Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Kazue Yamamoto Interview
Narrator: Kazue Yamamoto
Interviewer: Megan Asaka
Location: Spokane, Washington
Date: June 8, 2006
Densho ID: denshovh-ykazue-01-0005

<Begin Segment 5>

MA: And then you told me that you were raised Buddhist.

KY: Right.

MA: Was your family pretty active with the Wapato Buddhist Church?

KY: Active meaning did they go to church every Sunday? I think so, uh-huh. They sent us, so I'm assuming they went. My mother was active. I don't know about my dad, though. My mother, my mother was active in the fujinkai.

MA: What types of things would she do with that?

KY: Activities in church?

MA: Or, I mean, like maybe, sort of special festivals or that type of community things? Did they sponsor anything like that?

KY: I don't recall any of those things. My mother liked to do handcraft, you know, the Japanese embroidery. I don't think she did calligraphy, I did calligraphy. Let's see, what else did she do? She was good in art, artwork. So I do, I still have some of her artwork that she did hanging in my home. I think, I think they were just too busy working to do anything else. [Laughs]

MA: Busy working on the farm?

KY: Trying to make a living, yeah.

MA: Was there like a, I guess, a downtown area of Wapato, or maybe a commercial center?

KY: There was, there was. Mainly that, the Buddhist Church area, and there was a... what is that main, I think it's Wapato Avenue, they had a tofu-ya, they had a, they had couple of, several businesses there. But Wapato is not a big town, you know. So maybe one main drag and couple side streets, that's about it.

MA: Did they have, like, a movie theater or some sort of...

KY: I remember one movie theater. I think it was called the Liberty, and the only movie we could go to was the Shirley Temple movie, so I think we went to every Shirley Temple movie. [Laughs] That was back in the '40s, but she wouldn't let us go see anything else, that was it; Shirley Temple movie.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.