Japanese American Labor Pre-interment Camps

Above is a picture of two Japanese American men in a strawberry patch working for the company Driscolls. Before the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, many Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants worked as sharecroppers for companies like Driscolls who specialize in the farming of strawberries. I was very curious about Japanese American labor because my grandmother's family worked as sharecroppers for Driscolls before they were interned in Poston Arizona. My grandmother is a nissei kibei which means that she was born in America but raised and schooled in Japan. She was separated from her mother, father and two younger sisters who stayed behind in America. I was lucky enough to interview my grandmother's sister a few years ago and she told me of her memories on the Driscolls farm in Salinas. There was a massive Japanese American presence in regards to sharecropping and my great-aunt described it as a very close community. I decided to do some research online and found that Japanese American's have been in the strawberry sharecropping profession since before 1917. The term sharecropping is defined as: "supplying land and plants to families who supplied physical labor". Particularly in the article I found, they talked about a certain discrimination already established before Executive Order 9066. One of the men being interviewed said that the sharecropping environment was "just like camp"(in reference to the internment camp). I find this knowledge and research very interesting for we have briefly mentioned Japanese labor in class and it has sparked curiosity of my family's history and the history of the Japanese coming to America. Sometimes I feel like when the words "history" and "Japanese Americans" are put together in a sentence, one just automatically thinks of the internment camps and I'm just curious about the life of a Japanese American before the internment camps.