Annex farmer celebrates 100th birthday with family

When you have something you want to do, get up and do it.

 That’s George Morishige’s secret to staying physically and emotionally robust – no fountain of youth required.

 And considering the long-time Annex resident, who turned 100-years-old on Saturday, still putts around on his tractor and drives his wife, Setsuko, in his pick-up on shopping trips to Weiser and Ontario, there is no other option but to believe.

 “I’m a regular, old farmer,” he told the Weiser Signal American during his surprise birthday celebration held Sept. 10 at Matsy’s in Ontario, a Japanese restaurant and lounge founded in 1996 by Larry Matsumura.

 “I was really surprised my daughter Lisa put up all of this for me – Woweeee!” George said.

 The building – at lunch time – was nearly filled to capacity with friends and family who came to wish George, who once was interned at a relocation camp during World War II, a happy birthday.

 “I’m an old-timer,” he said. “I came out here in 1942 and have been here ever since. Yeah, I’m an old pioneer on the Oregon Slope.”

 George has lived in the area for 80 years and is often seen by motorists as he works his property along Highway 201.

 “Yes, he still drives his tractor and has his drivers license,” said George and Setsuko’s daughter, Lisa Morishige, a 1992 Weiser High School graduate. “All the neighbors and folks living in Weiser, going to Ontario or coming back home, see him irrigating his lawn, mowing his lawn, or spraying the ditches with his tractor, so he keeps busy.”

 George has no medical issues and does not seem to fit the stereotypical image of a centenarian in neither body nor soul.

 “Yeah, that’s what people say because I don’t have any wrinkles or nothin’,” he said smiling. “I guess the main thing is staying active. Whatever comes up, if there are things to do, I go out and do it. Maybe I get on the mower or take care of the garden, things like that. I don’t have a reason to stop. If I want to do something, I just do it.”

Farming is all he knows

 It would seem Morishige developed a sturdy work ethic from the time he was able to walk. 

 Born and raised in Auburn, Wash. he worked on the family farm, helping to support his parents and siblings. He graduated from Auburn High School in 1940.

 “I wasn’t very active in sports,” George said. “It didn’t interest me very much. As a little kid in elementary school, I would go to school during the day and came home and helped the family on the farm, so it didn’t give me much time to turnout for sports.”

 George continued working on the farm until he and his family were sent to Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a Japanese internment camp located near Heart Mountain in Park County, Wyo., between the cities of Powell and Cody. 

 It was one of 10 relocation camps built to house people of Japanese descent forcibly relocated from the west coast regions during World War II. Heart Mountain is one of the few relocation centers with buildings still standing today.

 “We were all sent to the relocation camp during the spring of 1942,” George said. “There wasn’t much I could say about it at the time. I was still a kid.”

 Daughter Lisa said her father never seemed to harbor any grudges for being forced by the government into a camp despite his status as an American-born citizen.

 “It seems that with the family and all the people that we know around that area, I think for all of those Japanese Americans, it was kind of a part of life,” said Lisa, who lives in Seattle, Wash. with her husband and 15-year-old son. She works for Swedish Medical Center as a physiologist in outpatient cardiac rehabilitation.

 “It was what they had to do so, to me, it seems they made the most of it, which is always how I interpreted it,” she said. “I think there was some resentment, but there wasn’t a whole lot you could do. You did what you had to do, so they made the most of it, did what they could.”

 Lisa’s uncles all served in the U.S. Army’s famed 442nd Infantry Regiment, an all second-generation Japanese fighting unit that became the most decorated in U.S. military history.

 In 1942, the same year the Morishige family was interned at Heart Mountain, George, based on his farming experience, was recruited for a group of laborers who traveled to Oregon to work the sugar beet fields.

 “My dad, being the eldest son … his thing was keeping the family together, to go out, when he was able to go to work on a work permit, and be able to leave and build a life, and then bring his whole family out with him.”

 “I came with that group to work in the beet fields in the Ontario area; I was about 19 or 20 at that time,” said George who worked hard and did well, buying his first car, a 1941 Chevrolet for $1,500, in his 20s.

 He ended up staying in the area following the end of World War II and eventually purchased his own land, growing onions, sugar beets, potatoes, wheat, barley, alfalfa, and corn.

 “That’s more or less how it happened,” he said. “All I’ve ever known is farming.”

 George met Setsuko in Ontario in 1958.

 “She had divorced her husband at the time and had two little children,” George explained. “We courted and then in 1960 we were married. We’ve stayed pretty healthy and have taken care of each other.”

 Their children are Nancy Barrie-Biederman of Portland, Bill Barrie of Ontario, and Lisa Morishige of Seattle. All three graduated from Weiser High School. 

 After 62 years of marriage, George and Setsuko seem to be getting along just fine.

 “Yeah, so far it’s going well,” George said with a chuckle.

 In the end, George Morishige is not a guy who was once forced into an internment camp. He is a farmer, he and his wife independent souls who do what they want to do, when they want to do it.

 “Don’t fiddle around,” he cautioned. “If you feel like doing something, go ahead and do it. That’s one thing: I never liked sitting around. I’m retired, but I still like to get on my tractor and take care of the ditches and this and that … you know? Heck, I do what I like to do.”