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-04-0032

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AI: So, just before this break you were describing the physical beauty of the setting of the cannery, and maybe if you could also discuss the layout of the buildings there.

FM: Yes. What I'm describing is the Waterfall cannery. And many canneries were like this, however, isolated canneries, nothing else but the cannery and the workers required to carry on the work there. At Waterfall, in this beautiful setting, as a cannery, had to have a dock that would be deep enough and long enough to handle freighter, freight ships that would come in and load the cases of salmon when they were completed. So you have the dock, and the dock, of course, serves as the place where the fishing boats and the scow, the trap tenders come in, so you have to have a set-up for unloading the salmon at that point. And from the unloading you had to have channels or a conveyer belt or canals, so to speak, that would transport the fish from the dock to the canal -- the cannery itself. Now the cannery itself is essentially a long warehouse building and at one end is the intake of the fish and put into bins the size of this room, twelve by twelve, maybe or, and deep enough to hold as many as five to ten thousand fish. And there would be many of these bins because at a given time there might be as many as thirty thousand fish brought in on a given day, rather unusual to have that many, but you had to have space for that. Then, in this long warehouse kind of set-up you'd start with the "iron chink," and the fish as it's fed into this first machine would be run down the length of this warehouse kind of set-up, through the slimer position, the filling machine, the patching table, the can topper, vacuum machine, down to the, the, ovens at the far end. And at the far end, because you have the ovens, you have to have a steamer set-up for creating the hot water and hot steam for cooking and usually a diesel engine down there also attached to the steam engine arrangement to power the whole electrical system of the cannery. Then you had to have a second warehouse along parallel to which the fish cans which already filled and cooked and so on could be moved over, and there they would be labeled and cased, and the cases would have to be piled up so as to be ready for loading on the ships when they came in. So, you had two long warehouses side by side, one for canning, the other for warehouse, warehousing the cases.

Then you would have another lodging area for the white workers, always separate from the Ja-, Asian workers. The white workers had a very nice dining area for themselves and separate rooms for themselves, I think. And as it happened, at Waterfall, because the supervisory people, or the executive people, like Mr. Bushman and his family would come, they had separate houses for them as well, very nicely painted and so on and so on.

Then the Asian bunkhouse was set off in another area, in a somewhat marshy area, but in a way attractive in its own way. Now, the bunkhouse is a large, two-story building, perhaps 125 feet long and 50 feet wide, 60 feet wide, about 25 feet on each side of this long bunkhouse divided by a corridor down the middle, and each of those two areas would then be filled with bunks for anywhere from fifty to a hundred workers. And these fifty to a hundred workers would be housed in rooms, as I say, about 12 x 15 feet in measurement with two tiers of bunks, one up, down and one up. As it happened in our bunkhouse, three, three up and down on one side, that makes six, six bunks, plus two more on the other side plus a little closet area, so to speak. No closet, but a place to hang your clothes and so on or store some things. So you had this kind of arrangement where maybe eight people would be assigned to each room, with each room going all the way down one, the hallway. This is the upper level. And downstairs is the kitchen, the dining room area. The dining room is a just simply large area with a lot of tables. A little like the evacuation centers which I remember from the wartime years. Enough tables to, well, as a matter of fact it was a little different from the evacuation centers. The relocation centers, the incarceration centers were places, the arrangement was such that you had long tables where, with benches attached where families could eat together or a bunch of guys would sit down and eat together. We did have at Waterfall, separate tables of, round tables for maybe two, six people at a table, something like that. And so it's a slightly different arrangement than at... but then there was also downstairs, offices for Mr. Nagamatsu and his foreman, and some storage area and things like this.

There was an area also where the... there was also a game of poker or rummy going on. Gambling was a fairly characteristic feature of canneries and you might have, usually it was only one table at our place, but you could have two tables there for that kind of activity. And at Waterfall there was also a group of benches at one side for shogi games and go games, or some other games if people chose to do them, but, the shogi and go were the most common at our cannery. Those who were not gambling as intensely as these regulars were might do their gambling in their bunkhouse sleeping areas, sleeping quarters where there were benches that guys would sit around and talk with each other or play games with each other, so there was that kind of facility in these bunkhouses. So that's the Asian workers' bunkhouse that I'm describing, set away from the cannery warehouse and the storage warehouse and from the white people's residential area. Finally, there's a third area, residential area, lodging area for Native Americans, and they had cottages, small cottages where they could cook and bed and so on, separately from the rest of the population.

One of the problems of this cannery, of every cannery, is that you, the fish refuse from cutting and gutting and so on was, were simply dropped into the bay where this... and therefore, if the tides were -- as they often were -- unfavorable, the fish heads and whatnots were washed ashore in the area where all these residential areas were located and the stink, stink from it could become very bad at times. On the whole, however, I thought of the setting as attractive. I never thought of it as unattractive. There were areas for doing, setting up basketball courts, for example, or we could sit around in the warehouse playing other games and things of this kind. So the facilities were, for us at least, Nisei youngsters, quite satisfactory in those respects.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.