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Today, third-generation Idahoan Don Morishita makes sushi with his children, Westly and Hannah, and they proudly take it to their Twin Falls school.

Forty years ago on his family’s farm northwest of Idaho Falls, just the thought of taking Japanese food to school “would make my stomach churn from the anxiety,” says the University of Idaho extension weed specialist. “What if somebody saw me? What would the other kids say?”

Although the Morishitas had farmed in the Idaho Falls area since 1916, Don always felt more than a shade different. “That’s one of the lifelong lessons I remember hearing from my parents: You should be proud of your heritage, but also remember that you’re going to stand out in the crowd—especially if you do something bad. I think all of us boys felt that it was really unfair that we had to be careful in this way, but as I got older, I understood it more and more.”

Don’s grandfather, Tsurukichi Morishita, first landed on U.S. shores in 1902. After working on section crews for the Great Northern and Union Pacific railroads, he operated a bowling alley and pool hall in Idaho Falls. But once his family back home sent him a bride, Tsurukichi leased farmland and resumed his ancestral occupation. “He didn’t think a pool hall would be a good environment for his children,” says the oldest of those children, Sud (Don’s father).

Growing up on that small, “neat-and-clean,” furrow-irrigated farm, Sud learned to maintain the land’s fertility and to keep it productive through careful crop rotation, meticulous weeding, and other practices that meet today’s definition of “sustainability.” But because Tsurukichi and his wife, Tsune, were not U.S. citizens, the Alien Land Law prohibited them from owning the fields they farmed.

“That’s one of the lifelong lessons I remember hearing from my parents: You should be proud of your heritage.”

Sud—20 years old and native-born—became the farm’s owner in 1941. Two years later, he met Ruth Imaizumi at a Japanese-American Citizens’ League meeting in Idaho Falls. Ruth, whose parents had farmed in southern California, had accompanied her brother to the Utah-Idaho Sugar Co.’s beet fields. Working beets, she believed, was at least an improvement over staying behind in the foul-smelling stables of the Santa Anita racetrack, where her family was first interned during World War II.

But the Mud Lake farm on which she thinned and topped beets “seemed like a forsaken country,” and Ruth soon found alternative work as domestic help in Idaho Falls. After marrying Sud (she laughingly says that she became his “hired man”), she drove tractor and did whatever she could to help on the farm.

By the time Don began his graduate program in weed science at the University of Idaho in 1979, Sud and Ruth had sold the farm and Sud had been appointed Bonneville County weed control supervisor. Sud recalls: “A lot of people said, ‘Well, we ought to have a good weed-control system now because the Japanese are always good at controlling weeds.’ I thought, ‘Oh, I better live up to that expectation.’”

Most people still expect a different answer when they ask Don Morishita where he is from. “Anymore, it’s become an even greater source of pride to say that I’m a native Idahoan—because there are so few of us.”
 

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