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SN: If I could, I'd like to go back to having you describe the daily community a little bit more. Now, earlier you said there were approximately twenty-five families in Bellevue?

SH: Twenty-five to thirty families, yes.

SN: Can you describe a little bit more about what that community looked like? For example, like, were the farms, the Japanese farms right next to each other, or were they separated? If you could go into a little more detail.

SH: They were grouped together, not by necessity, but by the availability of land. There was three major areas, we call it Bellevue, I lived in the middle section, middle portion, between Bellevue, present-day Bellevue and Lake Washington, Medina area, it's still called Medina. There was seven, eight farmers there. There was a couple of greenhouses. And where I lived, there was seven farms in a row. And then further east, there was another area, another seven or eight farmers all in a row, 10, 12 acre tracts. Those were the three major areas. There were some that was off by themselves. If one farmed there and the ground was pretty good, then the farm, somebody came there, and, you know, they grouped together. The Japanese, Isseis especially, were... liked to be not by themselves, I mean, a community, a little community.

SN: So it sounds like you had a Japanese language school, and I think you said you had a clubhouse that the Issei...

SH: Had a what?

SN: I want to say a clubhouse, but maybe that's not the right word. Oh, I'm sorry, you called it a public hall.

SH: Yes. Our parents had to have a meeting place, and so they built a Japanese Association Hall, they called it. All by donated labor, they did buy the lumber. But there was a couple of good carpenters from Japan, I mean, so they didn't have to hire a carpenter, they just built that with all by volunteer labor. And it served as a Buddhist church. And then when the Seinenkai, young people's club was formed, we put on plays in the winter, to raise money. We held, it was big enough, almost regulation to have a basketball floor on it, and we played basketball there in the winter and put on shows, shibais and stuff in the wintertime to raise money. And then a few years after the association hall, the parents decided we need to have a Japanese language school, so they... keep the offspring learning a little bit about the language instead of all English, they couldn't communicate otherwise. So, they built a two-room schoolhouse. It was, school was on Saturday, and Saturday evening school. And then, little later on, they had an evening language school during the week also.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.