<Begin Segment 13>

TI: Well, I'm curious, running, for your family, having a small store, was that pretty much a good business in terms of, of money and things like that? I mean, was your family pretty comfortable with that kind of, of business?

YN: I would believe if you looked today who runs the grocery stores in the large cities of New York or anywhere, it's another immigrant group, just like my mother and father. That's the starting point of this financial security. If they get rich or not, in the terms of the western world, no way is it worth that kind of life. But for those people, that's their beginning. And that's where their children learned the entrepreneurship to survive in America. What better example do we have than the success of the Chinese restaurants or the hand laundries? It had (helped) the generations to come (to be successful). But without that (experience) in the makeup of their life, that's (how) they learned the community. And I laugh because I say, you don't eat Chinese food, you only go to Chinese restaurants to eat food prepared by Chinese. They give you what you want.

TI: Right, right. And going back to that, that small store, I mean, so I imagine the hours were long, you lived actually upstairs from the store, so it really was a very labor-intensive existence.

YN: And the greatest thing I learned, though I never knew, my parents knew when people were in need. And when they couldn't pay for it, they had credit. And many times, it was never paid for, 'cause they would die or leave. It was never an issue. It didn't develop into bad credit or good credit, but sometimes years later, some of the children would come back and said, "I think my parents owed some money," and my parents would say, "No, there's no record." But there was always something left at the counter when the family left.

TI: I'm sorry, explain that again. So, so it was sort of a undocumented sort of credit system?

YN: Yeah, they had a little chit that they put in a cigar box, as far as I can recall, and it says, "This family had a loaf of bread and a quart of milk." That was their IOU, or what you call the plastic card today.

TI: But then when, when someone would come back later and say, "You know, my parents, or -- "

YN: Because they may have passed away or (were) ill, and somehow the integrity of the families, which were not Japanese only, always in their way, if they knew, paid it back. The system worked, because my parents didn't help somebody that was ripping them off. They knew that that family, somebody was ill or they were out of a job. They weren't sophisticated to know that that was profit out of their existence, 'cause they didn't go to an ivy league school to learn how to run a business.

TI: How interesting.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.