought the whole thing was quite an adventure. Albert remembers the local landscape: Castle Rock, a nearby mountain where the internees erected a cross and conducted Easter services in the spring; Abalone Mountain, so named because it looked like an abalone. They took little notice of the barbed wire and armed guards, playing soldier at the base of the guard towers and chatting with their keepers. There was also camp school and Albert attended the second grade there.

When the camp became divided between those loyal to the United States and the “No-No Boys”, Tony found the abuse he had to take from others intolerable. He stopped going to the mess hall, insisting that Mary bring him his food in their room. Badly needing to get away, he found that he could get work in farming if he was willing to go to Utah. In July of 1943, after 11 miserable months in Tule Lake, he went to Ogden to farm sugar beets. He stayed with his sister, Tey, and her husband. When the sugar beets had all been harvested, he had to work nights in a department store as a janitor. He could not get a job during the day because of problems with discrimination against him. This lasted a few more months until he could find work as a sharecropper in the nearby town of Kayville. He planted onions, potatoes and sugar beets. The farms were small, with some of the work still being done by horses. Tony’s landlord, though, had a big caterpillar tractor. This work not only provided some livelihood, but allowed him to avoid being drafted. He was not afraid to fight, but he needed to be with his young family. By March 1944, he could send for his wife and family to leave the camp and join him.

Mary brought two of her sons, Doug and Edmond, with her to Kayville. Doug, who was only five, took one look at the accommodations and wanted to go back to Topaz. The house was a converted chicken coop with no electricity. The bathroom was an outhouse that had two boards laid across an open pit. It was all too close to the hog pens with the smell and grunts of the pigs to keep them company night and day. The only good thing about it was a supply of burdock root that grew behind the hog pen and was considered a delicacy. They sent some of it back to Topaz. Albert had stayed behind with his grandmother and Ideochan so he could finish the 3rd grade in camp, but he joined them as soon as school was over. They stayed through the fall when all the crops were harvested. (Albert, being the primary heir to the family name, admits to being spoiled during this period. His grandmother would actually go to the mess hall and bring the meals to him.)

When Albert came to Kayville, he had to join Doug in helping with the work on the farm. They weeded, topped, gathered, and sacked the onions; helped load sugar beets; and helped store the potatoes. The potatoes were stored by placing them in large pits lined with straw and covered with dirt to keep them cool and preserve them for later sale. The crops were irrigated by a ditch that all the farmers had to share, even if it meant having to use the water in the middle of the night. Tony and Mary frequently had to go out at mid-night to irrigate, using miner’s carbide lamps atop their heads so they could use both hands to work.

The boys enjoyed much of this time, talking about who was stronger, Superman or George Orite (a family friend of large stature); eating grapes by squeezing them out of their skins and swallowing them whole (to avoid having to spit the seed out); or swimming in a nearby livestock watering tank. For the latter, they had to walk a mile on hot pavement in the summer. They had to stop often to cool their feet on the weed patches lining the road, but no price was too high for a cool dip.

Leaving Kayville behind them in the fall of 1944, Tony got a job working for Pacific Fruit Express in Ogden early the next year. He would bring home so many bananas that his sons got sick of them and wouldn’t be able to eat them again for years. They were able to take over the rental of Tey and Henry’s place that winter. It was a bit crowded at first, especially when Alyce came for a night or two. There were as many as nine people sharing the cottage. Tey and Henry soon moved to Minnesota where Henry was involved in army training. A fourth son, Timothy Shiro (named after his two uncles), was born in Ogden on January 4, 1945.

The summer of 1945 was a lot of fun for the three older boys. They made friends with the children in the neighborhood, most of whom were Mormons. Albert did not know what a Mormon was, so when he was asked if he was one, naturally, he said yes, going with the majority. He would join his friends in bike rides to the community swimming pool, a nice improvement over a watering tank. They also went to the Saturday matinees to see William Bendix in “The Hairy Ape,” or Lash LaRue serials. Movies in those days cost 5 cents with popcorn or candy or cola each costing a nickel. Tony once took Albert, Doug, and some of their friends fishing.  Someone caught a trout that was undersize, but decided to keep it anyway. A stranger came over and asked Tony if they’d had any luck. Tony suggested that they had had none, so Albert volunteered, “Oh yes, we caught one.” When he tried to find it, it had mysteriously disappeared. He later was told that the stranger was a game warden.

Meanwhile, Tony’s younger brother, Ted had moved his wife and young daughter, Teresa, to Mesa, Idaho. Tony was taking his family to visit them in August of 1945 when the news of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima came over their car radio. As grim as the news was, the realized it meant they would soon be going home. By September, Executive Order 9066 was lifted and the Americans of Japanese ancestry were allowed to go where they wished. Many did not wish to return to the west coast and its bad memories, but Tony gathered his mother, Ideochan, and his family and returned to California.

