Texas Rice Farming for Japanese Immigrants

The Cultivation of Rice and Other Crops in Texas [cover title] / Hokubei Tekisasu-shū no beisaku: Nihonjin no shinfugen

Yoshimura, Daijiro (James D. Yoshimura)

Notes: A rare book encouraging Japanese emigration to Texas to form rice-growing colonies, an effort that took off in the early 20th century but floundered in the 1920s, when xenophobia and harsh new laws forced most of the original settlers from the state. This is a very scarce book and one that has largely been left out of standard references to Texas and the West.

According to Kiyoka T. Kurasawa, writing in 1964, only one of the original Japanese rice farmers remained in Texas. "None other of those who were talked or written about in the first decade of 1900 as successful rice growers, or even their descendants, remain here in Texas today." The "dream of colonization and Americanization was finally ruined by the Immigration Act of 1924, which completely excluded Japanese immigrants from entry into the United States or its possessions."*

The author of this book was a Japanese convert to Christianity who took the biblical name James and emigrated to the US in the late 19th century. He became a minister and was an enthusiastic promoter of Japanese immigration to the US. He spent several years in Texas in the early 20th century promoting rice farming to Japanese immigrants. He later moved to San Francisco where he was pastor of a Japanese American church.

"An analysis of rice culture in Texas and the beginnings of the rice colony there."—A Buried Past, no. 337.

[10], 205, [18] page, plus one color plate, 7 black-and-white plates, and a folding map of the United States, emphasizing the location of Texas.

OCLC: 672450623 (Japan), 54608197 (UCLA)

* Quoted in "Seito Saibara's Diary of Planting a Japanese Colony in Texas" in the Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, August 1964, pp. 63-64.

Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing). Good to very good in original wrappers that are beginning to split along the spine; with a large blue-ink stain the top inch of the front cover and a bit of loss at the top of the spine.

Publication: Osaka: Japanese Colonijation (sic) Society / Kaigai Kigyo Doshikai, 1903 (Meiji 36).

Item No: #307876

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