The last Essay, No. 13, featured the Butts family, who were my father, Marlin Eller’s largest customer at the time, and who owned some 3,500 acres in what is now Boca Raton. However, there was another large farming group already in the Boca area before Butts, who also did considerable business with my father. It was a group of Japanese farmers and their families who had been recruited by the Florida East Coast Railroad (FEC) to colonize the northern Boca Raton area and grow pineapples to be sent by railroad up north.

The FEC had made arrangements with a young Japanese man (named Jo Sakai) who had recently graduated from New York University and gave him an incentive to recruit Japanese farmers to the area. He was immediately successful as the Russo- Japanese war was going on at the time, and young Japanese men were anxious to avoid being drafted into their military by emigrating. The young farmers started to arrive by 1905 and they named their settlement Yamato, which roughly translates to “large peaceful country”. Yamato reached a population of about 40 people, and included the property now occupied by Florida Atlantic University plus somewhat north all the way to the ocean. It included a beautiful outcropping of rocks overhanging the Atlantic Ocean shoreline, which is still called “Jap Rock” by some old time locals.

Jo Sakai, Yamato colony founder and his wife Sada Sakai were wedded in an arranged marriage in 1907 in Japan after he had established the Boca Raton colony. She later shared with her daughter that she was very disappointed when she arrived to the colony and found it much smaller than her husband had described.

The Japanese immigrants grew pineapples and certain specialty crops and were good customers of my father. However, as WWII approached most of the immigrants left and returned to Japan. In May of 1942, those who were left were ordered by the United States government to vacate all their land in Boca Raton west of the FEC railroad so it could be turned into an airport and military facility. My dad recalled his main Japanese customer “George” Sukeji Morikami crying as he told my dad what had happened and simultaneously apologizing for what his former countrymen had done in attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

George cried all the way to the bank, however, as he still owned considerable property which eventually netted him a fortune. He continued to farm his remaining land for many years, and I remember him coming in to our factory in Deerfield dressed in overalls and a straw hat to buy things for his farm and visit with my father into the 1960’s. Although apparently quite wealthy from farming and the landholdings he had sold, he continued to live hermit-like in a mobile trailer on his property. He was eventually granted American citizenship in 1967 at the age of 82, and showed his appreciation by donating the last of the property on which he lived for the South Palm Beach County Park, now appropriately named Morikami Park.

David Eller