Densho Digital Archive - Tokio Hirotaka - Toshio Ito - Joe Matsuzawa Interview (denshovh-htokio

<Begin Segment 4>

AI: Now, Mr. Matsuzawa, I didn't ask you about your brothers and sisters.

JM: Oh, well my oldest one, like I said, was born in Japan. But my second brother next to me was born here in the States. He's two years older than I, and I was born, and then I had two sisters below me. And then after that there was two more boys. And I think one of the boys is the same age as Mr. Ito here.

TI: Oh, Tom? Tom was one year older.

JM: Oh. Well, they went to school, (...) there were six of us, and to go back to my mother, there was six kids that she had to take care of. And like I said before, when my dad's health went bad, that dictated what his life would be in later life. And so, my mother (...) had to take care of six of us, and all going to school. When my father died, I had just graduated from high school, Bellevue High School, 1931. And he died in 1932, at the age of fifty-two. Which, well, I guess I consider young. These days... anyway, that was during the Depression. The Depression really started in 1929, but then several years thereafter, it was really tough going.

AI: Right. Before we jump ahead to those times, I'd like to ask you all a little bit about some of your childhood memories. If you can think back to the time when you were young, starting grade school, do you have any memories of starting school, what that was like?

JM: Well, I started school when we were living in, near Yarrow Point, and there was a little grade school, almost to the entrance of the Evergreen Point floating bridge. It was the area where you enter Hunts Point. That was the first school I went to, and it was a school building that had all eight grades in that one building. And then, I started the second grade in Bellevue -- we moved to Bellevue -- right now I-405 consumes that property we were in, that's when I spent most of my younger days, when I was a kid. But I didn't have too many Japanese friends at that time, because south of us there was a Japanese family, they were just a couple, and on the other side was a family of five girls. Well, you know how, we didn't want to play with girls, so most of my friends were up on the hill -- on Wilberton Hill -- they were mostly Scandinavian descent, they were young fellows and I used to play with them. But later on, why, I became friends with most of the Japanese, due to circumstances. In Bellevue, our farm was down in the flats there, and that's where I -- I used to go hunting a lot -- and that's where I started to hunt, and I still do.

AI: What would you hunt?

JM: Well, we were hunting pheasant, and ducks and things. And I might add that, the area where most of the Japanese, Midlake area, I hunted ducks there, too. You would never know that there was a lake there now, but it was a really, a rural area there.

AI: Right, I don't think you'd see any pheasants down there now.

JM: No pheasant, there's just too much development. I don't think people would believe me when they, sometimes deer would come out there, and I could see deer tracks, eat our strawberries, things like that. That area in, where -- I think it's Eighth Street South -- where the trestle is. In that area down in the flats there's just brush and jungle down there. But you have buildings now, I don't know. They claim there's a locomotive sunk down into the peat moss, that was still yet. I don't think that many people know about it, but there is a locomotive down there, they never bothered to retrieve it.