<Begin Segment 1>

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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<Begin Segment 2>

BN: Well, I was going to ask you, what ended up happening to the business, your mother's sisters?

MT: I guess he just sold it, he just sold it. But we were saying, conversely, if we took the business, we'd be living in San Francisco and we kind of liked Alameda, we really liked Alameda.

BN: You had a different life, maybe.

MT: Different life, totally different life.

BN: So they get married and move to Alameda. Does your father continue with the gardening?

MT: Yes, he did.

BN: Right up to the war?

MT: Right up to the war. And he kind of liked it because it was his own business and he did what he wanted to do. And he worked hard, so you could make as much as you wanted to, as you could. So he enjoyed that.

BN: And then where were you in the order of the children?

MT: My sister Teri was the oldest, she was the first one. And she will be ninety-seven this year, in September. Cookie had her birthday a couple days ago, she just turned ninety-three. And I'm ninety... excuse me, I'll be ninety in June, and there were three of us. We got some good genes from my father, I think. My father died at ninety-three, and he was the baby of four sons and a daughter, they all lived long.

BN: And then where did you live in Alameda?

MT: Before the war, it was a street named Eagle Avenue, 2316 Eagle Avenue, we lived there. That's where my father moved when Cookie was going to be born. And I was born in that house.

BN: Were there a lot of other Japanese in the area at that time?

MT: Yes, there were Japanese, there was a Japantown, two clumps of Japantown, small, but there were two clumps. And that's what this Alameda historically was all about, they want to put some historical markers in those two areas. And we couldn't... there was an article in the newspaper there, on the table on display that said that the city of Alameda, I think it was the Alameda Times had an article in there. At the time of our evacuation, they apologized to the Italians and to the Germans and to the Japanese for being taken out and asking, getting kicked out of Alameda, because they contributed so much to our community, and they wanted to wish them luck and maybe they'll come back. I thought that was an interesting article, because Alameda was a white city, very white city. Ironically, they had a line in there that the editor didn't know, the writer didn't know. It said unfortunately, they didn't have the foresight to buy their home, or the Japanese couldn't buy a home. Because the people, some families had boys that were older, and they could stay there, they were citizens and they were able to live there. Parents had to move, and they didn't have to vacate their house. It was interesting.

BN: Well, in addition to your father, in addition to his gardening, he was also active in the community, right?

MT: Yes, very active.

BN: So what were some of the other things he was involved with?

MT: Well, he was temple president four, five, six times, I don't know. He was a Nihongakko, Japanese school president, he founded that, one of the founders. And Nihonjinkai, that was a Japanese community thing, he was president of that. He was the Fukuoka-ken...

BN: Kenjinkai.

MT: Ken thing. So we were just really surprised that was not taken up. To this day, we think about that. One guy asked me, an older Nisei said, "Was he a squealer?" [Laughs] I said, we thought about that, but no, my dad would never do that. He was in the army. He was in the Russo-Sino War, the katana and everything, we burned everything in the backyard. Everything had to do with the battles and everything, he burned everything. At night we'd go out and burn everything. But there was a black car parked in front of our house every night. We thought any day they're going to come in.

BN: But they never did?

MT: They never did. But anyway, we were really fortunate. Maybe it's... yeah, I don't know why.

BN: Well, in some ways, the whole community was excluded, so maybe that... that is interesting. That happened to my grandfather, too. He was a Japanese school principal and so forth, but for whatever reason...

MT: He didn't get picked up.

BN: He didn't get picked up. This is in Hawaii. So given his involvement, you must have had to go to the Japanese school, right, if he's the president of the...

MT: For two years I went, but then they closed the school. I only went two years.

BN: Were you involved in other kinds of activities, too, as a kid?

MT: Before the war?

BN: Yeah.

MT: No, not really.

BN: Not too much. Because you were pretty young.

MT: Yeah, I was nine years old, yeah.

BN: Who were your... I mean, what school did you go to at that time?

MT: Grammar school was just Porter school, and I was right across the high school. It was a pretty large school, I remember. But the Alameda people lived in the two Japantown areas, they all went there. But there weren't too many my age, they were a little bit older than I. And they went to Porter school and they went to Alameda High and they almost invariably, one of them would be a valedictorian, going on to high school. Japanese were smart. Well, they had to study.

BN: About how many other Nisei were there, what percentage?

MT: I went to kindergarten, up through fourth grade, and there was probably five or six, maybe.

BN: Oh, not too many.

MT: Yeah. My friends were pretty much Caucasian friends. And although I say it was a white city, I was invited to my friend's birthday parties, and we'd invite them to my birthday party. But then I went to Nihongakko and then I went to church in Sunday school. So my friends out of school were Japanese. But my age group was small, I remember.

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<Begin Segment 3>

BN: Do you remember December 7th?

MT: Very much, very much. When we went to church, going to church with my father and mother said they have to go to San Francisco to see this Horita family, and the mother had just passed away, so they were really close friends. So he left about nine o'clock. We went to church, so we just went to church at nine o'clock and initially said he'll be back by four o'clock. So going over, he said he got stopped on the bridge. They questioned where he was going, but he was in a suit and everything, so they let him go. And he went to... and still, they didn't have a radio, they had a radio in the car, but didn't listen to it. He went to the kuyamin, they had the minister there, but no one knew about the bombing. Everyone was there, so they had a small service and got in his car and he was coming home about three o'clock. And he got stuck and got stopped about three times, then he found out what was happening. Leaving, they found out that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. So we were at home and we didn't know, we were kids, and we were playing outside and people were talking about bombing Pearl Harbor. Where's Pearl Harbor? As we grew up, the Japanese were, they were going into Singapore and China and everywhere else, Taiwan and Korea. So we just thought it was another place, we didn't realize it was... and it was a territory at the time, it wasn't a state or anything. I guess people weren't... they weren't that concerned about it at the time. I guess the older people were, but not the younger people. So my father didn't get home until after seven o'clock. So we were sitting on the steps there in wintertime. And we went to our neighbor's house, and they fed us dinner. But it was kind of scary. And then after the war, school next day was totally different. Yeah, I was kind of glad that Christmas vacation came around, because then I didn't have to face the kids at school. Because they were still friends, but they were a little bit keeping a distance, so to speak. They didn't have their arms around you and playing recess together, and it wasn't there anymore. Lunch I would eat by myself or eat with a Japanese girl or something. Because she didn't have her, lost her friends, too. It was a rude awakening for us. But I�m sure the parents, the hakujin parents, at dinnertime, talking about the war, and they say, "How about the Japanese here?" "They're getting thrown out of here, out of Alameda. They didn't bomb Pearl Harbor, but we don't know the Japanese like we know the Italians and the Germans." And so there's suspicion there, even amongst the kids. I'm sure that came down to the family.

BN: Then what happened with your dad's gardening after that?

MT: Oh, he just had to leave, it was just nothing. And my dad, like I said, he worked hard, and we had two cars, one for his business and one for pleasure. We had to leave one car behind. We had gotten the house, we had new furniture, had to leave that. And we were, everybody was trying to get into Oakland or Berkeley or Hayward or somewhere. But there was a lot of hysteria at the time, lot of chaotic things. And so the Japanese tried to rent a house in other cities. Well, there's, the landlords were white, they were in no way going to rent to a Japanese, they would be ostracized. So the Japanese families, lot of them, they were living in the garage of some friends or some relatives, they lived in the garage or in the basement, and they said it was really tough. And so a lot of people moved out of the area where they could rent a home like in, some people went to Stockton, San Jose, and way out to Hayward and Warm Springs, that was way out there, inaka, you know, they had to go inaka. So that's why, they say in every camp there was somebody from Alameda, that's what they say.

BN: And we should clarify, the reason for this is because Alameda, kind of like Terminal Island, is this place where...

MT: We had a naval air station and it was growing really big.

BN: Right, right.

MT: It was a security risk for the navy.

BN: So the Japanese have to be out of, kind of kicked out of Alameda at the end of February.

MT: Yeah, middle of February, I think before the 9066 was signed, you know. And then our friends, my father had friends in Cortez, which was just south of Turlock. And they said, "Come on out here," they called my father and they said, "Come on out here," and they said, "We've got a big farm, lot of room here," and they don't even know we're here. They don't even know we're here, right? That was in February, and in April, we were in an assembly center. April, May, we were in the assembly center, yeah.

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<Begin Segment 4>

BN: So you end up spending a couple months or so, something like that, right? Well, actually, close to three months they were in Cortez.

MT: Yeah.

BN: So you were pulled out of a school in Alameda and you now go to a different school in Cortez for a short time?

MT: About three months. And so I walked into... they have a schoolhouse. So I don't know why my father just dropped us off, I guess, if I recall. And I walked into this room and there was this big Caucasian man and he said, "What do you want?" And I said, "I have to enroll in school." Said, "What grade are you in?" I said, "I'm in the fourth grade." And he said, "Well, we don't have a fourth grade." We had two classes in every room, we had four rooms, big classes. We don't have enough people for fourth grade, so we've got to, you're standing in a room, the left side is third grade, the right side is fifth grade, which one you want to be in? So I said, well, I certainly don't want to be in the third grade again, so I said, "I'll go in the fifth grade," which I did. And then I was there for three months, and then we went to camp, we'd go to Amache. I'm amazed that the transcripts were all sent out, I still to this day, I don't know how they did that. But anyway, I'd go into camp, now I'm in the sixth grade. [Laughs] I went from the fourth grade to sixth grade in a year, but I thought that was pretty great.

