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FM: So then, there were other mechanics, and white mechanics and low, lower level workers. There was a white crew that had their own lodging, separate from the rest of the crew. Then there was the Nagamatsu contractor. He had a brother I didn't see very often, came to Waterfall. But Mr. Nagamatsu, one of the brothers, spent virtually all the time at Waterfall. Again, because Bushman and Fredell was there, he made this headquarters. And under him was a foreman whose name was Jack. I can't remember his Japanese name. We always called him Jack and that was it. Now, the relationship was -- between the workers and Mr. Nagamatsu as well as Jack -- was very cordial and I never felt that there was any difficulty, conflict between workers and these people. In fact, their attitude seemed to be, "We have hired you and as long as you can do your job effectively, why, there's no issue to be raised." And Jack, for example, who was a very nice and reasonably intelligent man, whom I liked very much, was never offensive at any time, to my knowledge. In fact, he was an extremely quiet man who almost ran the show by not doing anything. It wasn't that, that's not a true... but it was as if he was not doing very much. I mean, he was effective in that sense of minimizing his show of power or show of force and yet handling situations in such fashion as to in few quiet words, say do this, or that, and so on. And by and large you could say that the crews were well-trained enough so that they could handle their jobs without much supervision. The other thing is that Nagamatsu company was smart enough to retain or, smart enough and effective enough to retain workers year after year so they didn't have to oversee the crew all that much. In any event, the whole system worked very well without an excessive amount of supervision from the top, and this was true both on the white crew side -- white personnel side as well as the Asian crew.

Oh, and the, besides Mr. Nagamatsu and the foreman, there was also the cook. The cook is very important in a system like this. You know, if you eat every day, three times, or four times a day, and the food is not all that great... for breakfast you have misoshiru and rice and takuan or tsukemono. This is the kind of breakfast you would get. And if you have it day after day, at least for Nisei, if you're not accustomed to this kind of breakfast, why, seems a little painful. But, if you knew the cook, why, every now and then you could get a fried egg or something like this. And so there was this type of relationship involved between the workers and the cook, who was a very nice guy, he has his assistant, and their job, incidentally, was to keep the bunkhouse and the area clean and particularly take care of the bathhouse. The bathhouse was a typically Nihon, Nihonjin no furoba, you know, you build a fire underneath the ofuro and you have a space where you wash yourself and... I mean, you soak yourself and wash yourself outside. It was that kind of a ofuro. And, however, from a standpoint of hygiene you think, "Good God. I used to take baths with these fifty, a hundred other workers every day in the same tub," you kind of cringe at the thought of it. They didn't have showers. They probably do now. I'm sure they do, but... and the toilets were outhouses, and I won't tell you what the urine collection was. [Laughs] But anyway, the cook and his assistant were the caretakers of the bunkhouse area in that sense.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.