Long before the glass towers rose downtown, before Microsoft money and Chinese venture capital reshaped the eastside, the Japanese in Bellevue grew strawberries. They cleared the stumps, drained the wetlands, and turned a muddy logging hinterland into some of the finest berry land on Puget Sound. Then, in the spring of 1942, the government put them on a train and took it all away.
The Place
Bellevue sits directly across Lake Washington from Seattle, the largest city on what locals simply call the eastside. For decades it was farmland and orchard, a quiet rural cousin to the metropolis over the water. The 1963 opening of the Evergreen Point floating bridge changed everything, and the arrival of Microsoft in nearby Redmond did the rest.
Today Bellevue is one of the most affluent and most Asian cities in America. By the 2020 census, more than 42 per cent of its residents identified as Asian, a higher share than Seattle itself. It is a city of tech salaries, international schools, and corporate relocations, with a downtown skyline that did not exist a generation ago.
How It Became Japanese
The story of the Japanese in Bellevue is older than almost any other thread in the city’s history, and for a long time it was the most important one.
The first arrivals, 1898
Two Japanese men reached Bellevue in 1898: Jusaburo Fujii and Kiichi Setsuda. Fujii worked the local sawmills and cooked for an Alaskan cannery owner before becoming a field boss in the strawberry fields he would help make famous. Setsuda took work as a houseboy and grew potatoes. They were the leading edge of an Issei migration, the first generation born in Japan, that would soon define the valley.
The land they came to was not yet farmland. It was cut-over timber country, stumps and brush left behind by the logging crews, the soil waterlogged and difficult. White settlers had largely passed it over. The Japanese took it precisely because it was cheap and unwanted, and because back-breaking work was something they were prepared to do.
Clearing the stumps, planting the berries
Through the 1900s and 1910s, Japanese families cleared the brush by hand, dynamited stumps, and dug drainage ditches through the wet bottomland. What emerged was extraordinarily productive ground. Strawberries thrived in it, and alongside them came pole beans, peas, tomatoes, cabbages, cucumbers, celery, and lettuce.
Land ownership followed, despite mounting legal hostility. Between 1905 and 1938, at least 32 Issei owned land in the Bellevue area. Among them were Takeo “Tom” Matsuoka, Asaichi Tsushima, Itaro Ito, and Takayushi Suguro. The Takeshita family bought 13 acres in 1919 near the eastern railroad boundary of Lake Bellevue, planting roots that would outlast almost everything.
The Strawberry Festival, 1925
By the mid-1920s, Japanese growers worked the great majority of Bellevue’s strawberry acreage, hundreds of acres in all. The berries were so abundant and so good that in June 1925 the town staged its first Bellevue Strawberry Festival, complete with a crowned queen. It became a three-day institution, the social high point of the eastside calendar.
The festival was, in truth, a Japanese achievement dressed in civic clothing. The crop that drew the crowds was grown by Issei and Nisei hands. By the late 1930s some 60 families farmed more than 400 acres, and the community numbered over 300 people in a town of fewer than 2,000.
1942: the train from Kirkland
Everything ended in 1942. President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on 19 February, authorising the forced removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. On 20 May 1942, Bellevue’s roughly 300 Nikkei boarded a train at nearby Kirkland.
They were taken first to the Pinedale Assembly Center near Fresno, California, and most ended up at Tule Lake in northern California, the largest of the inland camps. Tom Matsuoka was sent initially to Montana before being moved to Tule Lake. The 1942 Strawberry Festival was cancelled. The berry fields, tended for four decades, went untended.
When the camps released their residents in 1945, returning families often found homes vandalised and belongings gone. Land that had been mortgaged or held in trust was difficult or impossible to reclaim, and the wartime years had handed the eastside’s development to other hands. The Japanese farming community that had built Bellevue’s agricultural reputation never recovered its former scale.
From farm town to tech city
The Bellevue that grew after the war was a different place, suburban and then corporate, its farmland paved into the downtown core. But the Japanese thread did not disappear. The Bellevue Historical Society revived the Strawberry Festival in 1987, and the town began, slowly, to reckon with the families it had lost.
A new Japanese presence arrived too, this time corporate rather than agricultural, as Japanese firms and expatriate families followed the region’s technology boom across the Pacific.
The Landmarks
Yao Garden, Bellevue Botanical Garden, 12001 Main Street. Bellevue established a sister-city relationship with Yao, in Japan’s Osaka prefecture, in 1989, and the Yao Garden opened within the botanical garden in 1990. It is a classic strolling garden with a pond, stone bridges, a cascading waterfall, stone lanterns, and Japanese maples and pines, a quiet civic acknowledgement of the city’s ties to Japan.
The Pokemon Company International, 10400 NE 4th Street. The international arm of the Japanese entertainment giant has its headquarters in a downtown Bellevue tower. Formed in 2009 and overseeing the Pokemon brand outside Asia, it is the most visible of the Japanese corporate names that have made Bellevue home, and a magnet for Japanese professional families.
Uwajimaya, 699 120th Avenue NE. The Seattle-founded Japanese American grocery institution opened its Bellevue store in the Crossroads area, stocking everything from fresh fish and Japanese produce to housewares and a food court. It is the practical heart of the eastside’s pan-Asian life and a daily anchor for Japanese households.
