Friends of Mukai (Out of Many, One display)
Wooden Strawberry Basket or Flat
The Mukai family built Vashon’s most successful strawberry farm, operating a cold storage and packing plant that shipped berries nationwide prior to World War II. Local Japanese American farmers sent their harvests to the Mukai facility. This basket represents the deep connection between community farming and the Mukai family’s innovative business. Their story lives on at Mukai Farm & Garden today.
How it represents the community’s American experience:
This basket reflects a distinctly American story of innovation, cooperation, and resilience rooted in local agriculture. Japanese and Japanese American farmers on Vashon Island built a thriving berry economy despite facing legal and social barriers, pooling their harvests through the Mukai family’s cold-process packing operation to reach national markets. The basket symbolizes not just the strawberry picking experience, but a community-based food system shaped by entrepreneurship, mutual support, and connection to land. It also carries the weight of wartime disruption, when that thriving network was dismantled during World War II when everyone of Japanese descent was forced to leave Vashon on May 16, 1942. Today, at Mukai Farm & Garden, this history continues to inform our work to rebuild a local food hub and honor the contributions of immigrant farmers to the American agricultural landscape.
On display at the Mukai Farm & Garden during the Haiku Festival, April 26 – May 31, 2026.
