San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Immigrants’ hard work built Texas’ rice industry
When George Hirasaki attended high school in the 1960s, he told his father, Tokuzo Hirasaki, that he wanted to attend Texas A&M to study agriculture.
George remembers Tokuzo’s face becoming stern and telling him that everything he needed to learn about agriculture was on their family rice operation, the Kishi Colony between Beaumont and Orange, that George’s grandfather, Kichimatsu Kishi, purchased in 1906.
Kishi wasn’t the first Japanese immigrant to settle in Texas in the early 1900s — the first prominent rice colony being the Saibara colony in Webster. But his family — along with the Saibaras, the Kobayashis and other Japanese families who settled on the Gulf Coast — share origin stories that represent what it means to not only be Japanese but also a true Texan.
“The first thing you’ll notice about Japanese Texans is the way they talk,” George said. “You will see a Japanese Texan and you would think that they will speak with an Asian accent, but no, they talk with a Southern drawl, just like I do.”
Seito Saibara and his family are some of the most famous Japanese families to settle in Texas. They even have a state historical
marker near the original location of the farms in Webster. Arriving in Webster in 1904, the Saibara family planted 1,000 acres of an improved rice strain and are credited with building Texas’ multimillion-dollar rice industry.
When some of the first Japanese immigrants were invited to Texas in the early 1900s by the Houston Chamber of Commerce, they hoped to empower the economy with revolutionary ricegrowing techniques.
According to a 2019 essay in Rice University’s Transnational Asia Journal by Scott Pett, business leaders encouraged the Japanese settlers to grow rice along the Gulf Coast, and the settlers
quickly learned to speak both English and Spanish.
The rice enterprise was intended to benefit the Japanese, who hoped to send food back to Japan, and to cultivate the economic and population boom created by Texas’ then-new oil industry.
Kishi accumulated 9,000 acres in Orange County and a number of Japanese settlers lived and worked on the farmland until 1924 when the United State prohibited immigration from Japan.
“Alas, a combination of factors ranging from the world depression on the rice market and white xenophobia ultimately doomed the project,” Rice’s Anne S. Chao wrote in an essay in the Houston
Chronicle in 2021.
Tokuzo Hirasaki was born in Japan and came to America around 1912 to study agriculture at the University of CaliforniaDavis. He wanted to be an engineer. According to George, his father worked his way through college by surveying land around California and eventually made his way to Texas to work on the Kishi Colony.
“During that time, professions like engineering, accounting and law were just not open to Japanese nationals,” Hirasaki said. That’s why in high school, his father told him to stay on the farm to learn agriculture instead of going to college, which only made Hirasaki want to go to college even more.
Hirasaki would go on to receive a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at Lamar University in 1963 and was awarded a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Rice University in 1967. He worked 26 years for Shell Development and Shell Oil Co. before becoming a research professor at Rice in 1993, where he continues to teach.
During the 1920 post-World War I depression, the rice market collapsed and anti-Japanese sentiment grew, partly because many Japanese migrants came to Texas from Mexico and found themselves in the midst of U.S. border anxiety.
Pett argues that Japanese Texas is “woefully under-studied in historiographies of the border and of U.S. immigration broadly,” which results in overlooking the role Texas played in the national campaign to exclude Japanese migrants from the U.S.
During this time, Kishi discovered oil on his land and organized the Orange Petroleum Co., sold the company and repaid his investors from Japan who had made it possible for him to start the colony, Hirasaki said.
“He continued to purchase more land in hopes of expanding the colony and maybe finding more oil,” Hirasaki said, “but there was no more oil. He had to mortgage the farm for the expansion and because of the Depression, he lost the farm.”
Where there were once active rice farms, now there are fields for grazing.
“The rice farmers don’t exist anymore,” Hirasaki said. “Once mechanization became available to the rest of the world, they could do it much more economically. So the land that used to be rice farms, most of it is laying fallow.”
Today, there are more than 53,000 Japanese Americans living in Texas, with most living in the Houston, Dallas and San Antonio areas.