The Bellevue Strawberry Festival. Born in 1925 from the Japanese berry harvest, cancelled in 1942, and revived by the Bellevue Historical Society in 1987, the festival is now one of the largest free festivals in the Pacific Northwest. It remains the clearest living link between modern Bellevue and the farmers who built it.
Crossroads, around NE 8th Street and 156th Avenue NE. This eastern Bellevue district, anchored by Crossroads Bellevue mall, is the city’s most internationally diverse quarter. Its international food court and weekly community gatherings reflect the same Asian Bellevue that draws Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian families to the eastside.
Mercer Slough and the old farm bottomlands. Much of the wetland the Japanese once drained and farmed survives as the Mercer Slough Nature Park, the largest wetland on Lake Washington. Walking its boardwalks today, it is hard to picture the strawberry rows, but this is the ground the Issei cleared by hand.
The Bellevue Japanese American Citizens League. The local chapter of the national JACL keeps the memory of the pre-war community alive, working with historians and the Eastside Heritage Center to ensure the names of the farming families are not forgotten.
Where They Came From
The original Issei of Bellevue came from Japan in the great Meiji-era emigration that sent young men across the Pacific in search of work, many of them from rural prefectures with strong farming traditions. They arrived through Seattle, drew on chain-migration networks of kin and home-village connections, and concentrated in the eastside valley where land was cheap and labour was needed.
The newer Japanese arrivals come for entirely different reasons. They are corporate transferees, engineers, and managers posted to the region’s technology and entertainment firms, alongside families drawn by Bellevue’s schools and safety. They come from Tokyo, Osaka, and Japan’s other urban centres, and many treat Bellevue as a comfortable, well-served base within the wider Seattle metropolitan area.
Bellevue Today
By the 2020 census, roughly 3,500 residents of Bellevue identified as Japanese, a modest share within a city where more than four in ten residents are Asian. The Japanese are now outnumbered locally by Chinese and Indian residents, whose communities have grown explosively with the tech economy.
Yet the Japanese imprint on Bellevue runs deeper than the numbers suggest. It is in the festival that still bears the name of their crop, in the Yao Garden and the sister-city tie, in the corporate names downtown, and in the slough that was once their fields. The community that exists today is partly old and partly new: a thin line of descendants from the farming families, and a larger, more transient population of corporate Japan.
The hardest part of the story is the part Bellevue spent decades not telling. The destruction of the pre-war Japanese community was not an accident of war but the product of deliberate exclusion, and the families who returned in 1945 rebuilt little of what they had lost. That history is why the strawberry, of all things, remains the truest symbol of Japanese Bellevue.
The Japanese experience here echoes other affluent enclaves where the community has put down roots, from the Japanese in Irvine, California to the Japanese in Palos Verdes Estates, and the East Coast corridors of the Japanese in Fort Lee and Japanese in Edgewater, New Jersey. On the eastside itself, the Japanese share their streets with the Koreans in Bellevue and the Persians in Bellevue, a layered Asian and immigrant city that began, improbably, with strawberries.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Japanese first settle in Bellevue?
The first Japanese settlers, Jusaburo Fujii and Kiichi Setsuda, arrived in 1898. Over the following decades, Japanese families cleared the cut-over timber land and built it into Bellevue’s most productive farmland, growing strawberries and other crops well before the city’s modern era.
Why were the Japanese in Bellevue so associated with strawberries?
Japanese farmers worked the great majority of Bellevue’s strawberry acreage from the early 1900s onward. By the late 1930s about 60 families farmed more than 400 acres, and the crop was so celebrated that the town launched its Strawberry Festival in 1925. The strawberry remains the defining symbol of the Japanese in Bellevue.
What happened to Bellevue’s Japanese community during World War II?
Following Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, Bellevue’s roughly 300 Nikkei residents were forced from their homes. On 20 May 1942 they boarded a train at Kirkland and were sent to the Pinedale Assembly Center and then mostly to Tule Lake in California. The 1942 Strawberry Festival was cancelled.
Did the Japanese families return to Bellevue after the war?
Some did, beginning in 1945, but many returned to find their homes vandalised and their land difficult to reclaim. The pre-war farming community never recovered its former scale, and Bellevue’s post-war boom was driven largely by other hands.
How large is the Japanese community in Bellevue today?
By the 2020 census, roughly 3,500 Bellevue residents identified as Japanese. They are now a smaller share of the city’s large Asian population, which is led by Chinese and Indian residents, but Japanese cultural and corporate ties to the city remain strong.
What Japanese landmarks can you visit in Bellevue?
The Yao Garden in the Bellevue Botanical Garden, opened in 1990 to honour the sister-city tie with Yao, Japan, is the most distinctive. Uwajimaya in Crossroads serves as the community’s grocery anchor, the Pokemon Company International headquarters sits downtown, and the revived Strawberry Festival each summer recalls the community’s farming origins.
If your family’s story passed through Bellevue, or any of the places Japanese Americans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the berry fields the Issei cleared by hand to the skyline that rose over them, to wherever you are now.