This is a great story, and their are other stories of rice farmers as well, many lost their land when it was confiscated during WWII, and had to fight to get it back or even buy it back.

Does anyone know why Nagasawa changed his name?

Kanaye Nagasawa – DiscoverNikkei.org

The Life of Kanaye Nagasawa Samurai of Kagoshima, Winemaker of Fountaingrove, Santa Rosa, California

February 20, 1852 Birth and Training Hikosuke Isonaga (changed to Kanaye Nagasawa) was born in Kagoshima, Satsuma, Japan. Son of a Samurai, his martial arts training began at 10 years, and he was a skilled warrior by 13. He was a brilliant student with a phenomenal memory.

February 13, 1865 Ordered to England Fifteen students, including Hikosuke, were ordered to go to England by the Daimyo of Satsuma to study Western ways and technology. This was in anticipation of the opening of Japan to westerners when such knowledge would be vital.

February 15, 1865 Awaiting Their Ship The student group went into hiding in Hashima Village. They were fugitives as they were planning to violate the Shogun’s prohibition against going overseas. All assumed new names and anxiously waited two months for their ship.

April 17, 1865 Voyage The ship arrived, and their 65 day voyage began. All arrangements were made by Thomas Berry Glover, a Scot, who was a successful merchant in Nagasaki.

June 21, 1865 Arrival Early in the morning their ship docked at Southampton. In the afternoon they went to London by train and were amazed at the splendid sights.

August 19, 1865 Sent to Scotland At thirteen, Nagasawa was too young to enter the University with the other students. He was sent to Aberdeen, Scotland, to live with the parents of Thomas Glover. There he entered secondary school, and records show that he was a top student.

Summer 1867 Funds Decreased In anticipation of the overthrow of the Shogunate, Satsuma increased its armament expenditures. Funds for the students decreased, and their economic situation was tenuous. All but six returned to Kagoshima.

August 1867 Thomas Lake Harris The students met Thomas Lake Harris, leader of the Brotherhood of the New Life cult in the USA. He offered them continued education in exchange for labor in his New York colony. Nagasawa and his fellow students accepted and crossed the Atlantic with Harris.

October 14, 1867 Meiji Restoration Secret orders were given by the Emperor to the Daimyo of Satsuma and Choshu to overthrow the Shogunate. The Meiji Restoration began. Emperor Meiji ascended the throne in 1868 and ruled until his death in 1912.

1867 – 1875 Brockton, New York Harris took the students to the Brotherhood’s colony in Brocton. The vineyards were a classroom for young Nagasawa, and he learned viticulture from an expert. In 1868 all but Nagasawa returned to Kagoshima for patriotic reasons.

July 1875 Fountaingrove Harris, Nagasawa and three others arrived in Santa Rosa seeking a new site for the colony. Four hundred acres north of Santa Rosa were purchased for $50 an acre. Construction began immediately on the Fountaingrove Ranch buildings. Later more acreage was added. [read more]

日系 Nikkei T-Shirt by okawastudios

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Jake Shimabukuro playing his new song for the veterans of Go For Broke at the the 125th Anniversary of Kanyaku Imin honoring all American’s of Japanese Ancestry and WWII Veterans at the Iolani Palace June 5, 2010.

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They get the laws on the books because the northern European settlers think their are to many Mexican’s in Arizona, and these people don’t realize Arizona was Mexican Territory not to long ago. Why wouldn’t their be a lot of Mexican’s in these parts? Their dumbfounded because they think America is a northern European country set up for them [ see kkk ]. It might appear that way if they stay in their own little community from days on end, and not venture out to learn something new, maybe they need to take an Ethnic studies course instead of learning nothing but European studies.

BTW, if Arizona plans on banning Ethnic studies related to Mexican-American, Native-American or Asian-American for that matter, then they should ban the European studies courses as well.  That most certainly would leave everyone ignorant of the facts, and then the KKK might be able to gain advances in their membership because more and more senators would be uneducated on facts and create bills like these that target Mexican American and Native American people in favor of northern European settlers.

People have a right to know their history, history of their ancestry and where it was they came from, and I mean all people, not just the northern European-American’s, and they have a right know how the country came about. You just can’t leave out facts that California, Arizona, New Mexico and other states not to long ago where Mexican Territory. It’s history, and all people should be able to embrace it, it’s not teaching people to hate, it’s teaching the facts about history. History, both good and the bad of it should be told, so that the mistakes that happened then do not happen again.

What’s next? Will California follow Arizona and ban the teachings that take place on how Japanese-American’s where removed from their homes and taken to concentration camps? Will this happen again, and again because people don’t know that it was wrong, if they ban these types of historical teachings? If these histories are not taught then who will fight to keep them from happening again?

I saw a news segment from a Arizona news station, and there was this, what appeared to be a northern European American guy belittling some Asian people because they didn’t speak English with out their Asian accent. Interesting since their are a lot of American’s who speak English with their strong northern European accents, but no body say’s anything about them. They every one else, yet they adopt everything that is theirs, even the American English language is filled with foreign adopted words. People have a right to speak other languages, and why not? We are living in a global society, and it was these same types of people who pushed for it, so they could sell their goods to other countries, yet they don’t want these same people here visiting or working. How can America have a closed off society, when it was the American’s who forced Japan to open theirs and forced them to change, not to long ago? All this looks very hypocritical!