BN: Now you're with older, bigger kids.

MT: Yeah, and I was a slow grower to boot, so I was always the youngest and the smallest in the class, all the way through.

BN: Who were these people that you stayed with in Cortez?

MT: The Morofuji family, and the Tsurumoto family.

BN: They're just friends of your father?

MT: They were friends of my father.

BN: Did you know them from before?

MT: I didn't know them. My father did.

BN: So you're going to a place where you don't...

MT: Don't know anybody. They had kids, they ignored you. And here I was getting discriminated in Alameda. You come to the country and now you're discriminated again. You're a city slicker. And the white guys would try to beat up on you, so you'd beat up one guy, and the next guy comes, he's bigger than, you beat him up and they get bigger, and pretty soon you're getting beat up pretty bad. And the Japanese guys just stand around.

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<Begin Segment 5>

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.

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<Begin Segment 6>

BN: And then you went to...

MT: Amache.

BN: No, the...

MT: Merced Assembly Center.

BN: Merced Assembly Center.

MT: And there were two. There was the Turlock Assembly Center and the Lodi people went there, Lodi/Stockton people were there. And they went to Rohwer, Arkansas, and Jerome, Arkansas.

BN: Yeah, and then Merced people pretty much all went to Amache.

MT: They went to Amache, yeah.

BN: Do you have any particular memories of Merced?

MT: The assembly center? Oh yeah. We got put into an area and none of the Cortez people were there. We were put in with a lot of Yuba City people, so I met a couple Yuba City people, and they were really nice.

BN: Do you remember which ward you were in?

MT: D Ward.

BN: D Ward?

MT: Uh-huh. And the barracks were unusual. I don't know why it was meant to be that way, maybe air circulation, but they built the wall up to eight feet, and then from the wall to the ceiling, which was peaked, it was open. You could stand at one end of the barrack and from the apartment you could say, "Hey, Larry, you want to go to lunch?" And come back and he'd be standing up there and said, "Yeah, I'll meet you in about five minutes." And everybody was just getting so upset that the young guys were yelling back and forth. [Laughs]

BN: And were all five of you in just the one room?

MT: One room, yeah. And then it was already in April and May, it gets really hot and dry in the country out there. And the food was terrible. We didn't know what it was, but we were served this meat for a couple, three times that week. Somebody finally said, "This is tongue." Well, everybody went, "Oh." [Laughs] Some people tried to eat it and it didn't have any flavor. And they looked at it and it had the little bumps on there. We had some spaghetti that was terrible. Jell-o was always, by the time they served it, it was all water, it was so warm there. No AC, hot. But anyway... and they had nothing organized because they didn't know how long we were going to be there. I mean, even the people who were running the assembly center, all they heard was they were building the camps where they going, they knew we were going to be moved again, but we had no idea when.

BN: Did you go to... I think they had established a summer school at Merced.

MT: I'm sorry?

BN: A summer school?

MT: No, there was no summer school, nothing yet.

BN: So you didn't have anything like that that you went to?

MT: Nothing. No organized activities. Once in a while they would have a talent show and I guess somebody would run around and find out people could just sing or dance or whatever. And they would go out to the... they had a field out there where the horses raced, and we would all sit in the stands. That was about the only thing. But they'd have singalongs.

BN: Did you know who Pat Suzuki was?

MT: Yes, very much so. Livingston girl.

BN: She's like a year or so younger than you.

MT: She was two years older than I.

BN: Older?

MT: Yeah, two years older than I.

BN: Oh, older than you, okay.

MT: Maybe one year.

BN: But close to the same age.

MT: Yeah.

BN: Was she known as a singer even back then?

MT: She used to sing in that talent show, and everybody used to clap, and I said, wow, she's got a great voice. She used to sing in Amache also.

BN: Right, right.

MT: And she ended up with the Flower Drum Song role, she was good. She was kind of aloof. Maybe she had every right to be. But the guys didn't like her. She was kind of on the chunky side, you know, but she had a pretty face, I thought she had a pretty face, cute face. But anyway, I guess maybe the guys were envious, who knows?

BN: And then do you remember the latrines, the toilets?

MT: Oh, yeah, that was terrible. They had one side, we could go downhill. So if you're standing at the bottom there, if there's a lot of people after lunch or something and a guy flushes, all that stuff comes down and splashes all over. [Laughs] You learned one time, and you just wait, you just wait. And there was one fellow named Bob Sueoka, I think it was Bob Sueoka. And he was about sixteen years old, and he didn't have any guys around his age and I didn't have any. A guy named Larry Nakamura who became a dentist in San Francisco, he was from Yuba City, he and I got to be pretty good friends. I used to hang out with his brother-in-law, so Bob used to take me aside and we'd get those, they would have peaches, and we'd cut the peach pits and we'd make... I was going to be in the Cub Scouts so he made this little thing you can put your scarf in. It's a beautiful thing. And we had no files or anything, and we used to have nails and punch a hole in there, and then used concrete and scrape it down and all this other stuff. He'd find some oil somewhere and oiled it down. He was like a brother to me. Went to camp, and when they accepted the 442, and into the army, he went in. I think he was one of the first Niseis to get killed. And I knew where he lived, in another block. I went by the house. All the people, families had a star, blue star I guess it was, if you had a serviceperson, and when they got killed, then they had a gold star. I went by the house, I wanted to go in to see the mother, but I didn't know what I would say. Boy, that just ripped my heart out, he was such a nice guy. And even when he was in high school, I used to see him and he would always stop and say hello.

BN: Yeah, it's sad.

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<Begin Segment 7>

BN: So anyway, after a few months there, pretty much the whole camp goes to Amache.

MT: Amache.

BN: Do you remember your block or your address at Amache?

MT: Yeah, we were the only camp that didn't have numbers, we had letters. It went from 6-E, 7-E and then into 12-E, and then they went F, 6, 7 and up. We were in 9-E, 7-A and B. Barrack 7, Apartments A and B. The guy next door moved out after three or four months, two or three brothers moved out. And since my mother was not well, the block manager said, "Takano, take that one before somebody comes in." So we were able to have an extra room where Cookie and Teri stayed. We were lucky.

BN: And then where were the other people in the block from, mostly?

MT: We ended up again with the Colusa people. Colusa and there were some, a couple of Cortez people, Cortez was the next block, 10-E, and there were a whole bunch of, pretty much all Cortez. So we were Colusa, we had some Yuba City people, but that was about it. And then when then Alameda people came in, people from Topaz, they had relatives, and so they came. And from Tule Lake, they came into, Amache was the smallest camp. So we had more room than most, I guess, they sent them over. And they would come to our block. Alameda was some, they had some kind of thing that was pretty amazing that they would put Alameda people, say, in 6-G or somewhere, where they didn't know anyone. The Alameda people, they put 'em in, so we had a couple of Alameda people in our block.

BN: And then you were mentioning in the school, you were also... I mean, half the camp were kids from L.A.

MT: Yeah. We had, each grade had about... well, when you're in grammar school, we had sixth grade, I was in sixth grade. 6-1, 6-2, 6-3 and 6-4. And each class had about thirty people, thirty-five, thirty, thirty-five. And they were from A to L and L to N or whatever. So we were in the T to the Z, you know. And then they moved some S people in to even it up. But they had about thirty or thirty-five kids in each, and they did alphabetically. And so you just moved, went along. So you got to know your... we had L.A. people and Yuba City, everybody mixed up.

BN: Was there... I mean, did the L.A. city kids and the more country kids get along?

MT: No, they didn't. Again, then they'd go into some more discrimination. "You're from the inaka," they used to tell us. The L.A. kids, they were rough, tough guys. They had the Seinan gang, and I don't know how they... I guess when they moved the people, they moved a bunch of people and they were Seinan gang. And the Seinans, little kids with Seinan teachers, and old guys with Seinan t-shirts, you know. And they were bullies. They picked on a lot of the people. I remember his name was... he was the brother of a good friend of my classmate. He got beaten up every day. The police had to escort them from school when school was out, to home. And it got so they would get him after. So he finally, his brother, his older brother had moved to Chicago, I believe it was, he relocated after he got out of high school. So he went to join his brother, I felt so sorry for him. He was a nice guy, too.

BN: He got to leave camp.

MT: He got to leave camp, yeah.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

BN: You were going to school, what... did your parents have jobs?

MT: Yeah, my father joined the police force, he was a policeman, but he didn't like that. He said most of the time they have to deliver the, "We regret to inform you that your son has passed away," a telegram would come to the police department, they went to deliver that. He said, "Oh, it was terrible." And then my mother was, like I say, she was sick. She was an invalid and she was in bed all the time. And they didn't have any medication for her, she had rheumatoid arthritis, and she couldn't... they didn't have any medication. My father ran into some man in camp, and he had a friend or relative living in Denver. So he said, "Maybe he can help you," so they wrote back and forth and the man said, "I'll be happy to help and get the medicine." So he got a doctor's prescription and they sent it up to him, and my father sent him forty-five dollars every month, and they would send the medication. And you know, losing proposition, you're working for seventeen dollars. [Laughs]

BN: Forty-five dollars was a lot of money back then.

