Inside the history of Texas' first Japanese immigrants who built the state's rice industry

When George Hirasaki attended high school in the 1960s, he told his father, Tokuzo Hirasaki, that he wanted to attend Texas A&M to study agriculture. Geroge remembers Tokuzo's face becoming stern and telling Geroge that everything he needed to learn about agriculture was on their family rice colony, the Kishi Colony, that George's grandfather, Kichimatsu Kishi, purchased in 1906 between Beaumont and Orange. Kishi wasn't the first Japanese immigrant to settle in Texas in the early 1900s — the first prominent rice colony being the Saibara colony in Webster. But his family — along with the Saibaras, the Kobayashis and other Japanese families who settled on the Gulf Coast — share origin stories that represent what it means to not only be Japanese but also a true Texan. "The first thing you'll notice about Japanese Texans is the way they talk," George said. "You will see a Japanese Texan and you would think that they will speak with an Asian accent, but no, they talk with a southern drawl, just like I do." Famous families Seito Saibara and his family are some of the most famous Japanese families to settle in Texas and even have a Texas historical marker near the original location of Saibara's farms in Webster. Arriving in Webster in 1904, the Saibara family planted 1,000 acres of an improved rice strain and are credited with building Texas' multimillion dollar rice industry. Mitsutaro Kobayashi was also another prominent Japanese settler who arrived in San Francisco in 1904. After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, he moved to Webster and worked for the Saibara family and was eventually able to purchase his own land where he planted vegetables and Satsuma oranges. Kobayashi Road remains in Webster today. When some of the first Japanese immigrants were invited to Texas in the early 1900s by the Houston Chamber of Commerce, they hoped to empower the economy with revolutionary rice-growing techniques. And they did, all along the Gulf Coast. According to a 2019 essay in Rice University's Transnational Asia Journal by Scott Pett, Texas business leaders encouraged the Japanese settlers to grow rice along the Gulf Coast, and the settlers quickly learned to speak both English and Spanish. The rice enterprise was intended to benefit the Japanese, who hoped to send food back to Japan, and to cultivate the economic and population boom created by Texas' then-new oil industry. "Alas, a combination of factors ranging from the world depression on the rice market and white xenophobia ultimately doomed the project," Rice's Anne S. Chao wrote in an essay in the Chronicle in 2021. Kishi accumulated 9,000 acres in Orange County and a number of Japanese settlers lived and worked on the farmland until 1924 when the United State prohibited immigration from Japan. College education Tokuzo Hirasaki was born in Japan and came to America around 1912 to study agriculture at the University of California-Davis. He wanted to be an engineer. According to George, his father worked his way through college by surveying land around California and eventually made his way to Texas to work on the Kishi Colony. "During that time, professions like engineering, accounting, and law, were just not open to Japanese nationals," Hirasaki said. That's why in high school, his father told him to stay on the farm to learn agriculture instead of going to college, which only made George want to go to college even more. On HoustonChronicle.com: A Chinese cowboy searches for the future of the colorful Texan tradition George would go on to receive a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at Lamar University in 1963 and was awarded a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Rice University in 1967. George worked 26 years for Shell Development and Shell Oil Company before becoming a research professor at Rice in 1993, where he continues to teach. During the 1920 post-war depression, the rice market collapsed and anti-Japanese sentiment grew, partly because many Japanese migrants came to Texas from Mexico and found themselves in the midst of United States border anxiety. Pett argues that Japanese Texas is "woefully under-studied in historiographies of the border and of U.S. immigration broadly," which results in overlooking the role Texas played in the national campaign to exclude Japanese migrants from the U.S. After the rice market collapsed, some Japanese immigrants switched to truck driving, operated plot nurseries, and others left Texas altogether, according to the Texas State Historical Association. Oil discovery During this time, Kishi discovered oil on his land and organized the Orange Petroleum Company, sold the company and repaid his investors from Japan which made it possible for him to start the colony in the first place, according to George. "He continued to purchase more land in hopes of expanding the colony and maybe finding more oil," George said," but there was no more oil. He had to mortgage the farm for the expansion and because of the depression, he lost the farm." Now, where there were once active rice farms there are now fields for grazing. "The rice farmers don't exist anymore," George said. "Once mechanization became available to the rest of the world, they could do it much more economically. So the land that's used to be rice farms, most of it is laying fallow." Today, there are more than 53,000 Japanese Americans living in Texas, with most living in the Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio areas.

Inside the history of Texas' first Japanese immigrants who built the state's rice industry

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