Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Frank Miyamoto Interview IV
Narrator: Frank Miyamoto
Interviewers: Alice Ito (primary), Tatsuya Fukunaga (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: July 7, 2003
Densho ID: denshovh-mfrank-04-0010

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FM: Incidentally, it came about in the last four or five years that I went to Alaska, that I no longer worked at the filling machine. For whatever reason, I was selected to do a job that the white personnel wanted done, namely to pack, hand-pack -- not machine-pack -- hand-pack, king salmon. Now, the king salmon came in numbers into our, because they would be caught in the nets, but they could not be machine-packed and so there was a question of what, you know, you don't want to throw away these beautiful king salmon, the best salmon there is, as a matter of fact. And so I had the job, I was given the job of hand-packing these king salmon, beautiful fish, weighing as much as seventy, eighty pounds, great, beautiful fish. My job was to cut off the heads and tail and so on. Got the thing, just manually handled the salmon in a fashion that the machines would for the other kinds of salmon. I had a, I had a separate area where I was to do this kind of work. So I got special treatment, and I got special pay for this. And all these cans of hand-packed king were going to Bushman and the president of the company and the white pack-, personnel at the top of this... just to indicate the kind of hierarchy of social relations that existed within the system, and in which I curiously played a part. I didn't have a keen sense of what I was involved in, but of course as a hand-packer, doing this kind of job, I think I had a kind of special status in the job.

Again, work, the sense of workmanship comes in here. You had to have very sharp knives in order to do this hand-packing work. And an Issei, an old-timer, taught me how to sharpen knives. He said, "I used to watch the Chinese cannery workers years ago who showed, they wouldn't show me, but if you kept an eye on what they were doing, you could see how they were sharpening knives so they would be sharp all day, even if you cut away on a fish." And he taught me that you should do this and that in order to have sharp knives, necessary for a job such as hand-packing salmon.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.