Title: "Editorial: Northwest Showing California How To Get Along Without Jap Farmers," Seattle Times, 6/7/1943, (ddr-densho-56-927)
Densho ID: ddr-densho-56-927

Northwest Showing California How To Get Along Without Jap Farmers

When California laments that it will be unable this year to supply the nation with delicacies produced on that state's fertile lands, because of the manpower shortage, the impression goes abroad that the root of the evil is the Jap-power shortage.

Such seems not to be the case in Washington. One aggregation of Japanese farms in the Seattle vicinity which produced 763 tons of food two years ago under Jap management will produce 2,000 tons this year under American cultivation.

These same farms will supply a goodly section of the United States with tomatoes. They are producing 10,000,000 tomato plants and a million cabbage plants for the victory gardens from the West Coast to the Mississippi Valley.

Thousands of these little seedling tomato plants have been given to units of the armed forces stationed hereabouts, for their own victory gardens. The notion that soil belonging to Japs is thus helping to produce food for victory must be regarded as poetic justice.� And, if another term may be borrowed from literature for so bucolic a discussion, the notion that the Japs have any monopoly on the green thumb appears to be just a pathetic fallacy.