apanese immigrants made their first real impact in Texas in the area of rice farming. In 1902, when Sadatsuchi Uchida, Japan's consul general to the United States, visited southeastern Texas on a fact-finding tour, he found a rice industry that was very much in its infancy. Still, Consul Uchida was impressed with the land he saw and its potential for producing rice. During his stay in Texas, he met with representatives of the Texas governor's office, the Houston Chamber of Commerce, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Rice Growers' Association of America, all of whom let him know that Japanese immigrants would be welcome in Texas, especially if they came to farm rice.

In Japan at the turn of the century, rice farming was still an important and much-respected occupation. A dense population and limited arable land, however, meant that many Japanese farmers would never own the fields they tilled. Even those who did own land usually had tiny parcels scattered in different areas, a definite hindrance to large-scale agriculture. Thus, when Consul General Uchida published his report describing vast prairies in southeast Texas suitable for rice farming, the news spread fast and became a popular topic of discussion in Japanese newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and books.

The response to the opportunities described in Uchida's report was almost immediate, if somewhat inauspicious. In 1903 two Japanese rice-farming ventures near Port Lavaca and Del Rio were attempted, with both ending in failure. Later that year, however, more Japanese came.

One of the most successful and famous of the new arrivals was Seito Saibara, a Japanese lawyer and politician who ironically had no previous experience in farming rice. Nonetheless, when he arrived in Houston in 1903, his goal was to establish a colony of 1,500 Japanese rice farmers. Through the help of a Southern Pacific Railroad colonization agent and with the enthusiastic support of Houston's Chamber of Commerce, Saibara quickly found and purchased a 304-acre tract of land near Webster, a small community halfway between Houston and Galveston.