<Begin Segment 28>

AI: Well, perhaps, in wrapping up this section on the union activities, I was wondering whether, in your last couple of seasons at the cannery, if you noticed any changes, whether in living and working conditions --

FM: Yes.

AI: -- the pay, or perhaps other kinds of changes which may or may not have been tied directly to the union --

FM: Yes.

AI: -- activity?

FM: There were changes, as I recall now. But in my recollection, they were not dramatic. The food changed, and improved. I'm sure, it must have been -- yet, it was not, not the kind of change that would... that led me to remember it clearly, until you raised the question as to whether this was so or not. As I recall, instead of the bathhouse, suddenly we had shower, shower heads, it was just a large room where men would shower, kind of set-up. And that was an improvement. The bunkhouses were still the bunkhouses that we always had before. The toilets were not improved as far as I can remember. And the work was not really very different. What happened was, that, the one important thing that I remember clearly was that suddenly, in order to get the job, one would go, not to the Nagamatsu contract office, but would go to a labor union office. And you'd have to have a union card in order to be a worker. And that was a matter of concern for many Nisei because it wasn't a sure thing that you could get a union card, even if you had worked for many years in Alaska. You had to get approval of some kind for this. I don't recall whether there were any Nisei who did not get a job, but I do know that there was a concern about the getting the card which would enable them to get, go to the cannery that they had had in the past. That was a dramatic difference.

And that being the case, the position of Nisei relative to Filipinos now suddenly was different, clearly. And also, in the canneries, this let to the circumstance where you had the sense that the Nisei were no longer in the superior or advantaged position over the Filipinos that they had been in before. The advantaged position of the Nisei before was not clear. It was just a kind of a mental attitude as to what was true of the circumstance. But nevertheless, the attitude was, you now had to deal with a different kind of leadership in the canneries than before. However, the jobs, jobs as far as I can recall did not change all that dramatically. What did change was the composition of the workers was increasingly more Filipino than Japanese and this was a result of the union card requirement and also the fact that your friends are no longer going and therefore, things are changing in that regard, in that sense, and therefore, you're not going to the cannery as Japanese Americans might have otherwise. So this kind of change went on. This meant that positions within the cannery also gradually changed, but the positions were already affected, primarily, not by ethnic background, but by skill, number of years of experience, intelligence in a sense, how bright were you in dealing with the more complicated kinds of problems. And at the time when I started, under the contract system, there were Filipinos in skilled positions as well as in the unskilled positions just as was true for the Japanese and Japanese Americans. So I didn't see that that circumstance changed radically, except that, as the composition of the work staff changed, you had obviously more Filipinos in higher positions than before. So that's my recollection of it.

AI: And perhaps, just to clarify for people who may not realize, that in this case, the union was led by, largely the Filipinos.

FM: Yes, I would say so. It was increasingly, and they were the leaders of the protest that created the CIO univers-, the union. People like Dyke Miyagawa and George Taki, as I recall, were part of this kind of leadership of the union movement, but I don't know to what extent they survived in those leader-, or remained in those leadership positions. Increasingly it became a Filipino union. Yes. And I think, again, I mentioned earlier the kind of mentality that makes a difference in what kind of working population you have. The Iss-, the Japanese people, by history, the immigrant population is middle-class-oriented, surprisingly so. And the reason is that the history of Japan, even under the Tokugawa period, was already becoming a kind of a middle-class-oriented population, even at the level of the tenant farmers and the low level farmers from whom the immigrant population was largely drawn. The organization of the society was such that it was middle-class-oriented enough to make it possible for the Japanese society in, under Meiji, to suddenly transform itself into a capitalistic system. And you can understand why the Meiji transformation was so successful and so quick given that this kind of middle-class-orientation was already embedded in the Japanese population. So the immigrants, then, coming over from Japan, are not the kind of immigrants who largely populated the immigrant population on the East Coast, or even on the West Coast here who might be called proletarian-oriented, or at least working-class-oriented in the sense that these were not people who felt themselves tied to the larger system or felt themselves as having the potential of moving up within the existing system. Rather, they saw... the working class population sees itself as somewhat distinct from those who are running the show up here, the workers, they see themselves as someone who's having to get their employment from this managerial class up there. Whereas, as I say, the middle-class-orientation is, "I'm down here but I expect to get up there," and how do you do it, well, by education for example, or by other kinds of means of getting up there. This is not the orientation of a working-class population. Now for historical reasons, as I say, the Filipinos were more of a working-class oriented population, therefore, in a sense, better fitted for union activities, which is a protest of the lower level population against those in the upper level society rather than a middle-class-orientation which is a population just trying to get up there to join the people up there. You see, the Nisei, after all, are products of the Issei background and were oriented in that fashion more than the Filipinos. And the Nisei, therefore, are not, were not as effective as union organizers or participants in that kind of movement.

AI: [Addressing TF] Did you have any additional questions on this section?

TF: Not really.

FM: If not, I'd like to move on.

AI: Yes.

FM: Yeah.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.