MT: He didn't like to be a policeman anyway. So when they started recruiting, because all the younger people, the Caucasian population, they're all in the army, so nobody to pick the fruit and the produce. So they came to camp to recruit people, and so my father went over and he was picking cantaloupes and honeydew in one year, and he would pick from about April through September/October, he'd pick, and he'd come home. But then they had an offer to work at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. And a whole bunch of Kibei people went there, and they would wash dishes and do maintenance and stuff, and my father thought that was okay. And then he would work on a golf course; he ended up taking care of all the greens. How ironic that was that he would be working on the greens. And he used to tell me, he used to come home and he would say, "Don't ever play golf, Masaki." I said, "Why?" He said, "It's so expensive." And I said, "What do you mean, expensive?" He said, "I work on the greens and I pick up golf balls in the shrubs all the time, I pick 'em up all the time. Those balls cost at least forty cents each, and there's a bunch of them in there every day, every day." Not just once a week but every day there's a lot of 'em. And if we pick 'em up, wash 'em off, and we sell 'em for a dime. [Laughs] And he said, "So don't ever play golf," he used to laugh. Well, we're talking about fifty year later, I guess, I'm at a conference at the Broadmoor Hotel and playing golf, and I'm thinking, "My father used to cut the greens here before the war, I mean, during the war." Boy, funny economics living in the hotel, living like a king and everything, you know, expense account at a conference, playing golf, skiing down the hill. Ironic how things turn out.

BN: Yeah. So he was doing this, this was like short-term leave, he'd go out and do this work and come back to camp, right?

MT: No, no, he was living.

BN: Oh, he left, so he was able to leave.

MT: Yeah, Colorado Springs was about two hours away, two or three hours away maybe. Yeah, so they had living quarters for the Kibeis that worked.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

BN: Okay, and then the rest of... you are still in camp with your mother?

MT: I'm still in camp.

BN: Your sisters have --

MT: Teri had gone to Cleveland.

BN: Your sisters had left, too, right?

MT: Yeah.

BN: Did they also work in camp?

MT: No, no. I worked in camp. I got a job in camp.

BN: As a kid?

MT: Yeah. I was a janitor in the high school.

BN: Really?

MT: And this friend of mine, he's from Cortez, he and I were the best friends in Cortez. He and I grew up together. And to this day, well, he just passed away two years ago. But he knew somebody, got a job to be a janitor, got this big broomstick, walked down the hallway in the high school, then we cleaned the windows and stuff.

BN: Really? They hired you?

MT: So he said, "You want a job? You could come with me," and he said I got the job. I said, "Okay." And so my father, when I started, I was making seventeen dollars a month, and there's three dollars and fifty cents clothing allowance every month. Well, he wasn't around, but I collected all that and my father came back and got that, he was really impressed.

BN: Because you're, like, twelve, thirteen years old.

MT: I was thirteen, yeah, twelve years old.

BN: I don't think I've ever heard of anyone that young working, but they needed people.

MT: They needed people.

BN: Yeah, there was a labor shortage.

MT: And then it's like who you know.

BN: Right, right. And then you were mentioning, when we were talking later, that your family were from, got to be friends with the Kodas, also.

MT: Well, they're from before the war.

BN: Yeah, right. They were also there.

MT: Kodas, yeah. And that was really ironic, because Livingston, I don't know if you're familiar with the Livingston community, but it was a community in Livingston, you had to be Christian to be there. And so when they all went to camp, the Kodas, who were in Dos Palos, were he had his rice farm, he ends up in 9-H, which was all the recent people. And I had a good friend, and I don't know, to this day, I don't remember how I met this guy, but his name was Mac Miyake, and he was a good guy, nice guy. So he and I got to be really good friends. And so I used to come down about five blocks down to see me, and we'd play or I'd go up there. But it was unusually, it was hard because at noontime, you had to eat in your own mess hall, you couldn't go to someone else's. You could sneak in, but everybody would look at you because they knew you weren't there. But I'd go up there and I'd see Mr. Koda in 9-H, and I'd say, "Good morning, Mr. Koda," he'd say, "Good morning," and he'd always wear a white shirt and slacks every day. He was tall, what a classy-looking guy he was. Amazing. And I'd see the rice bag and there he is on the rice picture, Mr. Koda.

BN: We still buy their rice.

MT: Yeah, I still use the rice, yeah.

BN: It's expensive, but it's good.

MT: Yeah, it's a little bit more expensive.

BN: So your sisters have gone away but then you mentioned that when you were ready to leave camp, they came back?

MT: You were having a little problem, Cookie was out of school, she graduated from high school, so now she could be there all day watching the kids and all this other stuff. So they looked at Teri and said, Cookie and Teri said, "We'd like to just have Cookie because she's out of school and she stays here, so Teri, we don't need you. So one of you have to leave," I think, is what they said. But they were happy to have two, because gas rationing, meat, and you get those coupons for everybody in the house, you get so many. So they got extra because of Cookie and Teri. But I guess Cookie told my father, said, "Maybe I might move to another place," and my father said, "Hey, Teri was there first, you move out. You look for another place or come back, one or the other." So she was, thought she would find a job over there. But then when they said they were going to close the camp, that was about April, I guess. And Amache was the first to close so my father got a hold of Cookie and said, "You come on back because we're going to move, you got to help us pack and everything." So, you know, she came back. And Teri stayed there another year, a year and half I think she stayed there in Cleveland. And then when Cookie comes back, she works at the... she's already out of school, she's sixteen, she gets a job with the naval air station, she's making a hundred forty dollars a month making more money than Teri. So my father said to Teri, "You better come back here, your younger sister's making more money than you are." So Teri came back, it's funny.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

BN: And then was it always, was it pretty set that you were going to go back to Alameda?

MT: Well, when we were moving from Merced Assembly Center to Colorado, we had a, kind of an idea we were going to a place in Colorado, they didn't really tell us where we were going. Instructions, don't get off the train when you stop and you have to go benjo, they stopped, you had to go benjo, the benjo was always full and it was never cleaned. So they would go on the lee side of the train and it would be in a field somewhere, you could do your, even the women and the men were doing their shishi and everything out there, you know, and get back on the train. But don't get off the train, don't pull up the shades, and I think that was, I got to thinking about that. I think they thought that if they knew that whole train was Japanese, somebody might blow it up, who knows, some fanatic? So I think that was for our safety. But we're going through Arizona, I remember, through Arizona, and hot, and we're at a train stop. We put up the shade because, to get the air in there, there's no AC in those things, get some air in there. And another train pulls up, and so they were kind of looking in there. And they're lifting up their shades, and they're Japanese, next train. So we're all looking in there and we start talking to each other, "Where are you guys going?" They said, "We think we're going to Arkansas." Said, "Where are you going?" "We think we're going to Colorado." And so my father said, "Where are you from?" They were from Turlock Assembly Center. So my father said, "Is there anybody from Alameda there?" A guy pops his head out and says, "Yeah, I am. I'm Yamasaki from Alameda," and my father had hired his two sons before the war. So they were close friends. And so they had kept in touch, and Jerome, they didn't close 'til later, but we were going home first. So he had written my father and said, "My house" -- and he had a son that was old -- so he had the house. But we've told them that we're coming back in a couple months so they're getting out. We had a Japanese pavilion at the World's Fair, they bought one of those homes. He said that house is empty. When you go back, stay in that place until we get back and then you can figure something out. So we were fortunate that we were going to Alameda, we wanted to go back to Alameda, we understood there's going to be a hostel, we could live at the church or something, but because of the Yamasaki family we were able to have our own little cottage. It was nice. Then within the year, we were out of there.

BN: Then you mentioned you were among the first Japanese families to come back to Alameda.

MT: Yeah, we were one of the first.

BN: That there was, because of that, maybe you experienced more anti-Japanese stuff.

MT: It was terrible. Yeah, I guess, you know, you get bumped in the hall.

BN: This is at school?

MT: Yeah, and they would bump you in the hall and they'd say a snide remark, they'd have snide remarks. But I used to say, they best day I had is when people ignored me. [Laughs] Basically it was true, best day. And then they used to chase me home from school. But that only lasted about three weeks, and then people started coming back. So we had about three or four people my age. And out of the three or four, two of them had never, were not Alameda people. It just said there was a hostel they could go into and so they came over. But they were my age, so it was good. So we looked out for each other, it was nice.

BN: Yeah, there were enough of you. What grade were you in at this point?

MT: I came in as a freshman.

BN: As a high school freshman?

MT: High school, yeah, ninth grader. And I thought it was nice, I came into high school to register, and I had to go see the Dean of Boys, Mr. Schreiber, and I remember Mr. Schreiber from... Porter school was right across the street from there. And so Mr. Schreiber's name used to pop up even, the Dean of Boys, and I think he was the assistant principal at one time. But he looked at me and he said, "Mr. Takano," he said, "Nice to have you back." I thought, wow, that's nice. I wish he told the kids, the other students. [Laughs] But anyway, it was a nice welcome back.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

BN: And then once you moved out of your father's friends' place, where did you go to?

MT: I said, my father worked hard, he really worked hard, and he didn't have a car. I used to help him, and sometimes from school I used to go directly to where I knew he would be, and I'd help him and then go home, walk home.

BN: So did he reestablish his garden?

