Kanaye Nagasawa: The samurai who forever changed California

Smuggled out of Japan, he became the US’ first permanent Japanese resident and helped birth California’s wine industry.An hour’s drive north of San Francisco, rows of gnarled and twisted vines terrace up the slopes of gently rolling hills in Sonoma County, California – which, alongside its neighbour, Napa, has been one of the world’s premier wine-growing regions for more than a century.  Many of the region’s first commercial vines were planted in the mid-1850s by European settlers who experimented with varietals from Bordeaux and other popular wine regions in France and Germany, curious to see whether they would flourish in the sun-splashed, temperate climate and rocky soil. But California might never have earned such viticultural acclaim if it weren’t for the little-known story of a Japanese immigrant named Kanaye Nagasawa.  Born into a samurai family and smuggled out of Shogunate Japan, only to become a founding member of a utopian cult and eventually known as the “Wine King of California”, Nagasawa led a life that was stranger than fiction. At the peak of his influence at the turn of the 20th Century, Nagasawa was operating one of the largest wineries in California, producing more than 200,000 gallons of wine a year from the vineyards of the 2,000-acre Fountaingrove estate in Santa Rosa.Nagasawa’s Fountaingrove estate was once one of the largest wineries in California (Credit: Museum of Sonoma County)The “Wine King” helped famed American botanist Luther Burbank teach horticulture; consulted with international Japanese dignitaries; and hosted Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Muir and other notable figures at his lavish Sonoma estate.  Yet, Nagasawa had been all but forgotten when local vintners Walter and Marijke Byck purchased land adjacent to the original Fountaingrove estate to plant vineyards. As they began researching the history of the area, they discovered a complicated legacy of triumph, prejudice and loss.  “My mother wanted to bring back the heritage of our land, and when she learned about Nagasawa, she wanted to tell this amazing story about an important historical figure in Sonoma County that a lot of people are unfamiliar with,” said Rene Byck, Marijke’s son and the owner of Paradise Ridge winery.  I was standing with Rene in the small, family-run winery, looking at an exhibit the Bycks first unveiled in 1996 with the help of the Museum of Sonoma County and Nagasawa’s descendants, Kosuke Ijichi, Amy Mori and their children. Photographs of Nagasawa and his family in front of his vineyards, entertaining at his ornate Fountaingrove mansion and overseeing winery operations were displayed across the walls. There were also copies of the winery’s early labels; bottles of Fountaingrove Champagne, burgundy, riesling and pinot blanc; and a large metal can of the “Pure Wine Grape Juice” Nagasawa sold during Prohibition in the 1920s.Nagasawa’s grand-niece, Amy, and his grand-nephew, Kosuke, grew up at the Fountaingrove estate (Credit: Museum of Sonoma County)The centrepiece of the exhibit was a long, curved samurai sword that Nagasawa brought back from Japan when he returned to visit as an adult. “That sword was important to Nagasawa because when they left for America, they had to cut their hair and give up their swords,” said Mary Ijichi, Nagasawa’s great-grandniece. “But my father told me his uncle said, ‘Our education will be our sword’.” Now blackened and dented, the sword became a symbol of resilience after the 36,800-acre Tubbs wildfire swept through the area in 2017, causing $8.7bn in damage and destroying 5,682 structures – among them Paradise Ridge. “When we saw where the fire had gone, we knew that everything was lost,” said Mary’s sister, Karen Ijichi Perkins. Also gone was the last remaining structure from the original Fountaingrove estate: an eight-sided barn that Nagasawa built in 1899, which had become a local landmark affectionately dubbed the Round Barn.It certainly seemed like the end of the exhibit until a team of searchers sifted through the ruins, pulling the sword triumphantly from the ashes. That was inspiration enough for the Bycks and Nagasawa’s descendants to recreate the exhibit as fully as possible from copies of photos and artefacts. The sword was back on the walls almost as soon as Paradise Ridge reopened to the public in December 2019, with Nagasawa family members in attendance at the dedication. Nagasawa’s extraordinary story goes back to 1864, when 19 young samurai from the Satsuma peninsula of Kagoshima were smuggled out of fiercely isolationist Edo-era Japan on a secret mission to study science and technology in the West. The youngest of the group, 13-year-old Hikosuke Isonaga went to Scotland, changing his name to Kanaye Nagasawa to protect his family, since at the time it was illegal to travel outside Japan. There, he came into the orbit of a charismatic religious leader named Thomas Lake Harris, who was recruiting followers to his version of ecstatic transcendentalism called The Brotherhood of the New Life.Nagasawa’s Round Barn, the last remaining structure from the Fountaingrove estate, was destroyed by the 2017 wildfire (Credit: Kenishirotie/Getty Images)Harris brought Nagasawa and several of his fellow samurai to upstate New York, where he had founded a commune on the shores of Lake Erie. When Harris elected to move the community to a rural, 600-acre swath in western Sonoma County in 1875, the then-25-year-old Nagasawa came along.  “I think Harris was like a father to him,” said Perkins. “He had left Japan so young, and didn’t have any family in America, so Harris was all he had.” Naming the estate Fountaingrove after a year-round spring on the property, Harris set out to grow grapes, putting Nagasawa in charge of the operation. The winery soon prospered, but the “Eden of the West”, as the commune described itself, became ever more wild, making headlines in San Francisco for its bacchanalian parties that eventually led to Harris’ ignominious departure.  