Stubborn Strawberry Farmer Digs In Against Disneyland

ANAHEIM, Calif. - Hiroshi Fujishige simply wants to be a strawberry farmer. But life is never as simple as we would like, is it?

Not when your 58-acre farm is across the street from Disneyland and bordered on three sides by high-rise hotels. Not when Walt Disney Co. and other developers have offered you tens of millions of dollars to give up the strawberries and retire.

Not when you say no, over and over and over, for decades.

"It's too big for me to comprehend," says the 71-year-old Fujishige. "If I had more schooling and knew what all these deals were, I might have been out of here a long time ago. . . . At this time and age, you've got to keep doing what you know best."

What Fujishige knows best is strawberries. Turning on the windmills in the middle of the night, when it's cold, to prevent frost damage. Rising at 5 a.m. Fungicides, irrigation, that kind of thing. What he says he doesn't understand is wheeling and dealing, Disney-style.

"You gotta be real careful, 'cause they're so sharp it ain't funny," he says. Disney offered him $32 million for a 99-year lease on the land, he says. He almost took it.

"But then I couldn't see it," he says. "Maybe I could kick myself later on."

These days, some Northern Virginia landowners are wondering about deals they already have made with Disney, about whether they might have done better to wait, as the company moves toward building a theme park in Prince William County.

Meanwhile, in Anaheim, Fujishige stands his ground. He is the dean of Disney holdouts, a breathing case study of what can happen to a landowner who decides to resist the blandishments of big companies who want to develop it for profit.

He lives in a tiny house among the fields he's been cultivating for more than 40 years, less than half a mile from the Disneyland gate, with his wife of about 30 years and one adult son who helps him run the business. You can't see the park from the Fujishige place, but you can see and hear the tourist buses barreling down the eight lanes of Harbor Boulevard and pulling into the huge Hilton and Quality Inn hotels directly across the street.

Fujishige speaks slowly and elliptically, throwing in a "shucks" about every fifth sentence, but if you spend some time with him talking about his land, a complex story begins to emerge.

Standing among his strawberry plants recently, with a cap advertising strawberry fertilizer shielding his eyes from the sun, he told the story of his farm, a story of bigotry, war and the suicide of a brother. Mostly, however, it's about finding a job and a life you like, and sticking to them.

"I'm a farmer, and I've been farming since I got out of high school, and shucks, that was in 1941," Fujishige says. "That's all I know, as far as making bread and butter"

Bread and butter: A million dollars an acre is the going rate for land along the strip of Harbor Boulevard where the Fujishige farm is situated, fronted by his dusty little fruit and vegetable stand, which is open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. There, for $1, you can buy a bag containing five pears, or 10 mandarin oranges or two ears of "sweet white corn."

"Fifty to sixty million dollars on up," is how much local business types figure Fujishige's land is worth, according to Thomas Kieviet, an Anaheim attorney who once negotiated - unsuccessfully - with the Fujishige family on behalf of a neighboring landowner who wanted to build a road through it.

Disney Chairman Michael Eisner met with Fujishige at a Disneyland restaurant a few years ago to try to persuade him to sell the land, which the company has long wanted to use in its planned expansion. Fujishige says he can't remember much about the meeting, except that Eisner told a story about some apple orchards his family owns back East. Disney President Frank Wells paid him a visit too, also in vain.

John Dreyer, Disney's chief spokesman, said the company won't discuss the offers it has made to Fujishige. Disney has dropped the land from its expansion plans, Dreyer said.

Still, it is widely assumed in Anaheim that Disney would still love to have it.

Fujishige says he can't remember the specific offers he has considered. "I'm not what you call business-oriented people," he says, protesting that he is poorly educated. For years he left the land negotiations to his college-graduate brother Masao, who killed himself in 1986. "I'm just a dirt farmer," he says.

Fujishige's parents came to the United States from Japan, and they had a cornfield in a section of Los Angeles that is now urban, he says.

During World War II, his family agreed to join other Japanese-Americans in a "voluntary evacuation" from California, as directed by the government. Rather than ending up in an internment camp, as many others did, the Fujishiges went to live with a relative in Utah.

There Hiroshi was drafted into the Army, with orders to go to Europe. Just before he was scheduled to depart, he recalls, he went to the dentist.

Soon afterward he became violently ill with a rare infection. When he informed the Army that he was too sick to report for duty, they opened an investigation. Fujishige says the Army discovered that the dentist, seeking revenge for a relative killed in the war against Japan, had tried to poison him.

The dentist's license was revoked, Fujishige says. The delay prevented him from reaching the front lines before the war ended. "He saved my life," Fujishige says.

After the war, Hiroshi and Masao began farming some land that Masao had bought in Norwalk, Calif. In 1953, they bought the Anaheim tract, in exchange for the Norwalk land, which was worth about $2,500. Two years later, Disneyland was completed, and the offers started coming in.

Fujishige makes clear that even after 40 years, he hasn't necessarily made a final decision. "I might sell to Disney, if they talk my language," he says at one point. And later: "I'll sell one of these days, I don't know to whom or what." He sounds most comfortable, however, when he suggests that the decision might be made after he is gone, by his children.