The stories beneath our feet | Editorial
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 22, 2026
After Earth Day, it feels worth saying plainly: on Vashon, the land is never just scenery.
It is easy, living here, to talk about beauty. We do it all the time, and for good reason. The shoreline at dusk, the sudden green of April, the old barns, the fields opening up just enough to remind you that this island has long been worked as much as admired. But Earth Day, at its best, should ask a little more of us than appreciation. It should ask us to remember.
This week’s paper holds two stories that do exactly that.
One is about Matsuda Farm, where two new farmers, are beginning the next chapter on land that carries a long and painful history.
They planted strawberries first — a small, symbolic act on a farm where strawberries once meant livelihood, identity and endurance for a Japanese American family that was later torn from this island and sent to incarceration camps during World War II. That story is about farming, yes. But it is also about continuity, and about what it means for a place like Vashon to hold memory in the soil.
The other story looks back at Kuni Mukai, a Japanese immigrant woman on Vashon who, in 1939, filed for divorce from her husband, alleging abuse and adultery.
It is a story that stops you a little. Not only because of what she endured, but because of how much of women’s pain, especially then, could remain hidden beneath the surface of farm life, family life, island life. Her story widens our understanding of Vashon’s past. It reminds us that history here is not only pastoral. It is also intimate, unequal, and shaped by the quiet acts of survival people made within systems that gave them very little room.
Together, these stories feel especially right to sit with after Earth Day.
Because loving a place should mean more than praising its beauty or posting a nice photo of it. It should mean knowing what happened here. Who farmed here. Who lost something here. Who stayed. Who rebuilt. Who was overlooked. And who is trying, even now, to begin again with care.
That is part of what local journalism is for, too. Not just to tell you what is happening this week, but to keep widening the island’s memory. To remind us that stewardship is not only environmental. It is historical. It is moral. It asks us to look at Vashon clearly and love it enough to tell the fuller story.