With Harris gone, Nagasawa took ownership of the estate and rose rapidly to become a respected and seminal figure in the state’s nascent wine industry. He also became the first Japanese national to live permanently in the US.Nagasawa travelled across the region, teaching other vintners how to grow grapes (Credit: Museum of Sonoma County)”He and Luther Burbank used to ride together to all the vineyards and ranches giving advice on growing grapes and other crops,” said Gaye LeBaron, co-author of the book The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove. “The townspeople here admired the heck out of him, as you can see from all the photographs of these huge dinners he would have on his front lawn.”  “He played a significant role in the growth of the California wine industry, being the first to market our wine to England and Europe, and he became an international figure as well,” LeBaron added, noting that Nagasawa was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese emperor in 1915.  All this came to an end during one of the darkest chapters of California’s history, when Fountaingrove was seized by the government as part of the state’s discriminatory Alien Land Laws, which were instituted in 1913, expanded in the 1920s and forbade Asian nationals from owning land or businesses. The childless Nagasawa, who never married, attempted to keep the estate in the family by willing it to his grand-nephew Kosuke Ijichi, born on the estate and thus an American citizen, and his Japanese-born father Tomoki Ijichi. But upon Nagasawa’s death in 1934, Kosuke was not of age and the trustee took control of the estate and quickly sold off the land. In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered the forced removal of Japanese American “enemy aliens”. The Nagasawa heirs, who were still fighting the estate’s seizure in court, were incarcerated in internment camps. Like the approximately 125,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned until after the end of World War Two, they lost any chance of reclaiming the property.The Nagasawa’s, and 125,000 other Japanese Americans, were imprisoned in internment camps during WW2 (Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)”He suffered twice at the hands of the government, so it would be understandable if he had some bitterness,” said Perkins of her and Mary’s father, Kosuke. “But I don’t think he wanted to impart that to us.”  In fact, during their childhood, the Ijichi and Mori children had little knowledge of Fountaingrove or the family legacy. “I think my father suppressed his true feelings about it,” Mary said. “We all knew this was where my father and my aunt grew up and we drove up to see it a couple of times, but we didn’t really know the story.”  It wasn’t until the late 1970s and early ’80s that the story began to resurface, at least locally, when LeBaron began covering it for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat newspaper. At the same time, Japanese media came to film documentaries on the collective legacy of the 19 Kagoshima samurai students, many of whom had gone on to become prominent figures in government and industry after returning to Japan.  But it was the Paradise Ridge exhibit that most helped Nagasawa’s heirs begin to tell their story again. “It was a positive thing for my father to go through and contribute photos, it helped him to know that the Bycks were sincere and that preserving the history meant something to them,” said Mary.Paradise Ridge displays images and a few of the original artefacts from Nagasawa’s Fountaingrove estate (Credit: Melanie Haiken)While the exhibit at Paradise Ridge is considerably smaller than the one before the fire, it is the only permanent exhibit in the US dedicated to Nagasawa (the Museum of Sonoma County, which maintains an extensive Kanagawa and Fountaingrove collection, has curated temporary exhibits). The largest Nagasawa collection resides in Japan, where a museum preserving the legacy of all 19 samurai students, the Satsuma Students Museum, opened in Kagoshima in 2014. Ten Nagasawa descendants attended the opening, joined there by Rene.  Just above Paradise Ridge, the city of Santa Rosa established the 33-acre Nagasawa Community Park in 2007, dedicated in a ceremony attended by numerous Nagasawa family members. And at Paradise Ridge, just behind the plot of chardonnay grapes designated as Nagasawa Vineyard, a small fenced-in area encloses a newly planted tea plantation, the result of efforts to connect Nagasawa’s legacy with that of Wakamatsu Tea, which employed some of California’s first Japanese immigrants in silk and tea production.  “A lot of California agriculture owes its start to Japanese immigrants. Like the ‘Potato King’ and the ‘Garlic King’, as well as the ‘Wine King’,” said tea plantation founder Nao Magami, referring to Japanese immigrants George Shima, whose vast potato harvests led him to become the first Japanese American millionaire, and Kiyoshi Nagasaki, who became the country’s biggest garlic producer. “But when the Japanese were sent to camps in World War Two, all of those stories got lost. Now we are trying to tie together those legacies of these earliest California pioneers.”  In 2021, the Wakamatsu group held its first tea ceremony at Paradise Ridge with Nagasawa family members in attendance. But perhaps the best and simplest epitaph for this remarkable man is the one added by his family to the plaque in Nagasawa Park, which outlines his life in just four words: “Samurai Spirit in California”. Rediscovering America is a BBC Travel series that tells the inspiring stories of forgotten, overlooked or misunderstood aspects of the US, flipping the script on familiar history, cultures and communities. —  Join more than three million BBC Travel fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter and Instagram. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called “The Essential List”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.