George Shima

Farmer, entrepreneur, business executive

• Pronunciation: SHEE-mah
• Born: ca. 1864
• Birthplace: Kurume, Fukuoka, Japan
• Died: March 27, 1926
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

An industrious, enterprising farmer, George Shima reclaimed and rehabilitated thousands of acres of unwanted swampland near rivers in San Joaquin County, California. He grew wealthy while cornering the market on tubers, and became known as the “Potato King” during the early twentieth century.

Birth name: Seikichi Ushijima

Areas of achievement: Agriculture, business

Early Life

George Shima was born as Seikichi Ushijima near the port of Fukuoka on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island. He descended from a long line of prosperous, land-owning farmers. Shima was privately tutored during his early years and developed a lifelong love of Chinese classical poetry. He entered private middle school as a teenager, where he was called Kinji to avoid confusion with a similarly named student. In 1885, Shima moved to Tokyo to continue studying Chinese classics at Hitotsubashi University. However, he flunked the entrance examinations because he could not read or write English. After taking private lessons for a time, he booked passage to the United States to immerse himself in English.

Shima arrived in San Francisco, California, in 1889. Unlike many Japanese immigrants, he did not come penniless to America, but sought work nonetheless in order to save money and improve his prospects. He landed a position as a “schoolboy,” a derogatory term for someone working as a servant while attending classes, and became fluent in English. Shima soon traded domestic servitude for farm work, moving from San Francisco to Stockton to become a field laborer. A fast, efficient worker, he won numerous friendly potato-picking contests with American farmhands. Eventually, Shima became a labor contractor, supplying for a fee other Japanese migrant workers to area farms in the fertile San Joaquin Valley.

Life’s Work

As he provided workers to California farmlands, Shima noticed that certain low-lying areas east of San Francisco along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers were not being used because of regular flooding. He thought that he could make use of the land. Shima and a group of Japanese friends began buying up cheap property near the rivers and for a decade worked to improve the land. At first, Shima grew beans while he experimented with other crops. Rice proved to be a disaster; mites, mildew, improper insecticides, and other factors made it impractical to undertake the crossbreeding necessary to create specimens appropriate for local conditions. Finally, he settled on potatoes.

Shima returned to Japan in 1900 and married Shimeko Shimomura, converting to Christianity at her request. They began a family after returning together to the United States: daughter Taye was born in 1902, son Togo in 1904, son Takuji in 1906, and final son Rindge in 1908.

With the assistance of both Japanese and non-Japanese financial backers, Shima continued buying and reclaiming land. By the first decade of the twentieth century, he had transformed thousands of acres into productive farmland. Though he grew such cash crops as fruits, berries, and onions, most of the land was planted with potatoes. Within twenty years of starting his American farming enterprise, Shima grew the great majority of potatoes produced in California.

By 1909, Shima was a wealthy man. He bought a large home in one of Berkeley’s most exclusive neighborhoods and an adjacent empty lot that he landscaped with rare, imported shrubs and plants. The purchase, coming in the midst of a rising tide of anti-Asian sentiment, spawned racist headlines in local newspapers. To counter the prejudice, Shima and other successful businesses formed the Japanese Association of America to promote a positive image and defend the rights of the issei (first-generation Japanese Americans) and nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans). Shima was elected the first president of the association, remaining in office from 1909 to 1926. His position made him a prime target for those opposed to the Japanese.

Despite the association’s efforts, California’s xenophobia continued and grew. In 1911, twenty-seven new anti-Japanese bills were introduced into the state legislature. In 1913, the Alien Land Law was passed. This affected Shima and other farmers by placing a three-year limit on agricultural land leases to issei. Like other issei, Shima made leases and purchases in the names of his children, Americans by birth. This loophole was closed in 1920 through a new law instigated by the Native Sons, American Legion, labor unions, competing farmers, and others. That new law prohibited issei from buying or leasing land through any means. In 1922 a US Supreme Court ruling prohibited Japanese from becoming naturalized citizens. The 1924 National Origins Act halted Japanese immigration for almost thirty years.

By the mid-1920s, the “Potato King” had been dethroned by increased competition from other potato-growing regions, notably southern California, Idaho, and Oregon. George Shima died of a stroke in 1926 while on a business trip to Los Angeles, leaving an estate valued at more than $15 million. By the mid-1930s, Shima’s widow had moved the family to New York, thus avoiding the ignominy of internment that West Coast Japanese were subjected to during World War II.

Significance

The first issei to become a millionaire in California, George Shima prospered through hard work and determination despite an atmosphere of hatred, suspicion, and jealousy toward successful Asians that dominated in the state. Shima carved a thriving farm out of wilderness and created a profitable market for potatoes that he sustained for twenty-five years. As longtime president of the Japanese Association of America, he advocated eloquently, though fruitlessly, for the assimilation of issei and nisei into American society. Shima shrugged off insults while quietly performing charitable acts; he donated fresh produce to victims of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, supported the YMCA, and beautified the neighborhood where he lived. It is a measure of the esteem in which he was held in the non-Asian community that pallbearers at his funeral included Stanford University President David Starr Jordan and San Francisco Mayor James Rolph. On the day of his death, Japanese Emperor Hirohito bestowed on Shima the Order of the Rising Sun, an award given for outstanding civil or military merit. Posthumous honors include the naming of a center at San Joaquin Delta College after Shima and a monument to his memory in his hometown in Japan.

Bibliography

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Print. Encompasses more than two hundred years of United States history, emphasizing the reactions of established Americans to successive waves of newcomers from Europe, China, Japan, and elsewhere.

---. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Print. A new edition of a well-researched 1960s examination of the racist attitudes and xenophobic political climate that prevailed in California during Shima’s heyday between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Street, Richard Steven. Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2004. Print. An overview using manuscripts, letters, and other documents to detail nearly 150 years of California’s agricultural industry through the eyes of the people who worked the land.

Yoshimura, Toshio. George Shima, Potato King and Lover of Chinese Classics. Fukushima, Japan: Taiseido Insatsu Shuppanbu, 1981. Print. A brief biography of Shima in English, incorporating his years in both Japan and the United States.