MT: Yeah, he did, one at a time, one at a time. On a Saturday I would, one day... you learn a lot from your parents. He had a place, we had to go from one end of Alameda, not the lengthwise, but it's only three miles wide, I think, two or three miles wide, and five miles long or something, whatever it is. We lived on this side, and on the other side we used to walk, and we had this place and a man hired him, four dollars a month. And so while we were doing it, we were there about two or three weeks and I went with him. And we'd have to go to another place, and he didn't have a lawnmower. So we'd have to have, when he got a place, they said, "Do you have a lawnmower?" They said, "Yeah." We brought a lawnmower and cut his lawn. But anyway, this guys had... the next door guy said, "Hey, you guys come here, and would you ask your dad if he would do our place?" And I said sure, so we got that place. So we asked the man next door, our first guy, and he we said, "Mr. Marillis, can we use your lawnmower?" And he said, "Sure, go ahead." If you've got some other use for the lawnmower, not a problem. So we went three doors, got those three doors, it was a cul-de-sac, six houses in and six houses back. We did fourteen places on a Saturday without moving with one lawnmower.

MT: And my father would have to go there, and he'd go there early morning and sharpen the lawnmower on Saturday. And that man used to work for a beverage distribution company, Golden Gate Beverages. And at noon, he'd get his son and his little guy, search us out and with an ice-cold soda. My father never forgot that.

BN: Then was he eventually able to buy his own equipment?

MT: Yeah, yeah, then he got a car. Got a car and we were able to do it. He worked for that Marillis family in 1946 to 1960-some ought.

BN: So a long time.

MT: Long time. He never changed, it was four dollars, and he would put in plants for him, seasons, time to put the pansies in spring. And I saw their kids grow up, go on to high school. But my father never... four bucks a month. And it took at least an hour to cut that place, you know, put in flowers and trim the hedges.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

BN: Did you notice... how had, I guess, how had Alameda changed over the time you were gone, or had it, from your perspective?

MT: Well, from my perspective, it hadn't changed too much. They were still very discriminatory, even all the people that came back, they finally bought houses, now they could buy houses in 1960-something, you could buy a house. But the children had grown, so they could better bring their children, so it was able to buy a house, but they would always show you houses that the real estate was, you didn't show Japanese a house north of, I guess north of Lincoln Avenue, you can't show west of this street. You couldn't show anybody, Japanese in the east end where my father put in all those clients, eastern side. But when I was... so in 1957, '59, I guess, '57 I got married, I got sent to Hawaii and came back. And in about 1961 or two, I guess they started to look for a home in Alameda. One year I couldn't find the house. They wouldn't show me a house, there'd be an open house, I would go in, and I put in our bid. And I called, and they would say, "We never got your bid." Real estate people just chuck it out. And I had my hakujin friends, by this time I had a lot of hakujin friends and we'd go in separately and they'd put in a bid and they would be always undermined. I'd tell them I'm going to bid this. They would get a call saying, "We got your bid," they wouldn't call me.

I went to the California Real Estate Association, real estate commission, I guess it was. And they said, "We don't, hard for me to believe you, Mr. Takano." I said, "Why?" He said, "The Blacks are always... the Japanese have never complained. You must be an anomaly." I said, "Hell, no, I've been doing this for over a year." And so we went around and around. There was one place I went in and it was an open house, I was the only one there, so I got to know the lady, and she said, "Give me a price," and she said, "And if you pay me a thousand dollars more, I'll leave the refrigerator and I'll leave the stove." And I looked at it and thought I'd have to junk it anyway, but that's okay. So you want total whatever it was. And he said, yes, I'll make a bid on it, she said, "Okay, fine." And I had a real estate guy, young guy, and he would be showing some of these homes and he would get blackballed, they would just run 'em up the flagpole and just rip them apart. And so he said, "I couldn't even get your bid in there," so I called him and he said, "Okay, fine, you talked to the owner?" I said, "Yeah." So he put the bid in and talked to the owner, put the bid in. And so the next day, Tuesday, I guess, I called my realtor and I said, "What happened to that house, what happened to the bid?" And he said, "We put it in and nothing happened." So I called the owner. I had her phone number and she said, "Oh, I remember you." She was a really nice lady. I said, "I made a bid," and she said, "I didn't get a bid that weekend at all." I said, "I gave you a bid that you wanted for the stove and the refrigerator. Do you remember that?" She said, "Oh, yeah, of course. You put a bid in for that?" I said, "I did put the whole thing in." She said, "That's odd." So then I went back to the commission again and I had all these papers put in. And they were shaking their head and they said, "We'll take them to court," which they did. But it takes, like, three months to get them to court. And they told, they warned me, they said, "We'll get them to court, but you're not going to get any action on this." All the numbers would be changed, it would be sold at a certain price, and that number will be changed. I said, "But that's okay, let's put the fear of God in them anyway." Then after that, I would run into the real estate people at homes and they would totally ignore me. I mean, they knew who I was. And my father was working for a man named Mr. Sunder and he was the owner of one of the biggest. So I went to see him earlier before the year, my first year, and I said to Mr. Sunder, "I need some help," and he said, "Sure, what do you need, Mr. Takano?" He knew who I was. And I said, "I can't find a house," and he said, "I'll have someone take care of you." Showed me the houses, the rinky-dink houses. So I went back to see him, he said, "How are you doing?" I said, "I can't find a house that I like." He said, "Let me talk to them." So he said, "Come back next week." I came back the next week, and I could see him and he had a glass in the back, you could see it. He wouldn't see me, would not see me.

BN: And this is, you're talking about the early '60s?

MT: Yeah, early '60s, early '60s, yeah, mid-'60s. And what happened was I would get the newspaper every day to see, and one day I was coming home from work, bought the local newspaper at the store, and I was looking at it, and there was a guy, new one in the Alameda newspaper, had bought, it was a new item, new entry. So I raced over there at the address, he was getting transferred to Seattle and he was a marine engineer. So I said, "Would you sell it to me?" I said, "Is this you?" He said, "Yeah." And said, "Where's the real estate agent?" He said, "There is no real estate agent, I want to sell it my myself." And I said, "Okay, would you sell it to me?" And he said, "Of course I would. What's your bid?" I said, "Your bid said, whatever it was, I'll pay that." He said, "Sure, you got it." I said, "You're telling me if I write you a check, you will accept it as a sale?" He said, "Absolutely, I'll write it down for the sale of this house." I gave him a check for five hundred dollars, I said, "Here." He looked at me and he said, "You haven't even gone through the house." And I said, "I went around the house before, and the yard was nice and the house was kept up." I said, "I'm sure the inside is clean." He and his father lived there. Okay by me. And so I got the house and boy, I tell you, when I was moving in, shades were all opening up. But you know, it's the real estate people. When we walked in the first day, the second day I had to go to, we cleaned the house. And then when I went to work that first day, after a week, then they brought a big fruit basket. And the guy across the street came over and he said, "I think you might want to take out, you were looking at some of those trees and you want to take 'em out?" I said, "I do." He said, "You let me know when you want to do it." So I said, "I don't need it." But the roots were big and I couldn't get it out. He came and walked across the street, it was a Saturday. Tried and tried, he said, "I can't get this dang thing out." He said, "Go in and have a beer, I'll be right back." Good thing we worked for the city, he brought a chain and a big truck, hooked it on there, yanked that thing right out, so they were all nice. So it was the people who, they don't care they were nice.

BN: More the real estate people.

MT: Real estate people. I was the first nonwhite to be east of Broadway.

BN: What year was this?

MT: 1964, I think.

BN: So as late as that.

MT: Late as that. No one else... I was the first nonwhite, and my daughter was the first nonwhite in that school, Otis school. So I was scared, I thought, "Are they going to beat up on her?" Kindergarten or first grade or whatever. But she was fine. I told my wife, if anybody gives you any stick, call me at the office. If anything happens, you call me, I'm going to put it up for sale and I'm going to sell it to some idiot, some nonwhite I'm going to sell it to. But anyway...

BN: How was it, I mean, how was it for other, like for Blacks or for other...

MT: Oh, that was the same thing. But now, I was the first to break the line there, and a lot of Japanese living in there now. And I saw a Black family in there. And you go to school, you could see the diverse student body now. Lot of Chinese. Alameda has a lot of Chinese.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

BN: Okay, I'm going to circle and go back a little bit because we jumped ahead. But no, I'm glad you told that story. So you had started, as you mentioned, you had jumped a couple grades earlier. So when you graduated high school you were very young still. And then at that point, what was the name of the high school?

MT: Alameda High School.

BN: Alameda High School. When you got out of there, did you have a sense of what you wanted to do?

MT: No. I think I wrote in the comments that I thought it was because of my lack of education, pre-education. We had good teachers, but they didn't have, like we had a science class. I mean, it would be nothing like the science class here.

BN: You're talking about in camp?

MT: Yeah, in camp.

BN: In Amache?

MT: But anyway, so I thought it was that, but I think more so it was... I think it was the camp experience, I think, that... what's the word? I was hurt deeply, and I think that, and it never healed. I didn't realize that, it was lack of confidence. Before, I used to speak up in class, couldn't speak up in class. Grades, I used to get better than average grades, and I didn't care anymore. I think it was that, I think. So even after I got out of school, I went to a couple of schools and I didn't even last a year in college. I went down to UCLA even one time to sit in a seminar. I had friends at UCLA, they said, "Come on down here." But UCLA was tough because housing was tough. You had to commute for so long.

