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AI: Today is May 12, 2004. We're here at the Densho office in Seattle. I'm Alice Ito with Densho. We're with Elaine Hayes -- thanks very much for being with us today.

EH: You're welcome.

AI: And John Pai on videography. And Elaine, I wanted to start off at, at kind of the beginning with a basic question, and if you could tell us your birth date and also, what was your name when you were born?

EH: Okay. I was born June 30, 1923, in Willows, California. What was your other question?

AI: And what was your, your name at birth?

EH: Oh, Elaine Ishikawa.

AI: Great. And I wanted to ask you, did you have any Japanese name that was given to you --

EH: Well --

AI: -- besides Elaine?

EH: -- that's an interesting question. Part of my family remembers the name Ineko, but it's not on my birth certificate, and it's not a very... it always arouses a lot of questions or teasing or whatever. "Ine" actually means the rice stalk, and I, I was born I think almost at the time of rice harvest in Northern California. That's why that name comes up, but since it's not on my birth certificate, I never used it.

AI: I see.

EH: One of my sisters still calls me that, but she has almost no business doing that. [Laughs]

AI: Well, I wanted to ask a little about your family's background.

EH: Uh-huh.

AI: And if you could tell a little bit about your father and his early life and some of his family background in Japan, what you might know of it.

EH: Okay. My, my paternal grandfather was a Shinto priest or a kannushi of a kind and ruled a fairly small village in Iwate-ken, it was called Anetai. Now Anetai is part of Mizusawa, which is a bigger town. There was a drought, a long drought in, in that area in Japan, and so my grandfather gathered a small group and they took a labor contract in the big island of Hawaii to work in the sugar cane fields. And my father was, my father was born in 1890, so this was 1897. And so my father grew up in the sugar cane field areas of, of Hawaii and when my paternal grandparents decided that they had earned enough and decided to return to Iwate-ken, my father was seventeen and he didn't want to start school all over, so he said he would go to San Francisco and finish high school. And in those days that was not that unusual.

So he came to San Francisco and finished high school, and when he went back to Japan to marry my -- my parents were promised, as is very common in Asian countries as young children -- so when my father came back to marry my mother, he was told that people are going to college these days. "You go back and get a degree, then you can marry my daughter," is what my maternal grandmother said. So he came back and went to Healds Business School in Berkeley, and then went back to Japan and could marry my mother. It was during a busy season in the rice business. Because he finished this business college he was able to do a variety of work like labor contracts and -- though he did even do some portering work on, on the railroad at some point. But he was able to lease a thousand acres from a banker in Oakland, and the thousand acres was along the Sacramento River in a town called Willows, California. It's one of the first small towns that you hit going south on I-5 in Northern California. And he was able to talk a friend into joining him, because my father growing up in Hawaii didn't know that much about rice growing, but a thousand acres is a sizable area, so they made a success of it for, from about 1918 to '24, when they had their leave. But they put cement ditches in. And I asked my mother... my mother died in 1990, and I asked her a couple of years before she died, "How did you plant the rice? You couldn't have planted seedlings like we saw in geography books." And she said, "No. By airplane." So even in the late teen years, 1900 teen years, they were able to sow seeds, rice seeds, and the higher you're up, the deeper they're going to drop into the mud. And my mother said that when she came from Japan she said -- witnessed the rice harvest. She said the rice was taller than she was. And she was 4' 10", four feet ten.

But it was, I think, a very comfortable way of life. They -- my father hired a few men, and if they had families, they were able to build little kind of shanties, small houses, for their families. If they weren't married, then they lived in a bachelor quarters, and they had -- and then my father had hired a good friend from a good hotel in San Francisco to come and be the camp cook. And so it was a comfortable living. The women all helped in the kitchen and probably tended gardens, vegetable gardens because there was plenty of land. They were pretty self-sufficient. They had a lot of chickens and, and Mr. Fujinami, the cook, made wooden traps to catch huge catfish, and he would put rocks to weigh it down, put it in the ditch. And my mother said they were so big that he could only carry one catfish on his back, back to the cookhouse. So my mother said people loved to come work for my father because there was always eggs and fish and chicken and plenty of rice. And the neighbors, the people around them were intrigued at the size of the hens and the eggs and they thought my parents had brought some special breed of, of chickens. And that wasn't the case. It was because there was so much grain left on the fields because the harvester probably was not that efficient, so a lot of grain was left on the fields and the birds could have a field day. The eggs were big and, and people came to buy the chicks and the eggs from miles around.

And, but it was a very comfortable life until the alien land law got passed, and if you were not eligible to become a citi-, to be a citizen, you could not lease or buy land. And that law passed in '24, 1924. I was born in '23, so my father could have bought it in my name, but I think there was just too much to do. He had to get rid of all the machinery and the animals. And I think my mother even had cow -- my father had cows, because my mother had to learn how to milk cows. And, and as she talked about making cheese, there was so much milk, when the milk got sour she would pour them into sugar sacks or some, some kind of sack and just tie a knot, hang 'em over the, the faucet, over a spigot of whatever kind they had and let all the, the liquid flow out. And the cheese would get very hard, and she... of course she said adjusting to cheese was a big challenge for her. But she, she always liked cheese after that. I think she even said that she learned how to make buttons out of this curd, because it was so hard and tough that it made buttons. Though, you know, it made you wonder what, what happens to your, to the buttons when you wash your clothes. [Laughs] Does it disintegrate? I, I never heard all of that. But they had pigs, hogs, and my mother used to say that was, that was a mess. Because I was a toddler and I'd get out there in the yard, and I'm sure I didn't play with the pigs but it must have been... it probably wasn't sanitarily kept clean. But she said the corn was a foot long and always covered with flies and they never worried about that. But they had plenty of... I'm, I'm sure she must have learned to use butter.

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