<Begin Segment 2>

MA: Can you describe a little bit about the neighborhood that you grew up in? What was it like?

MT: Oh, let's see. Downtown when we were, we lived behind the laundry, the Oriental Laundry, and then from there I would go to the next block where quite a few Japanese were, and we played in the alley. And behind my place, my father's place was a gambling place there, too, Chinese. But it was Chinese and Japanese around there.

MA: So that was kind of the ethnic makeup, was Chinese, Japanese?

MT: Uh-huh.

MA: Did the Chinese and Japanese kids play together?

MT: I don't remember too much playing with them, but we stuck close to Japanese.

MA: So most of your friends were...

MT: All Japanese, uh-huh.

MA: What sorts of things did you do for fun with your friends?

MT: Oh, jintori and... we used to play Annie-Annie-over. Tengoku was with marbles, and just baseball or hopscotch. We had a good place. That was after, after a while we grew a little older, my parents moved into a, rented a house on this, uptown on Third Avenue. And there was lots of Japanese there, too, and we used to have a really good time. There was lots of Japanese, just about every, most of it was Japanese, but then there were apartments, but there were no Japanese in there.

MA: Did most of the people own, like, restaurants and small businesses around that area?

MT: No, none. There was a, I remember there was a house that had, in those days, she did odori, taught odori and she had a large family, then next door was the Yamamotos, Cho-san's and Sachi's father, they had the other half of that. Then there was Mr. Nozaki and his family, Mr. Yamada, Kawai, Nozaki, and then come around to our house, yeah. There were a lot of them.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.