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TI: Well, yeah, and before you move on, I just want to capture this. So this is like, you said around 1920, you said it was the height of this. And so your grandfather went back to Japan to marry your mother and bring her back.

LI: My grandmother, yes.

TI: Grandmother, I'm sorry, your grandmother. She was about eighteen years younger. And from her perspective, she probably had other choices or other options, but it sounds like your grandfather was doing well enough that it was, she agreed to doing this.

LI: Oh, yeah.

TI: That she could study piano, voice, go to this country. Was her father, your great grandfather, still in Yakima at this time?

LI: At the time they came back, yes.

TI: Okay, so he was there, too. Because this is kind of -- and we're going to get into this -- right before, in the state of Washington, things like the alien land laws...

LI: Yeah, before they changed it.

TI: Changed things. But the other thing I want to just mention, from what I've read, and you recommended a book called The Burning Horse, there was still a lot of anti-Japanese racism in this area during this time period. In some ways, when I read the book, it was sort of a hotbed for a lot of that. So it wasn't all peaches and cream even though they were doing quite well.

LI: Well, and I think in those early 1900s, there weren't a lot of other people in the area besides the Japanese and a few Caucasian growers and the tribal people. But I think the people who came later resented the success of the Japanese and they wanted access to the ground that the Japanese were farming. Because they really were the pioneers in this area, and I think that some of the other immigrants were the ones who really kind of tried to figure out, well, how do we get those lands?

TI: And that kind of led, not only in the state of Washington, but up and down the West Coast and then even further to other western states, the alien land laws which prevented Japanese from owning and leasing land.

LI: Yeah. I think the alien land law initially said that they could not own land, they could not become citizens. But then I think in the state of Washington, I think it started in California, then moved up to Oregon and to Washington, they changed it. And they said, okay, now, even though they couldn't initially own land, they rented it and they broke it out of sagebrush. But now they modified that alien land law to say, "If you're Japanese, you can't lease land either." And so that was when they lost the ground that they broke out of sagebrush and became sharecroppers.

TI: Before you move on there, there's one thing I want to pick up we were talking earlier, that I wanted to capture. When your grandfather and -- I'm sorry -- yeah, your grandfather and his brother were breaking the land of sagebrush, they were leasing these plots of land to do this. Generally, do you know how long those leases were when they would lease the land?

LI: Boy, that's kind of surprising. I'm not really sure, but I would guess probably five-year time period.

TI: Because you said something in terms of breaking the land, about how Japanese cleared, I think it's like over twenty thousand acres.

LI: Correct.

TI: So I'm wondering, like I know in Western Washington, in Bellevue, the Japanese farmers were doing these five acre, five year leases, but after they cleared the land of stumps, they needed to move on to the next five year and do it again? So they literally cleared all the land in that Bellevue area. But it wasn't like they were keeping it, they had to keep moving on. And I was wondering if that was a similar thing in Yakima.

LI: You know, I don't think so. I think that initially the Japanese were allowed to renew those leases. And besides my grandfather, on the site that we were at early this morning, there were a good handful of very large Japanese farmers during that 1920 era. And I think those are the ones that were probably targeted the most. Because that was some of the most productive ground out there. And I think there's a lot of folks who wanted to take that over.

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