<Begin Segment 23>

MA: Did you have a, I know we talked earlier about some jobs that you had in Denver's Japantown. Can you talk about those?

MH: Yeah, well, I didn't work in the... well, my brother worked for the Mikawa, then he went and got married and went to Trinidad. He worked in the greenhouse, they had a big greenhouse in Trinidad, so he moved over there. My brother came back from the service, he was a 442nd member, he worked in several different places, he worked to make, sake brewery place, and then he worked at the grocery, fruit stand, and then he worked several different places as, working for the market. And then he eventually got a job at Associated Grocer, which is a warehouse, for, I guess he was in charge of the vegetable part. He worked there for twenty-five years and then retired, and he became a gardener. In the meantime, he had nothing to do, so he decided to do gardening work.

For me, I got married, I didn't work for a while. I worked, before I, before I got married, I worked at, I helped at Umeya senbei packing there for a little bit on the spare time, then after, after I quit there I worked for a tsukemono place where they make tsukemono, homemade canned tsukemono. And then I worked for one place, right after I got out of the camp, the Okuno family, these people that run the 20th Cafe right now, their parents, grandparents, we couldn't get umeboshi and nori and tsukemono and those kind of things from Japan anymore, so they had to improvise something that they can make it near enough to say that this is shoyu and this is umeboshi, and they had factories all started up in the area. Somebody started to make shoyu and somebody started to make umeboshi out of apricots. And then this nori, sushi nori, they bought dried seaweed from California, and they washed it and strained it and meat ground it into, as fine as they could, and then cooked it and flavored it the best way they could. And then after that was cooked, they needed people to spread the nori. So the Okuno family started a factory, and the board was as long as that sofa there, and it was about that thick. Put waxed paper on, then you slapped this nori and you spread it as thinly as you can, spread it as long, and then they put it in this room where they had a fan that dried it up overnight, they had that fan going. Then the next morning, the Mrs. Okuno would measure the size of the nori for, to make sushi, and cut them and packed them in, so many in a pack, like ten, I suppose, and our job was to do all this straining and spreading it as thinly as, we had four girls working. And that was our job until he decided that the things were coming in from abroad now, from China and things, so they disbanded that. So I didn't work there, so I worked for the tsukemono factory.

MA: What did you do at the tsukemono factory?

MH: We made what they call a kyuri. A, it's like a cucumber, but it's tough and then you take the seed out and you salt it and you pack it. And when that gets real salted, then it goes into this sake no kasu, the sake, the material, that paste. They save all the paste and they mix it with syrup and sugar and flavor it and it ferments. Then when you have to, we didn't have a mixer, so you had to do it by hand and you keep stirring it up as well as you can, and spread it. And then that becomes, you pack it into these cucumbers or whatever. And then you stack 'em and let it ferment, until it's ready to be packed or jarred or whatever. And that's what we did.

MA: I imagine at that time, too, they were selling a lot of these Japanese food products because there was such a large community, right? At the time?

MH: Yeah, well, yes. And the restaurant, there wasn't that many sushi factory, or there wasn't any. There was a restaurant but they didn't emphasize like they do now. And sushi and they had a noodle factory, they had a noodle store, udon-ya and they had several of those. And they had Japanese restaurants specialized in Japanese, one, probably one, and then there was a bar, Japanese bar around in the area. But that was mostly for people that drank and they had Japanese foods, side dishes that they made. But unless you go there, I couldn't tell you what they had, 'cause I wasn't interested in going those kind of places. But basically, Pacific and Granada opened up their stores eventually because things were able to get through, in from Japan eventually.

MA: I see.

MH: Little by little.

MA: So did all those factories close then?

MH: And then they start closing down because of the fact that they could get the real stuff, you know.

[Interruption]

MA: So I had a question about the Denver Japanese American community and the relationships between the people who were already there and the people who had gone to camp and sort of resettled to Denver. How was that interaction, you know, between the two different groups?

MH: I don't find it any different. It was nice to get out of the camp and be with other people and know what's going in the world, you know, a bigger city. And be able to be free to do the shopping and not be regulated at time and whatever we had to do in camp. So that was different, but it was nice to be out and be able to be free to do whatever shopping or talk with anybody. Going to the library, go anywhere. Nobody, well, and it seems that, it was just like normal before the war.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.