Katherine E. Young

“There’s not a lazy bone in the body of

these people,” they said about the Japanese

and put it in the paper when several rode

bicycles all the way to West Palm Beach.

“The interests of the entire state are really

at heart with the colonists,” enthused a writer

in The Tropical Sun, finding prosperity

and progress everywhere in evidence.

Flagler laid the rails with Yamato in mind;

every train except the express stopped there.

The colonists wrote home for Japanese brides;

Japanese children squatted companionably

in the pineapple fields, churning ice cream

with the local kids, chucking stones at lizards,

scratching mosquito bites. Pineapples destined

for England filled up thirteen railcars; tomatoes

packed eight hundred crates. A schoolhouse sprouted

beside the vegetable fields. Old man Ferguson

sold his fruit stand to one Henry Kamiya,

who moved into the former express office

next door to the Lake Worth Produce Company.

The colonists adopted American dress:

small girls in lace petticoats posed for photos,

boys in knickers brandished child-sized swords.

But Cuban-grown pineapples sold for less:

tomato blight withered the crop on the vine.

Even the citrus trees died. One by one,

the colonists abandoned the ruined fields,

the panting heat and steaming afternoon rain,

the wood huts lacking proper Japanese baths,

the alligators bellowing all night.

Henry Kamiya bought a stained glass window

for the Methodist Church in Delray Beach:

it wasn’t enough to mitigate the sin

of failing at the American dream. Kamiya

returned to Japan after the war, but ordered

that his ashes be placed on his wife’s grave

in West Palm. By then, nothing was left of Yamato

except the name, which means “great harmony”

and many other things in Japanese:

there’s no truth to the rumor that it came

from the Japanese way of saying “tomato.”