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BN: Okay. We are here on April 5, 2022, interviewing Mas Takano. I'm Brian Niiya, who will be asking the questions, and Dana Hoshide will be the videographer. So thank you, Mas, for coming out. And I should add we're in Emeryville, California, conducting the interview. I wanted to start, as we often do, by asking about your family, and maybe starting with, can you tell us about your father and where he came from in Japan, and how he came to the U.S.?

MT: I put everything on paper, but you want me to repeat, is that what you're saying?

BN: Yeah, for video, we won't necessarily have that.

MT: Okay. My father came over as a single man, and his sister from Fukuoka, from Hakata, had three or four theaters, so she sent him over to buy American film. The film industry in Japan at the time was nil, pretty nil, so he would get these films. He didn't know what he was buying, he's just look at them and say, "Pretty good." He'd send them back and they would put subtitles on them. And after a few years, the industry in Japan started to grow, so she said, "I don't need you anymore, Yasutaro, so why don't you come on home?" And he said, "I kind of like it here," so he bounced around. And I guess they weren't that strict and all that, so he was, got jobs, odd jobs, he was laying hardwood floors and he said, "Boy, this isn't for me." And he kind of liked the outdoors, and some friend hired him in the nursery, in the Japanese nursery, and he really enjoyed that, it was in Oakland. And the man said, "Mr. Takano, you're in Alameda," and how he ended up in Alameda, I don't know, but he was in Alameda. And they said the building, Alameda, the city, really big, it's growing and there's an area called... on the east side of Alameda, and they're building gardens and stuff. "And what you want to do is go into the gardening area." Japanese, we all have it in us, gardens, rocks and waterfalls and stuff. He started giving it a try and he didn't go into gardening with a Japanese friend, he taught him how to do gardening. And they didn't have equipment to move around, big rocks, and didn't know anything about plumbing. So he got started pretty much just making the gardens, small rocks and things. That's how he got started, then you did get into little bit larger projects. But he was pretty much into just making gardens, building the gardens. No, and that's what he was doing, so then he really liked the outdoors and he enjoyed it very much.

BN: Then how did he meet and marry your mother?

MT: Well, my mother, I don't think my mother came from a really wealthy family, but I think they were pretty well-to-do. Somebody was in the theater, her brother was in politics, and so she came on out after school. She had a good education, came on out to San Francisco to be with her sister, she wanted to go to college here, or in school to learn English. So she said her sister and her husband had started a dry cleaning business, but it was kind of a specialized one. They had contracts with Hollywood when they bought this business. And you know those feathers, the boa feathers and all those things, the frilly things, they took special cleaning. And so they would ship them up from Los Angeles and they would do it in San Francisco and ship 'em back. And apparently it was a very fruitful, very profitable business. But going back into the Japanese usually had the intention of coming to the United States, earning their fortune, and going back. Other immigrants, they were, poverty, famine, whatever, they came to stay here. So my auntie, my mother's sister, they did very well in the dry cleaning business. So they were going to go back within two years or three years. So she came over, my mother did, and she said she didn't do too well in school. [Laughs] The English was so hard and she was, and there were other people there, lot of Italians and things like that, not many Japanese, so the communication was tough. But anyway, so she'd left, but she was going to go come back, or go back to Japan. But she met a lot of Japanese that lived in San Francisco, so a lot of Japanese were there, and she kind of enjoyed it there, she stuck around and met a lot of people. She and my auntie, her older sister, were not that different today. So she met the same age people and they socialized, and a lot of single men, lot of people were looking for wives. So she wasn't interested in anybody, met my father. They didn't hit it off too well in the beginning, she said. [Laughs] But eventually got to know him and liked him, but then she went back, she went back to Japan. And the parents said, "Come on back, you're just fooling around out there. You're not going to school, you don't want to get married out there, so come on back." So they were trying to get her married in Japan, and she didn't meet anybody that she really liked, and she kind of thought about her father and the started to correspond a little bit. And I guess my father went back, met her, and they approved the marriage. So he came back first, got ready for her, and then she came back and got married in San Francisco. And ironically, her sister and her husband was ready to come back, go back to Japan. They said, "We'll give you the business, it's really profitable." And my father said, "No, I really like what I'm doing. So we were all looking at my father, saying, "You should have taken that business, my goodness." Because we would have been on easy street.

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