Tony’s youngest brother, Shiro, had in-laws in Richmond whom the whole Tokuno family had gotten to know in Topaz: Maida Torayoshi, his wife and their three daughters The Maidas opened their house to the young family to stay with them for awhile in the month of September. Tony and Albert loaded up the pickup truck and headed for California on September 18, 1945. Two days later, the rest of the family followed by train. Even though they were back in California, Tony could not wait to be home. He had to see what the house in Palermo looked like, so he drove there one day late in September with his brother, Tim, who had just been discharged from the army. They notified the people renting the house of his intention to move his family back to their home in October. Soon after, he took his family there to get back to the land, despite the fact that they had to sleep in the barn. Albert even had to spend a few nights sleeping outside. Suye slept in a makeshift bed in the persimmon shed. Ideochan stayed in a small cabin. They had to cook on a wood stove. Still, they were lucky that their kind neighbors had taken good care of the house and land. Even with the owner sleeping in his barn, the renters did not leave until December. One wonders how long they would have stayed if they had not been pressured this way, but one also wonders at the tolerance that Tony had in letting them continue there for so long.

In the meantime, Tony took stock of what he had lost. He tried to get a number of guns, cameras, and radios that had been confiscated in 1941. Only a few small items were returned. The rest had somehow “disappeared.” In the last entry, it was mentioned that Tony had had to sell all his farm equipment very cheaply, but he also had taken a big loss on a new Oldsmobile. It was one of the first cars with an automatic transmission. Albert found his bike in the trash. This was the bike that Suye had brought back from Japan before the war, but it was beyond repair. The chain was not a size that was made in the U. S. The family also lost all of their savings that had been invested by Bunda in a Japanese bank. The Japanese government had confiscated all of it. With all those losses, the biggest loss was the lost opportunity to profit from their land during the war years. Farmers who had been able to stay had become wealthy selling their crops to the government at inflated wartime prices.

The Tokuno family was still more fortunate than most other Japanese-American families, many of whom lost houses and land; many of whom never came back to California because of those losses or bitterness against the “Golden State” over their treatment. Tony was able to return home and begin again. Tim stayed on to help his brother get the farming business going again. Although they had the trees thriving, they had to get loans to purchase all their farm equipment.

In the late summer of 1946, Tony’s little sister, Tey, came to stay with them briefly before she was to join her husband in Japan. She was to embark from Seattle with her two daughters in the fall. Tony drove them to Seattle and saw them away before starting the long lonely trek back to Palermo. He must have been very tired, because near the town of Shasta he got into an auto accident. He was not seriously hurt, but Tim had to go up and drive him back home from the hospital after he had recuperated.

Aside from that incident, life began to settle into a routine again as they revived their contract labor business as well as the farming of the land. By 1948, Tim had married and moved out, leaving Tony as the head of a clan that was spread throughout the West Coast and extended to Japan. The heart of the family was still in Palermo, where Suye still resided as the family matriarch, pleased at the explosion of grandchildren that enriched her life after the war.

Most of the labor they now hired consisted of Mexicans, including the Braceros, who were imported from Mexico seasonally. It was when a law was passed prohibiting the importation of such labor that the Tokuno family ceased to be involved in the contract labor business, but I still remember the sight and smell of the laborers quarters way behind the house. These quarters consisted of a simple shack with beds in them. A shower and outhouses were nearby nor far from a huge stand of bamboo trees reminiscent of Japan. Bunda must have planted them there.

Tony began to add truck crops to the land between 1946 and 1949: stake tomatoes, squash and cucumbers. These crops were grown on small, rented plots of land and required a lot of labor to make them productive. In his diary of 1952, Tony noted that he had over 120 acres planted and it is clear that they were farming other plots as well. It was a good thing Tony had so many sons. Donald Uyeno, the fifth and last son, was born on November 7, 1949. The older boys were put to work ripping large boards into stakes to sharpen and drive into the ground for the tomatoes to grow on. They would use cattail stalks to tie the tomato vines to the stakes.

Tony took on a partner, Prosper Patton and they raised rabbits and chickens in the back of their farm. They called that area the pasture, because they also kept a milk cow there. All the boys had to take turns milking the cow. The milk was mostly for their own use and they would drink it almost straight from the cow. I remember the taste as being overpoweringly strong.

Although the chickens were profitable, easy to care for and producing lots of eggs to sell, the rabbits were not. Too much work had to be put into feeding and watering the rabbits while the chickens just walked around pecking at their feed. They made a profit on the eggs and meat of the chickens, but this money was lost taking care of the rabbits. Not enough people wanted rabbit fur or rabbit meat. When the boys ate at Prosper’s place, though, they knew what to expect on the menu.

By the mid-1950s, memories of the war years were fading. In 1954, Suye decided to take a trip to Japan. After all, two of her daughters, Haru and Tey, were living there. Actually, it was more than just a trip, she planned to stay for two years. After all the years of hard work, she certainly deserved it. My last memory of her is seeing her standing by the railing of the ship waving good-bye before the ship left San Francisco harbor. While Suye was in Japan, Haru was able to return to the U. S. as her husband had found a job in Los Angeles. Suye herself was getting ready to return when that Christmas, as they were bidding guests a good night, Suye suddenly crumpled to the floor. A doctor misdiagnosed it a case of indigestion, but she had suffered a heart attack and died that night. They brought her body back to Palermo, and she was laid to rest next to her husband on one of the green hills near Oroville.