BN: Still is.

MT: Still is, yeah, still is. I don't know how people do it, gee, you have to have a car, motorcycle or something, or bicycle, motorbike. But anyway, so I went to, after a couple years I just kind of bounced around and I even helped my dad. My dad said, "You're not doing anything, why don't you help me?" So I said, "Okay." I helped him for about eight months, nine months, and I said, "I've got to be doing something." So I enrolled in this private school, business school in Berkeley. And it was really expensive, and I didn't want to hold my dad to it, so I thought, well, he can get me through the first half year and I can work my way through after that. But it was recommended that you wore to the school, coat and tie. Coat and tie? So I used to do that, coat and tie for a while, but I noticed that all the guys didn't all wear coat and tie. But everybody had a coat and slacks. Very business-like. And I got to know some of the people there and they accepted me. The hakujins were just, they rushed into it, the biggest fraternity there and it was nice. I ran for, made me run for office and I ran. So four elected officers in the student body, small school. The president and men's representative with men, and the vice president and the women's representative with women. So there was only four elected officers. So I was fortunate enough to get in there. My life just changed there.

And he told me, my advisor was four years, he said, "You know, Mr. Takano, I keep telling you to change your major." And this is the third year now. And he said, "I'm going to tell you right up front," I said, "to change majors, you got time." I was in merchandising, I specialized in merchandising management. "You got to get out of there." And I said, "Mr. Bedford, you're always telling me to get out. Why do you tell me to get out of that?" And he said, "I didn't have the nerve to tell you for three years, but I'm going to tell you now. They won't hire you." "What do you mean they won't hire me?" "Look around." And at that time, there was, before the pre-Macy's time and there with the white house, and it was the emporium and I. Magnin, Bruce Brothers, they had a big department. You look in there, go walk in there, see if you see an Oriental. See if you see a Black guy in there, you won't. "They won't hire you as a salesman." I said, "Are you kidding me?" He said, "No, I'm not kidding you." I said, "Well, I'm going to change it." He looked at me and he said, "If you're that stubborn, maybe you will. But," he said, "it's going to be tough."

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

MT: So about, I guess it was about... I graduated in April. So about May or June, excuse me, April or May, they had ads in the paper, the big department stores, looking for management training programs. He said, "Come sign up before you graduate." So I went, everywhere I went, they just said, "Gee, we just ran out of employment applications." "Oh, can I come back tomorrow?" "We don't know if we're going to have any more." And a couple that I went to, they said, "We don't hire Japanese," and I said, "Oh." It is true, what Bedford was telling me. So I kept looking around, and they wouldn't hire. But six months prior, I was working for a company called Grant Laboratories while still in school, part time school. And you know the Grant ant sticks? The aluminum things, got jelly in there, you poke it down into the ground? I don't know if you... it's all over. But anyway, the old man there, "I'll hire you." So I was only there part-time, doing administrative work, just doing nothing. But when I told him what I was running into, he said, "Why don't you come out full time? I'll put you on an intern in my sales and marketing staff." Big, Italian guy, you know. I said, "You serious?" He said, "Absolutely." He said, "Yeah, you want to work for me, hey, I'll put you in that staff there." I said, "Okay," so I was working there and I learned a lot. And then I went to see my advisor and I told her what had happened going to the other source, getting turned down. And he said, "Tell me something." I said, "What?" He said, "The president of U.S. Steel, the president of Proctor and Gamble, the president of another company." What do they have in common? I thought I had no idea, making a lot of money. And he said, "They all have direct sales experience. You got to get out in the street and go direct sales door to door. You go door to door." I do a lot of things, but I didn't go door to door. He said, "Well, anybody that's successful in marketing and sales, they know if you go door to door." And I said, "Sure." You know a guy named Lane Nakano?

BN: Uh-huh.

MT: Lane was a good friend.

BN: Okay.

MT: He had a company called Magna Sales. So he was opening up in Oakland, so I find out... he and his wife Fu was my sister's best friend. So Cookie tells me, "Lane's coming up here, he's about to open an office." I went to see him one night.

BN: He's the guy that had, acted?

MT: Go For Broke! actor, yeah. Nice guy, nice guy. So anyway, I went to see Lane, and Lane said, "What are you doing here?" I said, "I just wanted to see what your presentation was like." He was doing interviews that night." Very impressive. He could have sold me a horse that night, let me tell you. [Laughs] But he was really good, and he said, "You interested?" And I said, "I didn't come to be interested, I just came to watch." "But are you interested?" "Yeah, I was interested, it was good, it was good. But I don't think I could ever be..." so we had coffee there until nine o'clock, ten o'clock at night. Before I walked out of there, I signed up with them. What am I doing? But he said, "Keep your own job, just do nights." Lot of these guys are part time, they do it at night. Well, to make a long story short, I did.

BN: What is he selling?

MT: He was selling... he had a line of pots and pans, fine china, cutlery, fine cutlery, beautiful cutlery, and he had one more line, I forgot what the other line... but I said, "I'm not going to be carrying around pots and pans, let me tell you." And fine china, it's heavy, and you crack it, "Let me take the cutlery." The cutlery I was really impressed with, beautiful cutlery, steak knives and butcher knives, carving knives. Nice presentation. Well, I did really well with that thing. [Laughs] And so I was working full time, and I'd finish there at five o'clock, and then I'd go home and take a quick shower and shave. And you start off with friends first, then my sister and she'd give it to... and then you kind of fall into it. And after about a month or so, I was calling on Caucasians, I was calling on people that didn't know Japanese. But I did really well, in fact. And then when I got out of school, I forgot all about it. I was 1-A, I was going to be in the army. So I told my boss at Grant Laboratories, "Mr. Grant," I said, "I'm going to get drafted, so I'm going to give you fair warning, I think I'm going to be leaving." And he said, "Oh, yeah, you're going to get drafted?" "Yeah." So we parted company. So I took that magnet thing and I went out on the peninsula. I started in San Mateo, I had a bunch of referrals over there. So I thought, "I'll go down there." I checked into a motel, and I worked the peninsula from San Mateo all the way down to Palo Alto, Mountain View, for about a week, and came back with contacts. "Here, Lane, here we are, but," I said, "I got to quit."

BN: Were these... was it Japanese cutlery?

MT: Pardon me?

BN: Was it a Japanese product you were selling?

MT: No, Ancienne Maison was the cutlery, French type. The fine china was... I don't know whether, English, I think it was, but beautiful stuff. And the pots and pans, I think they were American stuff. But anyway...

BN: Then just to go back, I don't think we ever said. What was the name of the school that you went to?

MT: Armstrong College.

BN: Armstrong College, this is a private business?

MT: Private school, yeah.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

BN: And then you were drafted?

MT: I was, yeah. Then I was drafted. Gee, you guys get into areas that I forgot. Yeah, I was overseas in Okinawa. And I went to MP school of all things, went to Okinawa. And you have two weeks' orientation and you go to class and then you go to the mess hall and then you see all these guys with bandages and arms this way... what happened to those guys? Oh, the Marines had a weekend off and so they came into town, one of the towns, raising hell. No big deal, they'll live. They're all at least sixty, at least. I'm still growing, I think, I must have been 5'8", 5'9", 135 pounds, 140 pounds. Then they were looking for an interpreter. So a sergeant came up to me and said, "Hey, Takano, you speak Japanese?" I said, "Why?" He said, "This guy named Uchimura from Los Angeles, from California, is rotating back, and the colonel was looking for an interpreter. It's a good job, he said it's the best job in this whole island. That guy has his own car, he never has to come in, he'd just report to anybody. He reports to the colonel. I said, "Okay." He said, "Just call them and make an appointment with this sergeant up there." I made an appointment and the guy looks at me and he said, "You speak Japanese?" I said, "Yes, sir." And he said, "Can you read and write?" "No, sir." I told him I could only speak. He said, "Well, you know what, Takano?" He said, "I got no choice, you're on." "Yes, sir." Gave me a car. "This is my car," he says, "but I'll ask you if I need the car." [Laughs] "You drive it wherever you want." So I was really fortunate. I was working with the CID, the criminal investigation because they needed an interpreter. And I did some interpreting for the colonel. We had our own army, Okinawan army, no one knew this. We had 950 people, they had full uniforms, carbines, and we had two sections, north, south and midsection.

And they had a captain, U.S. captain in charge of each, they reported to the colonel. We have a first meeting and the colonel looks at these guys and he says, "Captains," he said, "this is the new guy, Takano." I don't even have a stripe yet, just came up. And he said, "Anything you want, you ask it. Don't come to me, he'll give you an okay or no." But as it turned out, it was nothing hard to learn. It was stuff that they could have... I was surprised at the inadequacy of the captain, U.S. captain. They couldn't make a decision. They'd call me and they'd say, "Hey, Takano, would you ask the colonel, would you give an appropriation for... we need some new uniforms. We got twenty-five new guys coming out and I got some funding for that." I said, "You got it, not to worry." "You sure?" I said, "Yeah, you got it." Who's going to say no? New recruits. So I said, "Yeah, you got it, take it. Just put in the paperwork," all the easy stuff, you know. But these captains, I was really surprised. Maybe that's why they were in MPs, I don't know. Wouldn't want to meet them in a back alley, I guess. But I had a good time, and I was teaching English, and I would just go out Monday morning and go teach English Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

BN: Who are you... you're teaching to the locals?

