 Good Sunday evening. I want to do something a little different in my letter to you this week and share a story by Mari Uyehara about Keisaburo Koda, the Rice King of California. He founded Koda Farms, which he built in post-war California both before and after spending the WWII years with his family in a government concentration camp. It's a gripping account of the bittersweet mix of the innovation he brought to California's young rice industry, the injustice that he faced — and the triumph that Koda Farms has become.
* * *
As soon as he was released, Keisaburo Koda, his wife, and their two sons drove — the barbed wire, 29 blocks of military barracks, and dirt-flat expanse of dry prairie fading fast in the rearview mirror. They drove all day and all night and into the day again. They left behind the Amache concentration camp in eastern Colorado's High Plains to reach San Joaquin Valley in central California, more than 1,300 miles away.
It had been more than three years since the Kodas had seen their farm — three years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the round-up and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans without even a nod at due process. Before World War II, Keisaburo was known as "The Rice King," and operated a 10,000-acre, vertically integrated farm producing the best japonica rice, a rounder and thicker Asian rice variety, in the country. In California, he'd pioneered the technique for aerial seeding, installed a state-of-the art miller and drier, and set up a 1,000-head hog farm for using the rice's byproduct, nuka (or rice bran), as feed.
When he returned, the two airplanes used for aerial seeding were long gone, as was the rest of their best equipment, the livestock, and 9,000 acres of their best land, along with their family home and the housing for workers. More than 30 years of his life's work simply taken.
"I really don't know where they spent that first night," says Robin Koda, the granddaughter of Keisaburo, who currently runs the operation now called Koda Farms, California's oldest family-owned rice farm, with her brother, Ross. "They came home to essentially nothing."
All my best,  FOLLOW FAITH
RICE ON REPEAT Follow Us
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Sunday, June 13, 2021
The Rice King of California
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