Just off of Highway 99 in Livingston lies a fascinating piece of California history. The story of Yamato Colony, today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots.
Today the Merced County town of Livingston is best know for being the home of Foster Farms. But not far from the company’s corporate offices, sits Yamato Colony. Located on 3,000 acres east of Highway 99, it was like many other agricultural land development schemes from the early 20th century.
The organizers aimed to sell small, 40 acre farms to aspiring agrarians. But unlike the others, Yamato Colony was the product of Japanese Americans, and was something on a utopian experiment.
The colony was founded by Kyutaro Abiko. He came to the U.S. in 1885, attended the University of California, and became a leader in San Francisco’s Japanese American community, starting a popular newspaper. In 1904, he organized a venture that purchased land near Livingston and began marketing the colony to Japanese immigrants already in the United States, offering them the opportunity to own their own farms.
The colony was steeped in the ideas of the Yamato-damashii or “Japanese spirit.” The growers eventually formed a co-op to market their crops, the Livingston Farmers Association. They grew grapes, peaches and almonds.
By 1940, 69 Japanese-American families called the colony home. But like others across California, they faced racial prejudice, and in 1942, the forced removal from their land and imprisonment in camps during World War II. Most returned to their farms after the war, though only a handful of families still farm the land today.