MT: Oh, locals, yeah. The kids in Okinawa, they were smart, too, they got smart kids. They could pass all the tests to get into a university or college -- not all of them, I'm sure, but most of them -- in Japan. But they could not pass the conversational. They just couldn't pass the conversational. They couldn't comprehend it, they couldn't speak it. So I used teach them three hours each day, and I used to sneak off and just tell the colonel, "I got a visit this morning, be back at noon." But one day I'm teaching, I'm in uniform and I'm teaching on the blackboard, and some guy's taking a picture with a flash camera. And I had two assistants, one guy had a PhD from Michigan State, and one guy had a master's from Yale, and they're two Okinawan guys, but they could teach them. "This is the bar, this is the object, this is the verb," teach them all that stuff, I just taught them conversational. And this guy's taking pictures, so I asked him after it's over, I said, "Who were those guys?" And he said, "It's from the paper, newspaper, Okinawan paper." "Is he going to publish it?" He said, "Oh, yeah." I said, "You can't do that." He said, "Why?" I said, "I'm not supposed to be here." What happened, the government ran out of funding from the U.S. government, and they had a civilian, U.S. civilian staff, and they weren't going to get paid so they quit. So the Okinawan kids were out of it. So I said, "Hey, I'll do it." Don't have to pay me, don't tell anybody. But anyway, so I said, well, maybe it won't come out, they won't see it, maybe the colonel won't see it. The colonel had another colonel boss, and even the provost marshal.

One day this guy named Murakami, he reads and writes, and he's a career Hawaiian kid, Murakami, he calls me in and he says, "Takano, come to my office." I went over and he says, "What's this?" Shows me these pictures. I said, "Where'd you get that?" And he said, "I take the paper." I said, "Hey, trash it." And he said, "Why?" And I said, "I'm not supposed to be there." He said, "Well, my job is to show the provost marshal all this stuff. Every publication printed here, I go through and pick out the stuff that relates to the U.S. Army. I got to put this in. So I said, "Oh, Murakami, my colonel's going to get in trouble, I'm going to get in trouble." And he said, "No, no, well, I can't help you. You better warn your, does Kohler know about this?" I said, "No." So I go running back to the office and I tell the colonel what happened, and I said, "I have a feeling McKeprin's going to call you in, maybe me too. But I just want to forewarn you what I've been doing on these." He said, "You've been going to teach class on those days that you said you were busy?" I said, "I was busy." [Laughs] And he says, "Well, that's okay." Just then the phone rings, colonel's in the other office, he said, "Kohler, get Takano and you in my office right now." I could hear him, oh, gee. We go marching over there and we sit down, and Colonel McKeprin says, "Takano, I want to congratulate you on your good job. And Kohler," he said, colonel, he said, "why didn't you tell me this was happening?" And he said, "Well, it was not a big deal, so I didn't want to say anything." He said, "Look at this," and he shows the pictures and everything. And the colonel says, McKeprin says, calls his press guy in and, "I want this in every Stars and Stripes, East Asian publication, I want it in the U.S., I want it in everything. This is the kind of stuff we need." And I'm going, oh. Fell in a pool of mud and came out smelling like a rose, you know. And the colonel puts it down, we're walking back to the office and he said, "Good job, Takano." But anyways, I had fun in the army, I did well. I did well.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

MT: But anyway, you wanted to know something about my mother? Did we talk about my mother?

BN: Not much, other than she had these health problems.

MT: Yeah. My mother, I don't think she came from a very wealthy family, but she came from a well-to-do family. Did I tell you this? Seems like I told you.

BN: No.

MT: So she came over and her sister, brother was in, family had a big hardware store, brother was in politics, he was an assemblyman or something like that. And so she got out of school, and her sister, older sister and her husband had a... I told you, didn't I? Had a dry cleaning store? Dry cleaning in San Francisco. So my mother wanted to come over and learn, come to school and learn English. So she stayed with her sister and they were a couple, three years apart. And it was very profitable.

BN: Yeah, you did earlier, about the business.

MT: Yeah, about the business. And then my mother got to know a lot of people there and she was one of two... like in kendo and judo, you were brown belt, green belt, black belt. She was one of two ikebana, who could teach ikebana flower arrangement in the United States. She was educated that way. And so she was teaching that for a little bit. Later, after she got married and was living here, the Fairmont Hotel and Mark Hopkins, they would call her and ask her to make flower arrangements for them in the lobby, you know. Not all the time, but during a big celebration or something, she would go up and put in an arrangement. And then she was teaching ikebana. But she played the biwa, and most people don't know what the biwa was at the time. I think it came from China and it was either the Ming Dynasty or the Qin Dynasty, that only the royal court could hear that music, and there were only a select few people who could play it. So that was restricted, but I guess the Japanese got in, got out. My mother took up biwa, and she was the only one that ever played that. Everybody was saying koto or shamisen or something, but she was playing the biwa. I watched the Korean Shen Yun symphony, they have an instrument just like the biwa, looks like my mother's biwa. But anyway, it's an interesting instrument. So she was educated and knew how to cook, boy, she was a good cook. Then she got, at age thirty-seven she got arthritis. And it wasn't too bad at the time, but kept getting worse. By the time she was, the war started, her hands were kind of gnarled and she couldn't walk too good. Boy, she was so young yet. She died at seventy-eight, I guess, so for forty years she was... and at the end there, she was in a wheelchair. Still cooking every day for my father. We had to redo the kitchen, you know, you had the cutting board? You have the cutting board on top, and then we had to redo that so that the cutting board is in the middle. So she was in a wheelchair, and she had the best tools on top, the knives were on the first shelf, first drawer, and she could cook. But she was a fine lady, my mother. Boy, never raised her voice, never. My father did. [Laughs] But my mother didn't.

BN: How long did your father continue with his gardening?

MT: Well, he died in 1984, he was ninety-three years old, I think. And he quit when he was eighty-seven. Every day he was gardening, six days a week.

BN: Was your mother similar in age?

MT: He was eight years younger, eight or nine years younger. She died in 1978.

BN: So he outlived her by a few years.

MT: Yeah, about five or six years, yeah. I asked my mother one day, I said, because she was a pretty lady and I said, "You must have had a lot of suitors, right?" She said, "Yeah, I had a few." "How come you picked Dad and coming to a country, getting out of Japan?" "He's the only one that told me, 'I will take care of you 'til the day I die.' The only one that told me that." He said, "Yeah, I'll give you everything, I'll give you a big house and children, but your father's the only one that told me that." And he did. Yeah, she was a good lady.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

BN: So I want to go back now to, or, I guess, forward, because you were talking about your time in the army. And I think you wrote that you were drafted in '55 and you came out at the end of '57?

MT: '57, yeah.

BN: And then that's kind of when you went into the travel...

MT: Yeah, travel. I was surveying land there for them. Somebody got me as soon as I got out of the army, said, "Come with this Pacific Farm Rating Bureau, survey some land." I did, but I was never home. I was gone for two weeks, they gave me a car, "Go." We had teams so we worked with teams. But I left that, and so this guy from Pan Am, his name was Kozakura, he was the head of the Japanese department. And he said, "Mas," he said, "you're going to get married pretty soon?" I said, "Yeah, maybe one of these days." And he said, "You can't be doing what you're doing." I told him what I was doing, he said, "Why don't you join Pan American?" "Doing what?" And he said, "I'll get you into the management training program." I said, "Okay, that sounds pretty good." So that was in June or July. And they have it twice a year, the class. "The November one is full, but I got you in already in for the March one. So I'm going to get you a job in the tour company so that by the time you get management training, you'll have a leg up on everybody. You'll know what travel is, tour operators, how Pan Am works with the tour operators, travel agents and group operators." I said, "Okay." So he put me in this company, and it's a subsidiary of Airborne Freight Corporation, it was a freight corporation but they had travel agencies. And there was a guy named Chiura Obata who was a professor emeritus, and he led these tours. This company had the biggest Asian tourists from America, from the United States, and successfully ran, we ran two or three tours, they were full up every time. And so I worked with Professor, well, he was Professor Obata, put together the programs. And it was in the marketing side, so I knew kind of, a little bit about advertising, marketing. We had a marketing guy, and he was really happy to get a lot of stuff off his desk.

BN: So who was the audience for this?

MT: Caucasians.

BN: So this is white Americans...

MT: White Americans.

BN: ...touring Japan and the Far East?

MT: Touring Japan first and then Hong Kong.

BN: And Obata was the one organizing the itinerary?

MT: Yeah, he was just a figurehead, he would just go along.

BN: Okay. But he was... because he was a well-known Japanese guy?

MT: Well-known guy, yeah. Well-known guy, yeah. Everybody knew him. And we had it limited to thirty-five people.

BN: That was successful, though?

