![]() ![]() ![]() Raised under the vigorous California or Mexico sun, its beefy, triangular shape dwarfs its leafed end-technically it’s called a calyx-into a jaunty little hat. In the opposing corner, a behemoth of a grocery store strawberry. In one corner, a fresh-picked strawberry from the Spooner fields of rural Thurston County, red as a stop sign and no bigger than a golf ball, a stem still protruding inches above its green cap. “Rumor has it, it was going to be a really good crop.” But efforts dwindled and the Suyematsu lands languished. “Some of the Filipino community tried to help out with the harvest,” says Bainbridge Island farmer Karen Selvar. Army even as his family remained incarcerated. The Suyematsus were sent to California’s Manzanar Relocation Center, then Minidoka in Idaho Akio, just graduated from Bainbridge Island High School, was drafted into the U.S. Now they and other Bainbridge Islanders of Japanese descent became the first to be forcibly relocated to America’s World War II incarceration camps. Almost 15 years previously, Japanese immigrants Yasuji and Mitsuo Suyematsu purchased that Bainbridge Island farmland in their American-born son Akio’s name when he was eight Asian exclusion laws prohibited non-citizens like them from ownership. In late March of 1942, before the cherry red Marshall strawberries had even begun to form on their 40 acres of plants, the Suyematsu family walked away from the crop. STRAWBERRIES In Season May–July Strawberry Fields Foreverīainbridge’s rich farming history weaves the stories of a changing island with the country’s traumatic past. ![]()
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