<Begin Segment 7>

MA: So when you were growing up, your parents, you said, were caretakers of the, was it the Methodist church? Were you heavily involved with the church as well?

MT: My parents were very involved with it, to a point where they and then Mr. Okamoto, a group of them were the nucleus of starting the church and making it go. So my mother spent an awful lot of time contributing to the church. All those women did.

MA: What sorts of things did they do to contribute to the church?

MT: Oh, they went to church every Sunday, but then, well, everything was centered around the church, everything. Matter of fact, I was telling somebody that we had a church down there on Third Avenue, then we had to move out of there. So they moved into, going to buy this Grant Street Methodist Church, and they asked for a contribution from everybody. And Mr. Kasai -- this is what I heard parents talking about -- insisted that the only way that he would help get people to contribute to it and everything -- he was sort of the leader of the group -- was if they allowed, forget about being Methodist and let it become a Japanese community center. So we held everything there. So we'd get, in those days the kids were growing up and they wanted to have dances and stuff, so they got to have their mixers at church.

MA: So the church kind of became a community...

MT: Community center. Community center on Grant Street. Reverend... oh, golly, I forgot. Anyway, he was a hakujin minister during the war years, and he was a wonderful fellow. Spoke real good Nihongo. [Laughs]

MA: Wow. Do you know how he learned Japanese?

MT: He, I think, taught or something in Japan, but he... what was the name of the Reverend? [Addressing Kazue Yamamoto]

KY: Cobb?

MT: Cox?

KY: Cobb?

MT: What was his...

KY: The name Cobb, C-O-B-B?

MT: Oh, Cobb, Cobb, C-O-B-B, yeah, Reverend Cobb. That's right.

MA: So it sounds like, then, the church became so central in the community.

MT: Central. They had dance, we have dancing and everything, programs with dancing, and then movies, real old, "(47 Ronin)," remember that one? Yeah, and all those shows and all those tearjerkers? [Laughs] Make you cry every time. All of us young kids were all upstairs fooling around, but then all those parts we'd be crying. [Laughs]

MA: So there was the Methodist church, was there also another, was there like a Buddhist church as well?

MT: There is now, uh-huh. But then the Catholics, the Catholic people went out and searched on the farms and picked them all up as Catholics there for a while.

MA: You mean they...

MT: [Addressing KY] Remember that?

MA: They searched, they wanted...

MT: Well, make 'em Catholics. [Laughs] That's what the Catholics do, that's why they get big, big, big. And then so there were Catholics and then there were the central Japanese, but other people might be going in a little group of their own, but there was none that I saw. Just our church, and then [addressing KY] when was the Buddhist church started, do you remember?

KY: After camp, so 1945?

MT: After camp, oh, '45.

MA: So it sounds like, then, before the war, the Methodist church was really the central.

MT: Oh, the major, uh-huh, central.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.