MT: Oh, yeah. But we had a white Russian, and she spoke Japanese perfectly. I think she fled Russia and raised in Japan. So she spoke English and Russian and Japanese, so she led the group. And so she could converse with Obata very well. So then this company sent me to Hawaii to open up an office there, a couple offices there. Because at the time, they were propeller airplanes, but it would take nine hours to get to Hawaii, and these people pretty much, on the older side, they get off the aircraft and nine hours, or spend a couple days in Hawaii. And then I would make sure my staff would take care of them, put 'em on the plane and take 'em to Japan. And on the way back, they were all scattered, but they would still want to stop in Hawaii and we made sure we took care of 'em in Hawaii. And then my plan for me was to go two years in Hawaii, two years in Hong Kong, and two years in Japan. Well, during the war, at the time, ironic it's starting now in Taiwan, Quemoy and Matsu, they were bombing each other and China was bombing them and everything else. So our company was hesitant to open up in Hong Kong. So I ended up in Hawaii about, a little over three years, and I said, "Either send me forward or send me home." I didn't plan on spending four years in Hawaii. So they said, "Yeah, we'll bring you back home."

BN: Which company is this now? This is not Pan Am, right?

MT: No, no. So in the meantime, March comes along. And excuse me, November comes along, we were having coffee, and he said, "How's it going?" I said, "This company has sent me to their, really treating me nicely, Albert." I said, "They made me open an office in Portland, one in Los Angeles, and now I'm running this office here, the people here, I've got seniority. I haven't been here a half year and I'm the boss and I don't think that's right. And I'm kind of uncomfortable." But he said, "I know, I talked to Dell, Dell Cherill was my boss, and he said, "I talked to Dell and Dell said he's not going to let you go." And I said, "What's going to happen?" He said, "Well, I don't know, Mas." He said, "If they like you that much, maybe you ought to stay there. I hate to lose you, maybe you could stay there and see how long you like it." So I said, "Okay," because now they're going to send me to Hawaii and they're going to do all this stuff. So I told Albert, "They're going to send me to Hawaii and Japan and Hong Kong." He said, "Okay, do that." He said, "Maybe you could come back to Pan Am then, we wouldn't have to send you to training." I said, "Okay." So I didn't go to the training program. Then when I was in Hawaii, I opened up the office and then I came back. And when I was leaving there, I met a lot of Hawaii people, of course. My office was, I lived in Waikiki, my office was in Waikiki, I knew all the people, and the industry was not that big at the time, it was just starting. So the people over there said, "Why don't you stay? I'll give you a job here." I said, "No, I want to go home," and came home. And by chance, I was doing some work for a company that we were building homes, second homes. Our eastern boundary was a common boundary with the Bohemian Club. I don't know if you're familiar with Bohemian Club, it's the most exclusive club, I think, in the state of California for anybody who's anybody, I mean, presidents come there. And so we were developing this land, and the market just fell apart. So I said, "Well, it's okay." I was walking down in Union Square and I run into this guy who was the vice president of Hawaiian Airlines, and he asked what I was doing and I said, "Looking for a job." But I had another job, but I said, "But I'm looking for another job, I'm not sure I like it." He said, "We're going to open our first Hawaiian Airlines office in San Francisco, why don't you take it?" He said, "You know Hawaii, you know it well, and you know us." "Oh, maybe." But he gave me a form to fill out, and like Cookie, it took me two months to send it in, but I sent it out. And they came flying over and they said, "We want you to visit our office." And I went back and talked to their, if he had a company psychologist for crying out loud, and passed that. They said, "Yeah, we'd like to have you on board." So I joined Hawaiian Airlines.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

BN: And before we go back there, I want to go back and cover a couple things.

MT: Sure.

BN: Somewhere along the line, you got married, right?

MT: Yeah.

BN: That's after the army and after Pan Am.

MT: After the army and then...

BN: After Hawaii?

MT: No. I got married, and within the year, I was transferred to Hawaii. She said, "Hawaii?" [Laughs]

BN: This is, she's not a Hawaii, she's from here?

MT: Yeah, local girl here. El Cerrito girl, yeah.

BN: So, but then she went with you to Hawaii?

MT: Yeah, right.

BN: So you're there as a young married person.

MT: Yeah.

BN: And then other question I had, we talked a little bit about this before, was as a kotonk now, what was it like, what as different about living in Hawaii especially as a Japanese American?

MT: Yeah. I used to laugh, people asked me about that. It was almost as bad as when I came back from camp, getting chased home from school. I had a... you were in Hawaii, you remember the Hayashi family, Ben Hayashi? He built some of those hotels, the Miramar Hotel in Waikiki, the hotel. His son, Alan, went to Stanford, and I met Alan here. He was working part-time at the gas station, who was a good friend of mine, Leo Ikeda. And so I got to know Alan really well, so when I moved to Hawaii, I guess he heard I was coming over there, so he called me, looked me up, and he said, "Hey, Mas," he said, "I got married, and this is..." anyway, to make a long story short, he said, "I was there a couple of months," and he said, "It's Thanksgiving." He said, "It's your first Thanksgiving away from home, why don't you come over to my house? I have four of my best friends and their wives, and I always have their Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'd like you to be part of them." I said, "Okay, let's see what it is." So we went, my wife and I went up there, and typical Asian party, the girls in one place, and the men in the other place. So he brings Betty and I over to meet the ladies and brings us over to meet the guys. And one guy, they're Chinese Hawaiian, they're Hawaiian, Japanese Hawaiian. Father's a vice president of a bank, one's a superior judge, a superior court judge, big people, young guys, about the same age as me, I guess. And so as soon as Alan leaves with Betty, goes back there, they looked at me and they said, "What are you doing here?" "I was invited to dinner." "No," he said, "what are you doing in Hawaii?" And I said, "Well, I was sent here." And they said, "We don't need your kind." "What do you mean, 'my kind'?" And he said, "You're Japanese from the Mainland?" I said, "Yeah." "We don't need you. You saying we don't know how to run business here?" I mean, each one of them. We went round and around, and I'm thinking, "What is happening here?" I said, "Maybe you don't understand. Alan and I happen to be good friends." He said, "You be friends with Alan, you don't have to come here." Anyway, so I look over and I see how my wife is doing, and she's sitting on the couch by herself. So I walk over there and I said, "How are you doing?" "Same as you, I could hear you." [Laughs] "You too, huh?" She said, "Yeah, really bad." I said, "Well, I can't leave, let's have dinner. We could leave, we won't even have dessert, we'll just leave." So we had dinner and we left. So the next day, Alan called me and he says, "Hey, I heard what happened to you and your wife. I really apologize." I said, "Don't worry about it. I heard about the feelings some of the Hawaiians have against kotonks." But he said, "You're not a kotonk, you're my friend. This won't happen again, I guarantee you." He said, "Don't forget, I told you about Christmas. You come for Christmas dinner, too." Because it would be a lonesome Christmas without being home. I said, "Okay." Christmas comes, same thing, exactly the same. "You still here?" It was terrible.

Then I opened an office, and what happened was I was with Airborne. So the vice president in the Pacific region, my job was to come over thirty days earlier, find a place to live, find office space, hire staff. "Do that, and that's your job for thirty days," my boss tells me. I come over and they put me in a hotel. When I get off the airplane, the vice president says, "You're not going to the hotel, you're staying at my house." I said, "No, I have reservations, I got a car." "We got an extra car, you can use my car, you stay at my house." "Okay." The whole family's there, the three kids are there, and they give me a lei. You know, the pictures with the leis like that? You know, take a picture, they sent it back to headquarters. He's reporting to me. God, terrible. Right off the bat with him, too. But anyway, forgot where I was going with that. So I had a staff, and so he said, "I got to go." In the morning I get up and he said, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I've got to look for office space." "I got the office space." "Got the office space?" yeah, I got a nice place, brand new place right in Waikiki, right on Kalakaua Avenue, you'll like it. I said, "I got to get staff." He said, "I hired a manager, and she'll hire staff. She'll know." I said, "Oh, that will make it easier. Okay, as long as she knows what I want." So I go to the office, I get in the borrowed car and I go down to look at the office, see where the office is. I got a key and walked in. And here's the manager sitting there, it's his wife. [Laughs] "Edith, what are you doing here?" She says, "I'm the manager. I'm going to start hiring your staff." And I'm thinking, I'm in deep trouble here, they're very close.

Anyway, I had a staff of... Edith, I had Elaine, Coney, Trudy, Drew, and another guy, so got six people on the staff. Edith talks to me, of course, but the other five people, they don't say anything, they don't even talk to me. I mean, I'd say, "Good morning," they say, "Good morning." "You have a good weekend?" "Yeah, it was okay." "What did you do over the weekend?" "Oh, nothing." Nothing. I have a staff meeting Monday morning, go over everything we went to the week before. They do their work, good workers, they did everything I asked. Six months later, they called me and they said, "Could we have a long lunch today?" I said, "Sure, whatever you want, no problem." Edith's not there, I think, "Take a long lunch." "We want you there, too. Could you close the office?" I said, "Yeah, we can." So I'm thinking they're all going to quit or I'm going to fire 'em, one or the other. I'm up to here with this. So at the end of lunch, I said, "You guys called the lunch, what do you want?" And they said, "We want to apologize to you." And I said, "Why? Because I'm going to fire you, I think." They went, "Oh." I said, "You don't talk to me. You do your work, don't misunderstand me, you guys are great workers, but we don't have, we're not a team at all. I tell you what to do, you do it. You don't tell me, 'We should be doing this, you might want to do this,' we're not a team, it's just me on the top telling you guys what to do. It's not working." So anyway, they want to apologize, and I said, "Why?" And they said, "Because we didn't know what a kotonk was." "I'm no different than your neighbor, for crying out loud." "Well, so what do you think about kotonks?" "Well," they said, "you're really nice and you're kind and generous, and we really feel bad about this." And I said, "So you're going to quit?" And they said, "No, we would like to stay here." And I said, "Okay. We get into a team, you can stay here." Next day it was page turned. Ten years later, I was getting flowers from them. I was not with the company anymore, they were sending me flowers every Fourth of July, for some reason, Fourth of July. Nice people.

