<Begin Segment 12>

TI: So I actually, I wanted to... so the first hour, Yosh, we're talking about your growing up, but I actually wanted to, to go back and touch on a couple things. One is you had a career in retail, and I wanted to go back in terms of the influence of working in the store, and perhaps some of the more entrepreneurial things you did as, as a kid. This is all before the war, so, so talk about what were some of your responsibilities in the store?

YN: Well, like all, all -- and I say "all" because we all come out of the basic internment story -- I think that all those that returned back to their freedom, and I would say that then our basis of where we would like to be upon our return to that, quotation mark, our "release from prison," I think solidified a drive in a group of people that for the first time could be measured. Because it was small enough of a group that many things happened that, that maybe would not have happened if there was five million of us.

TI: But even before we go back to that influence, I'm talking about even before the war.

YN: Before?

TI: Yeah, when you were just a kid, you had to help out in the store.

YN: Right.

TI: What were some of the things that you did in the store?

YN: Real simple. Real simple. When a person came in, I wanted to see if I could go get the milk for them, or get the cigarettes behind the counter, or whatever, and the more I learned as a child when that person came in, I always wanted to make certain I could be there before he or she asked for it, bringing up what they wanted. Now, I didn't know that's good business, that's good salesmanship or anything. It was something innate that you can't teach.

TI: So as a young child, you would anticipate the needs of your customer from the very, very beginning.

YN: Absolutely. I don't know why. And I wasn't always right, of course not. But it was fun to be praised, that I knew exactly what brand of cigarettes they smoked, or what loaf of bread they wanted, or whatever, and then to be told I was doing something good. Now, it sounds silly, I watched my mother make frozen suckers. Put a stick, a chopstick broken in half into it, and it would harden. And I got good at making frozen suckers. I saw my mother go down to Chinatown and my father would buy the ginger and she would package it up into, with waxed paper into little packages, and many, including some of your parents, they came to buy those things. So as much as they don't remember me, they remember coming to the grocery store.

TI: And buying those little packets of ginger.

YN: Things that I helped with, never knowing what a significant part these little things play in your make-up. We are not who we are because of ourselves, we are who we are because of people. And they have far greater influence as to where we come from and the things we do. And so you hate to be as simplistic as that -- after all, I was educated, I was not educated to, by my education to become a retailer in the sports world. I went into recreation and sociology; I wanted to be a social scientist. Didn't even ever get close to that. But I found I was a social scientist in the field, because I was working with people. So I was well-prepared, but I wasn't prepared to be a businessman.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.