From Fukuoka to Southern California:
four generations of growing

Every part of Akari Farms, the free tool, the fish, the greens, the small community forming around it, is a continuation of something a man named Jukichi Matsuura began more than a hundred years ago.

A farmer who crossed an ocean松浦 十吉 · 福岡県

Jukichi Matsuura was born in 1887 in a farming village in Fukuoka Prefecture, on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. In 1905, as a young man, he left for the United States. He worked the land almost immediately: two years in an orchard near San Jose, then eight more at an orchard in Los Altos, learning California soil the way he had once learned his family's.

In 1914 he married, in San Francisco, a young woman who had made the same ocean crossing. Two years later he signed his own land lease. By the 1920s he was managing a ranch in the Central Valley. He was, by every record that survives, a farmer's farmer, someone whose life was measured in seasons and soil.

He didn't just grow. He gathered.西南庭園業組合

This is the part of his story that matters most to me, and the part I see most clearly in what I am trying to do now.

In June 1941, his own name appears in a call-notice as one of the founding members summoned to organize the Southwest Garden Industry Association, an organization of Japanese immigrant growers and gardeners in the Los Angeles area. In a country that did not always welcome them, and often actively did not, these were people building something together: sharing knowledge, pooling resources, and helping the ones who arrived after them find their footing in unfamiliar ground.

He understood that growing food was never only about your own plot. It was about the people around you, and the people who would come next. He grew, and he made it easier for others to grow.

The tools changed. He had soil and his hands and a horse-drawn plow. I have water, a greenhouse, and a laptop. But underneath, it is the same act: making living things grow, and bringing other people along with you. The Japanese have a word for this kind of continuation, keizoku. It does not mean copying what came before. It means carrying it forward.

The part I will not leave out

Why "Akari"明かり · light, glow

Akari means light. A small, warm, human kind of light, the glow of a lantern, the light left on for someone coming home. I chose it because that is what I hope this work can be: a little light passed from one pair of hands to the next.

My children are the fifth generation, the Gosei. Someday the growing may pass to them, or it may not. That is theirs to decide. But the light does not depend on any one of us holding it forever. It only depends on it being passed.