BN: But it took a while.

MT: Took a while, yeah.

BN: Like how long did it take for this?

MT: Nine months.

BN: Wow.

MT: Nine months and I was up to here. When they said they were going to have dinner, I thought this would be a good time. If they don't quit, I'm going to fire 'em. I just had it. Because now I know what kind of people I want. But anyway...

BN: But after three or four years or whatever...

MT: Yeah, three years there, they were great.

BN: You had no desire to stay longer?

MT: No, I had no desire to stay there. Too small. But I came back as Hawaiian Airlines. So that wasn't so bad, I think I could have... I didn't want to, it was too small. But if I were with an airline, I could get on an airplane and go back and forth all the time, you know. But when you're not in the airline business, gee, it's tough. You get rock hugger, you know, rock happy, I guess.

BN: Yeah, "island fever" they call it.

MT: Island fever there. In fact, when the big companies, the Big Four over there, when they used to hire people from the Mainland, in the contract that they signed, the executives, they had to go back to the Mainland for two weeks every year. It was a must.

BN: Yeah, I know how that is. [Laughs]

MT: Tough.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

BN: So, okay, we have... we should wind up, start to wind up. I know you joined Hawaiian Airlines and then you opened mainland offices for them, right?

MT: Yes. I opened twelve offices. And you know, this is funny, if I could just digress...

BN: Sure, sure.

MT: Even the Hawaiian Airlines people, I was a kotonk. One guy, I was an orphan, we have a sales meeting, they wouldn't even talk to me, you know, for about three years, four years. And then the Hawaii crest, the tourism started to crest. Then all of a sudden I had four offices, six offices, eight offices. And I think we were probably generating probably seventy, eighty percent of the revenue, maybe. And all of a sudden everybody's attention, right? I don't think any of you guys were...

BN: At that time, was Hawaiian flying from the Mainland?

MT: Before I left, we started the service. I left in '84.

BN: Oh, so you were there for quite a while.

MT: Yeah. And we started in about '82, I think, we started. We were trying to generate that business, trying to get in. And United Airlines kept coming after us and said, "Don't do it, don't do it." I said, "Hey," they said, "We're your biggest account." I said, "Yeah, I know, but we're going to die. Just flying neighbor islands? We're going to die." And they said, "If you leave us, we're going to give all our business to Aloha Airlines, your competitor." And I said, "We got a... if we're going to die, I'd rather dive into the Pacific Ocean, trying to cross the Pacific Ocean than going around the islands." So we started and it just turned the faucet on, wow. But we did well, we did well.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

BN: And I want to switch gears now, and one of the standard stories you hear from Sansei is that their parents didn't talk about camp or all of that stuff. Did you talk to that about your kids?

MT: No.

BN: Or, I mean, to your kids?

MT: No. They asked once in a while and they were curious. Two years ago, Fourth of July, for my birthday, they took me on a reunion to camp. They hadn't been there, we were going to go one time.

BN: This is the Amache reunion?

MT: Amache, yeah. And they had a mini reunion there, too. So I said, "Could we take Cookie?" because she wants to go. They said, "Oh, yeah, we'll take Cookie." So my three kids, they were good kids, they paid for the airfare, the hotel and everything, car rental. They took the two of us and we all went there for four days, and it was nice. And I think that might have answered a lot of questions for them because they were, we had little seminars here and there.

BN: Is this a reunion or is this one of the pilgrimages?

MT: It was...

BN: I mean, did you go to the site?

MT: Yeah, we went to the site. We went right to the site there, we flew into Denver and then we drove down. And we spent four days in camp, we stayed in a motel in Lamar.

BN: Had you been back before?

MT: Yes, I had been before, like eight years, ten years before. And it was unusual. We were standing there and it was free time. And the professors from the University of Denver, they're doing all of this preservation of Amache and all this they're doing, they're doing the archaeology. They said, "Why don't you go down and see those two ladies down there? It's a plain field, and they're digging around something, they found a lot of stuff. So we got in the car, we went down there, and there were two ladies and they're working for their PhD. One already had her PhD, and the other one was working for her PhD from Cal. So anyway, they were digging around, and we got to talking, and they said, "We found a lot of artifacts here in this block." He said, "Do you know what block you were in?" I said, "Yeah, we were in Block 9-D, 7-A and -B." She looked at me, "You're kidding. This is 9-E, right here." I said, "What barrack?" "7-A. 7-A and B." She's got the GPS thing going, she's wandering around, and she says, "Come here, Mas, come here. Stand right there. This is the threshold to your barrack, to your building." I said, "You're kidding." And I said, "You know anything about... my father put in a brick, he put in a lawn, and he lined it with bricks like this to make it look nice." And they put in a tree, and he put wood around that. So they were looking around and digging around and they found the bricks right there. And the wood was there but it was all torn up, you couldn't even tell it was wood. But it's right here, I said, "Yeah." Anyway, it was amazing.

BN: How long ago was this?

MT: Huh?

BN: How long ago was this?

MT: Two years ago.

BN: Oh, recent.

MT: Three years ago.

BN: Oh, probably the last pilgrimage before the pandemic.

MT: Oh, yeah, just before the pandemic, just before the pandemic.

BN: Yeah, they're having another one next month.

MT: Amache?

BN: Yeah.

MT: They have it quite often, yeah.

BN: Yeah, because Amache just got national park status.

MT: Yeah, got NPS, yeah. We were working with them and we got it. Do you know this Christen Leone? She's kind of spearheading this thing. She's in Hawaii now, she used to be in Berkeley, so I think she's in Hawaii now, I think. I've never met her, but lot of correspondence back and forth.

BN: I don't think I have either. But these days, with Zoom and so on, you work with a lot of people you never meet before.

MT: Yeah.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 21>

MT: I'll tell you something ironic. I was going, my birthday's in June, so my kids said, "We're going to take you to Amache." And in June, I was appointed the Alameda's Fourth of July parade, what do you call it?

BN: Grand Marshal?

MT: Grand Marshal.

BN: Oh, nice.

MT: And what's really unusual is the fact that... and not unusual, they'd take me on a reunion on Fourth of July, day after Fourth of July. So I'm thinking when I got on that convertible, and said, "What do I do, Mayor?" Back at the mayor, he said, "Just smile and wave." And I'm thinking, when I came back from camp, you guys used to chase me home from school, I feel there's going to be a bunch of guys out there that I went to high school with, and here I am, the Grand Marshal. So I said, I was going past, and my neighbor said, "I'm going to have my kids out there," on this certain corner. So, "When you get there, would you make sure you wave to my kids and say hi to them? They're going to be really excited." I said, "Okay." Going by, and going on this caravan. It's the biggest Fourth of July parade in the United States, it's either by size or by the number of participants. We went around the whole island, came back, and there's a long line still waiting to go yet when we finished. But we're only going eight, ten miles an hour. But anyway, I see the kids out there, so I see the kids and they say, "Uncle Mas," and they're Caucasian kids, waving. And I'm waving at 'em, and some guy in the back says, "Hey, Mas, all five fingers, come on." And I was thinking, you know, I thought about that because I got chased home from school and guys wouldn't sell me a house, and I went through hell to make a home and living for my children and my family. And I just thought about that the whole trip, waving at everybody and they're all waving. And I saw some guys from high school come out, and a guy from Hawaii came out, he was a Maui boy. And I said, "You living here now?" He said, "Yeah. You know, I moved over here." I said, "Why didn't you call me?" He said, "Yeah, we moved there." But that was a really odd feeling. Full circle.

BN: Yeah.

MT: But anyway, it was... I had a, well, like everybody else going to camp, we had a unique experience. Who else went to camp, concentration camp? Who else got chased home from school? Who else? And when I went to Hawaiian Airlines, the president called me in and he said, "We voted you in as senior management," the vice president of the company. And I think at that time, there were no Japanese that were vice president of an airline company. We were a small company, but, you know, still. Now there are a couple in there, Alaska put one on, I think, maybe. Company treated me good, too. But I worked like hell, though. Pardon me, I worked really hard. [Laughs] I worked really hard, yeah. But anyway, we all did, and it was fun.

BN: Okay. I think that's a good place to stop. Is there anything else you'd like to add, though, at the end?

MT: Yeah. I still wonder how my life would have been if I didn't go to camp.

BN: Right, yeah.

MT: Whether it would have been better or worse. I think I learned something in camp, some I don't really relish, you know. But I really wonder about that. Everybody that went to camp has that same feeling, I'm sure. But I was fortunate. I was ten to thirteen, and I didn't get affected too much educationally. I thought I didn't, but I did, but not as bad as if I were fourteen, eighteen, you couldn't go to college, you were just put into the workforce. But anyway... but I want to thank you guys, yeah. Thank you for everything.

BN: Thank you very much.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.