Editor's note: Summer is festival time for Japanese Americans, who honor the memories of their ancestors with prayers and folk dances, with taiko drumming and rice dishes. I republish this blog post each year in honor of my late parents, grandparents and family spirits. It's a reminder of what is most important in life, beyond the next quarterly earnings release.
THE QUEST TO better one's life is universal. Leaving rice farms and their loved ones in Meiji era Japan, my grandparents boarded ships to the United States before the first Ford Model Ts rolled off the assembly line. Like the legendary industrialist Henry Ford (Photo, left: Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan), Japanese American entrepreneurs had business in their blood, and blood in their business. My grandfathers and grandmothers raised a flock of kids, grew fruits and vegetables on leased land, ran a store near “Little Tokyo” in downtown Los Angeles. Despite legal barriers and brutal discrimination, Japanese Americans rose in the agricultural and florist industries, and launched restaurants, metal shops, tofu factories, commercial fishing firms and other small businesses.
THEIR SAGA REFLECTS the spirit and work ethos of all U.S. immigrants and their kin, from 19th-century Irish laborers to 21st-century India-born entrepreneurs. In our modern U.S. economy, immigrant-owned startups churned out $52 billion in sales in 2005, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa, Ben Rissing and Gary Gereffi at Duke University and AnnaLee Saxenian at the University of California at Berkeley. For old-schoolers who like digging through voluminous yet enriching history, my late uncle Masakazu Iwata, a UCLA scholar and Biola University dean, wrote about Japanese American farmers in Planted in Good Soil: A History of Issei in United States Agriculture (Peter Lang Publishing, 1992).
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