Many northern Europeans don’t want to do work that the Mexican’s who come here to work do. I remember my father telling me he couldn’t hire white people because they didn’t want to do the work, so he was left with hiring Mexican’s who wanted to work, and this was more than 30 years ago.

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Bloom Watch

The blooming of the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. has come to symbolize the natural beauty of our nation’s capital city. The famous trees, a gift from Japan in 1912, signal Washington’s rite of spring with an explosion of life and color that surrounds the Tidal Basin in a sea of pale pink and white blossoms. Thousands of city residents and visitors from across the nation and around the world come here to witness the spectacle, hoping that the trees will be at the peak of bloom for the Cherry Blossom Festival. [more info]

Cherry Blossoms by okawastudios

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Tule Lake Unit – WDC List 1944 (U.S. National Park Service)
The documents in this section gives a rare look at the Japanese American population incarcerated in the Tule Lake Segregation Center from September 1943 through July 15, 1944. This list was compiled by the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command (WDC) following the forced removal to Tule Lake, known as segregation, of persons from the other nine WRA camps who refused to cooperate with the flawed loyalty questionnaire.

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Cultural News: Lecture: True story of the first Japanese colony, Jan 19

January 19, 2010 (Tuesday) 6:30 PM

Brian Tadashi Maeda, film director, will be speaking about his current film project: “Samurai of Gold Hill”

It is the fascinating sage of the “Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Colony,” first Japanese colony to establish itself in California.

The last samurai group of Aizu-Wakamatsu during the Bakumatsu (the End of Tokugawa Shogunate) period, escaped from Japan with a lead of a German to settling in Gold Hill, California.

The year was 1869, the second year of the Meiji when they finally arrived at California. [more information]

More information about Wakamatsu Colony at Rafu Shimpo: A Legend Reborn By Ryoko Ohnishi

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Getting a lot of spam bots or spammers trying to register at the forum.

I delete a lot of them, and sometimes I may inadvertently delete a legitimate registration, so please retry if that is you. That can be avoided if you use a good name and a good email address, a lot of the spammers use hotmail, gmail and yahoo because they are so anonymous. I get around the spammer by checking the IP address to see if they are problem IPs.

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Michele Bachmann is alleging that census taking will lead to “Internment” camps! 

What does Michele Bachmann know about these concentration camps?  If she would spend more time fighting for the civil rights of all American’s these things wouldn’t happen, yet she and her conservative base are spreading lies about the census takers.  If conservatives would fight for civil rights instead of working hard to target sellect groups of people like the LGBT community for one, internment camps like these wouldn’t happen, but they are working hard across America targeting LGBT people because of their personal religious views.

If internment camps come back it will not be because a guy was taking a census note, it will come back because the civil right’s of American’s and Californian’s were taken away by a vote of these religious people.

Check out documentary about the Japanese being taken away to these “internment” camps.  My grandfather came home to an anvil, and that’s what was left, it must have been to heavy for people to carry off.  We still have that anvil.

Manzanar: “Never Again” Released – Video by Ken Burns

Manzanar: “Never Again,” a short film by critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, has been released by WETA-TV (Public Television in Washington, DC) and Florentine Films. The mini-documentary is one of five such films produced by WETA and Florentine Films as part of their Untold Stories project. [see video here]

Manzanar: “Never Again” was shown at a preview screening at the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History in Lone Pine, California on April 24, 2009. It was also screened at the Manzanar At Dusk program on April 25, 2009, following the 40th Manzanar Pilgrimage, held earlier that day at the Manzanar National Historic Site.

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The forum is not accessible when using http://forum.nikkeiancestry.com/

I’ve contacted the hosting service. You can get to the forum by using http://www.forum.nikkeiancestry.com/ until it gets fixed. Some links that don’t have the WWW are currently down. Sorry for the confusion.

Access the forum at http://www.forum.nikkeiancestry.com/

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Japanese American Citizens League
The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) applauds Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for her comments that the massive incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was a mistake and that detention solely based on race is wrong.

Judge Sotomayer’s reply to Senator Feingold

Never Rule From Fear | 3:04 p.m. In trying to get at rulings made during wartime, Senator Feingold mentions the World War II decision Korematsu v. United States (in 1944), which permitted the detention in camps of citizens of Japanese descent. (A brief explanation of the case here.)

“A judge should never rule from fear,” Judge Sotomayor says in a very strong voice. “A judge should rule from the law and the Constitution.” She calls it “inconceivable” that a decision today would permit the arrest and detention of people based solely on their race.

It’s that lack of knowledge in a society that causes things to creep up on us again and again, it might not be happening to the Japanese this time, but it’s happening to other groups of people based on who they are.  The LGBT community is currently the target of religious extremist pushing their own social “conservatism” views on others who don’t belong to those particular groups, much less their particular religious faith.  They’re using fear as the same tool and manipulating lies in order to get people to turn and attack the LGBT community, and their families based on their religious fears.

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