<Begin Segment 7>

MA: So I wanted to go back. You said you moved back to L.A. when you were in the fifth grade.

CT: Uh-huh.

MA: You know, why did your family decide to leave Denver for L.A.? Just because it was home?

CT: And everybody, the family was all beginning to re-gather again. You know, so we went back and my aunts and uncles and their children, my cousins and everything, everybody started to regroup back again. So by a couple years later, most of us were all back in the Los Angeles area.

MA: And what neighborhood did you move back to?

CT: We went back to Boyle Heights. And then my grandfather opened a nursery in a little, kind of a flower shop in Montebello. So then we relocated there, you know, to Montebello. But again, everybody was still in the L.A. area and so we were able to get together and I was able to grow up really closely with my cousins.

MA: Can you talk a little bit about the Boyle Heights area and just what it was like growing up there? And, I'm just curious because there's a lot of interest right now, I've noticed, in Boyle Heights. If you could just talk about your experiences there and what the community was like in Boyle Heights.

CT: Well again, being a child, it was really fun because there were so many other Japanese American students at the school. But then everybody really played with everybody. You live in a neighborhood and you play with who lives next door and across the street. And so, growing up, the friends were a combination of Hispanic, Jewish-Russian and Japanese Americans. But it was a pretty large population, so the first, one of the things that I still remember was they reactivated Nisei Week. And so they had the Obon, or the, it wouldn't be called officially the Obon, but they had the Japanese dancing and they had the queen contest and things. So that we would catch the streetcar, which you wouldn't dare do now, and ride into Little Tokyo and attend practice for Nisei Week, the parade and everything, and then catch the streetcar and come back. But there was a lot of interaction, and you felt a strong sense of Japanese American community. And so there were grocery stores, 'cause my mother would send me to go buy tofu, or pick up something for dinner. So, I knew that after I graduated from, or I left elementary school, then the normal progression would be Hollenbeck Junior High School and Roosevelt High School, and again, very heavily populated with Japanese Americans.

MA: That's interesting what you said about Nisei Week. So it was the first Nisei Week --

CT: It was the first Nisei Week after the war ended and they felt that they wanted to start it up again.

MA: What are your memories of the community at that time, and especially at Nisei Week? Like, what was that like?

CT: It was very tight, and everybody was really excited. I do remember that buzz, there was a buzz. Everybody was excited to be back in California and they, we went to a talent show to watch the entertainment and things, but there was, there was just that sense of a positive buzz. And yet I know as an adult now, that people really struggled financially to get back on their feet. But again, I think when you speak to people about growing up in Little Tokyo or being connected to it, those are really fond memories for a lot of people. 'Cause again, it's that getting back together again and rebuilding your community.

MA: Right, I think that's, yeah, that's very powerful. The rebuilding of the community after the war.

CT: Very much so, yeah.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.