This meant that Mary was now the Tokuno family matriarch, a role she filled very well. She had always worked as hard as her mother-in-law tending to the house and family, as well as doing a lot of the farm chores. She was also the hostess to the family’s gatherings during the holidays. She kept a collage of photos of all of the Sansei from their childhood, reminding us all that Palermo was the root of the family tree even though the branches were spread all up and down the West Coast.

Just as the torch was passed from Suye to Mary, Albert, the oldest sansei was being prepared to take on the responsibility of leading the family. From 1947, at the age of 11, he had been responsible for taking care of the “furo,” the Japanese bath that was located in a small tin shed behind the house. Each day, he had to drain the old water from the previous night. This was not simply a matter of pulling out the plug. The tub was made of thick redwood boards with a metal bottom. It was 2 feet deep, 5 feet long, 4 feet wide and heavy. Inside the tub were two wooden racks seemingly to protect the bathers’ feet from touching the hot metal bottom. (Actually, the metal was not that hot. The racks were there to keep the metal from getting bent out of shape by the weight of the bathers.) He would have to empty all the water, take out the racks, clean them, then scrub the sides of the tub. Then he would rinse the tub and refill it with clean water. Next, he would start a fire under the tub with some newspaper and small olive branches, keeping the fire going with old scrap wood until the bath got good and hot.

By the time he had graduated from high school, Albert was given more of a say in the operation of the farm. Albert was not satisfied with the kind of crops they were growing. They required so much labor, even from the women. He wanted to see if they could profit from crops that were more mechanized. Taking his son’s advice, Tony was able to obtain cannery contracts from the Campbell Soup and Del Monte companies for their tomatoes. Later, he obtained contracts from Holly sugar for sugar beets and the Robinson Seed Company for vegetable seed crops. These crops did not require the kind of care that produce for the market required, so they could be cared for by machines. By 1958, they had 150 acres of canning tomatoes, 100 acres of sugar beets, and 50 acres of seed crops. Ironically, one of the leased lands was the Hearst Ranch, where Bunda had began his farming career fifty years earlier and Haru had been born. Tony was also leasing 200 acres of olive trees. He continued to contract labor, for example, in the winter months, he arranged for men to pick and haul navel oranges.

His sons all pitched in, for by the late 1950s, all but Don, who was too young yet, could handle heavy work. In 1958, Albert had started a venture with his Uncle, Henry Imaoka, to buy land, plant orchards and sell it. Henry had contacts in Japan who were interested in financing the idea, but he died before they could complete the deal. Albert then had to decide where his future laid. He had a good head for business, so he decided to go to college at Chico State College and study business administration. Although he considered the possibility of trying to raise two families in Palermo, he realized it would require too much risk. When he completed his degree in 1962, he took a job with the State of California’s Department of Employment. Albert married on April 22, 1965 and settled into a suburban life in Sacramento with his wife Yoshi and their daughter, Kelly. His brothers all followed suit, even though all of them continued to dabble in farming to some extent.

Doug went to the University of California at Davis for a while and eventually began to work for the State. He married his wife, Carmen, in 1963 and they had two sons, Mark and James, and a daughter, Robin. Edmond graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in social work, married in 1967 and had a son, Tony, and a daughter, Lynn, with his wife, Jean. He and his brother, Tim, both died tragic deaths by heart attacks in 1994. Tim was survived by his wife of 28 years, Helen, and their two sons, Tom and Mitchell, and a daughter, Dawn. Don married in 1969 and pursued a career in construction. He and his wife, Debbie, have a son, Lance.

Tony became involved in a lot of civic activities, setting a pattern that all of his brothers would follow. He volunteered his time for the Butte County Citrus Association for 21 years. He was Farm Bureau Chairman for the Oroville United Center and Butte County Third Vice-President. He was also on the Selective Service Board and the Butte County Agricultural Stabilization Conversation Board. Mary was also active in the PTA and as a den mother. The community recognized the contributions of the Tony Tokuno family in 1997 when they made Mary one of the two Grand Marshalls of the Palermo Field Day Parade.

As he got closer to retirement age, Tony found more time to pursue the one thing he most loved next to farming, fishing. His trips to him to places like Baja California in Mexico and the Campbell River area in Canada. However, farmers never retire and like all of his brother, Tony was never going to give up his first love which placed him close to the good earth of California that had been so kind to the Tokuno family over the years. At the time of his death, Tony had become a grandfather many times over. He died the kind of death any farmer would wish for, while working in his field on July 11, 1980. When he did not come, Mary went out to look for him and found him dead of a heart attack, his shovel still close at hand. Mary continues to live in Palermo, carefully tending the family home into the next century. Who will continue to care for the old homestead? Perhaps it is worth asking that it be preserved as a historical monument, for the family was certainly one of the pioneers of the valley.