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TI: Well, fishing, so of the fishermen in Prince Rupert, what percentage of them were Japanese?

HS: Oh. They, Japanese fishermen were mainly salmon fishermen. And in a way, they dominated the salmon fishing industry, and if you think about the numbers of -- every year there would be a, the fishing season would open with kind of a bang. All the fishing boats would line up. And the majority of the fishing boats that lined up to go out into the fishing areas were Japanese. I mean, there would be a few white fishermen, and some Indians, but if you look at the, those boats, most of 'em were Japanese fishing boats. And, because they were a particular type. The Japanese fishing boat you could recognize. They were built to, to harvest salmon. They had a very particular type of structure, you could recognize 'em, oh, you could recognize 'em from half a mile away, that they were Japanese fishermen.

TI: Now, where would they get these boats? Who would build them?

HS: They were all built by Japanese boat-builders who learned to build these boats -- some of them might have known that from Japan when they came over, but the majority I think is, are self-taught, or people who apprenticed and realized that they can do it, how to make these Japanese fishing boats. There was one, I went down to Fisherman's Wharf, when we first went to Victoria, that would be back in '84, '85, first went down there to see, to get crab. And somebody said, "You go down Pier 6, Edgy the crab man is down there, go see Edgy." So I went down to see Edgy, and when I arrived at Edgy, I looked at his boat and I said to Edgy, I said, "That is a Japanese fishing boat." And he said, "Yeah, built in 1933," and he says, "It's still seaworthy." It was over fifty years old at that point, but it was still in good shape, it was still working, in good condition. Dirty as heck, but other than that, you can just recognize the way the superstructure is made and everything. It just, and it's hand-built. In those days, they had to hand-build these things, and there were at least, I think there were about four or five Japanese (builders). Up in Prince Rupert area, there would be four or five Japanese boat-building areas, and then on the Fraser River there'd be a whole number of them. They were building these boats.

TI: Well, other than building a particular type of boat, what was it that made the Japanese dominant in the salmon fishing?

HS: Well, two things. They had the right type of boat for salmon fishing, they also apparently had knowledge of where the fish were going to be. To some degree, I was told that the white men never talked to the Indians, whereas the Japanese did, the Japanese fishermen did. White fishermen would, apparently, according to this guy who talked to me about it, said it was beneath their dignity to go and have to ask an Indian. The Indians were, they didn't know anything. But they've been living there for five, ten thousand years on the West Coast. They must have known where the fish were by that time. Japanese people, of course, just by being ethnic, were not, were not averse to talking to them about things, and they would find out to some degree where the fish was gonna be, where salmon were best. Not only that, but they also developed a lure -- and I forgot the name of it, it's something like "red devil" or something, somebody told me about this -- that was especially good for trolling, for catching salmon. And they would catch salmon two ways; they'd troll, or they would net them by getting in an area where they knew that the salmon would congregate, and put down their nets. So they had, they had two types of boats, the boats would often have the, there were little what they called little seiners, and they would have this big drum in the back, and the drum would, would pull the net in that way. Or the other thing, they would have these lines that would go out the back, and they would troll for salmon and catch the salmon that way. With their, with the special, they learned about this, and of course, it would go amongst the Japanese people, "Use this thing, it works. It's a good, it's a good lure." And the white people, of course, they would never talk to a Japanese, or they would never talk to the Indians, and they had to learn, learn to catch salmon on their own. And of course, doing that, they're mainly into halibut, because they required a big boat to go way out in the ocean. But on top of that, they would be mainly people who were involved in the, in the middleman area of fishing, you know. They would go around, pick up the fish...

TI: You're talking about the Caucasians?

HS: Yeah, Caucasians. They were more in the middleman, middleman activities, much less likely to find them as actual primary fishermen out there picking up the fish, catching fish. They would pick up the fish from Japanese places, but not the other way around.

TI: So I'm curious. I think of fishing, each boat has sort of their own kind of little business, and so I would think it'd be kind of competitive in terms of, the more fish you can catch, the better you'd do. Was there much cooperation amongst the Japanese fishermen?

HS: Well, fairly, I would think they did cooperate a lot like that, especially in Steveston, because they had the little group. Steveston was the big -- Steveston, I don't know if you know where that is, that's just south of Vancouver. And it was a big, it's a town that was, oh, in those days, it would be, five or six, four or five thousand people. It was quite a large community of mainly Japanese. Even to this day, they have a number of streets named after Japanese people because they somehow developed gardens or something that sort of commemorated that area, and they were known that way. And the Steveston area did have a large number of Japanese fishermen. It became probably the biggest salmon catching, or salmon product. Salmon was, the biggest product that came out of there (...), and the majority of the people that were doing all the catching were Japanese. And like I say, they had the advantage of being ethnic in terms of... and on the other hand, there was this, there was always this sort of feeling that they were, to some degree cheating because they worked too hard. They would work, they would fish longer, wait until they really got everything, then they'd bring it... they used to have a term called "high boat." A high boat meant that, a fisherman who had a high boat, that he caught a large number of salmon and he would bring 'em in. You would think that it would be a "low boat" because the boat would be way low in the water. But they used to call 'em high boat, and every year, they would talk about, "So-and-so had a high boat," and they were always Japanese fishermen that got a high boat. And to some of the resentment that, of course, developed over the years was because of their ability as fishermen.

TI: And some people, the resentment felt that it was almost like cheating because they worked too hard?

HS: Yeah. Yes, almost.

TI: And who kind of felt that way? Was it again, the whites that felt that way?

HS: Yeah, the Caucasians. I remember hearing that type of thing and working too hard. That's how they were successful: they work harder than, than the Caucasian people.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.