<Begin Segment 37>

FM: Now going back to this matter of friends, many of the people, Nisei, who were there in the years in, when I was attending, are people whom I knew down here. And so the question... it really revolves around the fact that the Japanese community, the Issei community back in 1930 was a community in which families and people were related to each other down here in a way that normally you don't find that much association within a community, among, certainly not in the white American community, but even among immigrant people, there's not that much association taking place. And this is somewhat a characteristic of the Japanese people, you see. Why does this happen? Well, as I said, Japanese have a capacity for organizing and they organize Boy Scouts, for example, or they organized... they had these, in the, you may have found in the Japanese American Courier, pages of stuff about the Japanese American Courier basketball league and baseball league, and football league. Each season, Courier would run a league of sports activities and it's not only one or half a dozen teams, it's a whole series of teams, not only here in Seattle but down in White River, down in Fife, even from Yakima they would come in and play against... and these are Nisei teams against. So, the contact range in the Japanese community was considerable simply because the organizational characteristic of this community. You had camera clubs, you had university students clubs, you had dances organized by this group and that, it was just a terribly organized society. But as a young person growing up on Beacon Hill, where I had white friends, I used to wonder, why is it these white guys can't get together the way that... it's so much more fun if you can, well, I'd think on a Saturday morning, gee, if I can get a baseball game going among my white friends up here, now occasionally you could, you could, but it was not as if there was total disinterest, but somehow it was much more difficult to arrange things like baseball games or a joint activity of some kind. There was a Boy Scout troop I was a member of up in Beacon Hill, where I lived, all hakujin friends. And we went on camping trips occasionally, I mean, among a group of us. And yet, it was so much easier to organize these things in the Japanese community. As I say, I also had contacts in the Japanese community and I subsequently became a member of the Boy, the Japanese Boy Scout troop, as I recall, after leaving the American one, simply because the American one had much less activity and I didn't find it all that exciting. And then, down in the Japanese community there's this Boy Scout troop that does all kinds of things all the time, including attending bazaars which the parents are holding, whatever. It's so much more interesting that I naturally got drawn into. Well, coming back to the cannery life, these are contacts that I had established through my twelve, thirteen, fourteen years earlier and then I come to Alaska cannery and I know at least a dozen, two dozen people who are going to the... that makes a totally different kind of situation than if I'm going into a totally strange situation. So cannery work was of that character. And if you talk to anyone who went to cannery you immediately find out that they, "Oh yeah, we, I was there and Pete was there," and now, you know, get this kind of conversation going, and we did this and we did that. It's a "we" kind of thing because it was the Nisei group associating with each other in the cannery that is the kind of thing which is remembered. And if you then ask, why is it that the Nisei are able to organize JACL today as they do? Why, this is the kind of background you have to refer to. People had lived together and associated and worked together in some fashion way back when, 1930, 1940, different from a lot of other ethnic populations.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.