Hood River: We Don't Want You Back

The Hood River Valley in the nineteen thirties was known for its apples and pears, some of the finest fruit orchards in the Pacific Northwest. Much of that land had been cleared and cultivated by Japanese American families, Issei immigrants who had arrived in the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds and built farms on land nobody else had wanted. By the time their children, the Nisei, came of age, the Hood River Japanese American community had been here for two and three generations.

Executive Order Nine Thousand Sixty-Six removed them in nineteen forty-two. Families were given days, sometimes hours, to close their homes. They were sent to the Tule Lake and Minidoka internment centers. Before they left, some arranged for neighbors to watch their land. Some signed over leases. Some simply locked their doors and hoped.

While they were gone, the Hood River County American Legion post removed the names of Japanese American service members from the county honor roll of those serving in the war. It was the only American Legion post in the entire United States to do so. The action drew national condemnation. Newspapers across the country named Hood River specifically. The War Department refused to send a military recruiting officer to the county in response.

Some of the men whose names were removed were fighting in Europe at the time, as members of the Four Hundred Forty-Second Regimental Combat Team, the segregated Japanese American unit that became the most decorated unit of its size in United States military history. They were fighting for a country that was simultaneously telling their families not to come home.

Some families returned after the war to find their orchards sold, their leases transferred, their property gone. The community did not disappear entirely. Some farms were recovered. Some were not. The Hood River County Historical Museum holds photographs, documents, and oral histories from the families who came back to a community that had made its position plain.

The apples and pears still grow in Hood River. The orchards that Japanese American hands cleared are still productive. The trees outlasted the welcome.