by Peter Twitchell
When I was a boy about 13 my mom made a profound statement that I never forgot. As a matter of fact, she brought this up twice to me into my teens and I was still in high school. She told me a story of around 1942 when the Army and Air Force occupied the old airport across the river from Bethel – about 3 miles upstream from Bethel on the right hand side.
My mother had a Homestead from the BLM of 160 acres of prime soil which she and her Japanese husband had cleared and planted three huge gardens of vegetables. I remember cabbages, lettuce, radishes, green beans, potatoes, carrots, turnips.
She and a Japanese man in his late 60s named Toni (I believe that was his American name) had the homestead. He was an immigrant from Wakayama, Japan, with last name SUMI.
They did what was required of getting a Homestead cleared and made ditches and acquired a white horse from the Matanuska Valley to pull stumps to help clear the land for those gardens.
The Japanese man came in to Bethel in 1936 and asked my mother’s mother Hannah Pitka to make a parka for him which went down below his knees, a pair of mukluks which went up above his knees, a warm beaver hat, and a pair of fox gloves which went up past his wrists – to purchase. He was equipped with warm clothing for our cold winters back in the 30s.
The Japanese man ran the movie hall in Bethel where he accepted dried fish for admission to see a black-and-white movie. He was very business-minded but the people always told Mom that that Japanese man helped many people.
He started a mink farm and had over 200 cages. He built a huge warehouse and filled it with sawdust where he put frozen ice to keep it from melting in the hot summers. This man brought in orphans and young men who otherwise didn’t have jobs and put them to work, chopping up fresh vegetables and mixing them with raw salmon to feed the mink on Mom’s and his homestead.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 they took this Japanese man and arrested him because he had a windmill and dozens of dry cell batteries to light up their two-story home, which now sits on Watson’s Corner in Bethel. The military came to Bethel and arrested him and accused him of being a spy, ignoring the pleas of the community of Bethel. They put him into a Japanese internment camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico where he died.
Clyde Hall, a Bethel resident, told me once in person in the early 70s that this Japanese man who loved the people of Southwest Alaska “died of a broken heart.” Clyde told me he was no spy.
I know if this Japanese man ever had a broken heart from the false accusations and imprisonment 5000 miles away in a desert with over 100,000 Japanese men, women, and children, my Mother too had a broken heart.
The 160 acre BLM Homestead was stripped away from my Mother by the Army and the Air Force military of the Civil Aeronautics Administration to build their airfield across the river from Bethel – the land that my Mother and her husband had cleared and worked!
When the native land claims came which gave the natives of Alaska free land, my mother never saw her 160 Fur Farm Homestead ever again!
