Tammy Ayer

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Yoshiko Hide Kishi gazed at the small buckskin moccasins in her cupped hands as she recalled her early childhood in rural Toppenish.

Her father and mother, Mantaro and Kiyo Hide, were farmers with five children, Yoshiko their youngest. Her father raised several crops and Kiyo helped him amid her household duties, which included making dresses for Yoshiko because money was tight.

The moccasins came from their landowner, George Adams, a citizen of the Yakama Nation in White Swan. They are soft, with little adornment — ideal for a toddler learning how to walk.

“I was 7, 8 months old ...

Eight Japanese men gathered at the Tamagawa Tei restaurant on First Street in downtown Yakima to recite their poems and judge the others. On this fall day in 1912, members of the Yakima Ameikai — Yakima Croaking Society — met for the first time.

All seasonal farm workers, they wanted something more than just gambling, smoking and drinking sake during their time away from work in the fields. They wanted companionship and culture. They wanted to express their feelings in a way that each could understand and appreciate.

They chose senryu, an unrhymed Japanese verse consisting of three lines of five, seven ...

Kara Matsushita Kondo was born in Wapato, a town with a thriving Japanese population. There were Japanese-owned businesses and schools, a Buddhist church and a meeting hall. The Wapato Nippons baseball team won a pennant and a following beyond its local fan base.

But she knew that her life would change in the aftermath of Dec. 7, 1941.

“We were very uncertain what would happen to us, and we realized it would never be the same,” Kondo recalled in a brief recorded oral history that can be heard at the Yakima Valley Museum. It’s among several oral histories of ...

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Karen Lee has lived in Yakima since 1973. In that time, she never heard of Yakima’s Japan Town, a downtown block packed with a variety of businesses operated by Japanese-Americans.

“I figured there was a Japan Town in Wapato,” Lee said of the Lower Valley community where Japanese immigrants first moved to the Yakima Valley in the 1890s. They cleared sagebrush, dug canals, farmed and ran thriving businesses, schools and churches in Wapato and Toppenish.

Lee was among about two dozen people who attended an 11 a.m. walking tour of Yakima’s Japan Town and adjacent ...

Esther Short Boyd was working as usual at the R.R. Short Hardware store in Wapato when a man walked in and identified himself as president of one of the local Granges, a national fraternal association for farmers.

“You went to the Tolan Hearing,” he said. That’s correct, she replied. “Then we can’t trade with you,” he added, reflecting the anti-Japanese sentiment running high in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

She told him that was his privilege.

“It was my privilege to make my own decisions and do what I considered right,” Boyd recalled years later of the ...