New blog- History that spans cultures

By Tim Johnson, California Rice Commission President & CEO

Often history is seen as a single thread. Past events are translated as something belonging only to one people or associated with a single place. As a result, book titles like “American History” or “History of the California Gold Rush” proliferate. In truth, however, one event nearly always influences another. One thread is woven into a whole fabric on the loom of time. This is certainly true with the Gold Hill Wakamatsu Colony.

I had the great opportunity to visit the Gold Hill Wakamatsu Colony site last week with members of the Japanese Consulate’s office in San Francisco and acclaimed sushi chef Tomoharu Nakamura of Sanraku.

This image of these three Japanese men standing on the porch of an 1854 American farmhouse struck me forcefully. This must have been close to the image of the original colonists standing in the same spot in 1869 after a long day farming!

While the first Japanese colonists in the U.S. were only in Gold Hill for a few short years, their impact was widespread. The Placer County town of Penryn later became an all–Japanese community replete with two grocery stores and many other shops. Japanese laborers migrated to Colusa County in the early 1900’s to work in the adjacent rice fields. Japanese agriculturalists became known for their fruit and nursery stock across the state.

In 1869, nineteen colonists traveled to the Gold Hill site in wagons from Sacramento – the last leg on a journey that started by steamship to San Francisco and paddle wheel up the Sacramento River. Their initial impact on history was small and limited to the small El Dorado County towns of Gold Hill and Placerville. Certainly their countrymen in Japan knew of the settlement. That was about the extent, however.

A century and a half later we can see how this small first step on U.S. soil impacted not only a state and one culture, but also an entire nation and all its people. Certainly it impacted one person who grew up less than ten miles from the Colony site and later went to work in the California rice industry. For that I am grateful.