Yamato Colony: Japan's Farming Outpost in Boca Raton

On Christmas Day nineteen oh three, a young Japanese entrepreneur named Jo Sakai stood on scrubland north of what would become Boca Raton and saw a farming future. He negotiated with Henry Flagler's Model Land Company, sailed back to Japan, and returned the following year with colonists. By nineteen oh five a settlement called Yamato, the ancient name for Japan, was growing pineapples and winter vegetables on the Florida coastal ridge.

At its peak about seventy-five Japanese men and their families worked the land here. Pineapple blight and market shifts slowly drained the colony, and when World War Two came, the last Japanese residents were uprooted and dispersed. One man, George Morikami, stayed nearby and farmed until the nineteen seventies.

He donated his land to Palm Beach County, and it became the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, keeping the colony's memory alive a mile from where Sakai first planted it.