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BN: And then where did you... were you staying in a separate house?

MT: Well, my two sisters stayed in the main house, and they had a room, extra bedroom there. My father and I, I don't know if you've been to the country, but they've got these big water houses, water tanks. And in between the water tank itself, they have a rule about, must be about eight feet high, I guess. I don't know why it's there, but it's just empty. They put a couple beds in there and they had running water. So we had to go to the bathroom, we had to go to the house. We lived in a tank house, you had to climb up the stairs at the stepladder and go in. It wasn't too high, so my mother was not well, so she could make it in. And it was a whole new ballgame, my father didn't know anything about the country. So they told my father, they were already picking strawberries in March, I think, picking strawberries in March, and apricots were coming out. They told my father, "You can't do anything, so you take care of the furo." We didn't know what a furo was in the beginning, but it was nice. I was a guy, so I could get in first. My mother and sisters, they would get in last, right, into the furo. So at four o'clock you start the fire and boil up the water. He said okay. He didn't know that there's no water in there, he built the fire and burned it down. [Laughs] It was horrendous. They couldn't take a bath for two days, and working on the farm, it's pretty tough. But anyway, they had to rebuild it.

I came back from school the first day, and this one farmhand looked at me and said -- he was a Kibei -- and he says, "Takano, when you come back from school, you got to work." I said, okay, I'll go get changed, I got changed and came back down and he said, "You see the bulls over there in the fence?" I said, "Yeah." "You got to cut the alfalfa and feed them." I said, "Okay." Then he said, that's over here, way over there, and there's a tractor and there's a trailer and there's a sickle. Fill up the back trailer, bring it in. It was amazing because I said, "First of all, I don't know how to use that big sickle, secondly, I've never used a pitchfork in my life," but that was piece of cake, then I learned how to drive a tractor. "You don't know how to drive a tractor?" Hey, I'm only nine years old. So he taught me how to drive a tractor, started up, and it was a Ford, I remember, it's just got one gear. You start it, put it in gear, and off it goes. So anyway, I could cut the alfalfa, stick it on. And the farm is big, the main area is big, so I'm going from the alfalfa side, going to the main housing and everything and then going to where the bulls are. And I'm going through there, and my father's standing there, he looks at me, he can't believe I'm driving this tractor with a trailer. He asked me after, during dinner, he said, "How in the world did you get on a tractor?" I said, "Charlie told me." He said, "You going to do that every day?" I said, "Every day, I got to do it." He said, "Oh, that's good." But he had no idea how to drive a tractor either. [Laughs] But that was my, I had to do chores. I don't know where the other kids were. Maybe they were picking strawberries, I have no idea.

BN: You mean the kids? The families who lived there?

MT: Yeah, the kids. There was one a year younger than me, and one two or three years older than I. And they were never around, they came at dinner time. They didn't look like they were working. [Laughs] By anyway, that was my farm work.

BN: You may not know this, but when you moved to Cortez, was the expectation that that would be, that you would be avoiding having to go to camp by moving?

MT: Well, we didn't know about camp.

BN: Yeah, okay. You just knew you had to be out of Alameda.

MT: We had to be out of Alameda and my father said we were pretty fortunate because, "I don't think we'll have to move again." Everybody said to just get out of the way, pretty much.

BN: But you did have to move.

MT: We did, yeah. Because three months later we went to the assembly center.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.