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TI: So, Jim, we're going to start this second section. I actually wanted to go back and talk a little bit about the land issues. Earlier we talked about how you leased land for the rice. Why don't you walk about the difference of why you would lease land for rice, and then later on buy land for other things. Like what was the difference?

JT: Well, the big difference was, first of all, it was finance. People were just getting started. You know, like my father, just getting started, he had no money. And, of course, the bank wouldn't lend him money, neither. So instead of buying, they leased. And then you don't grow rice on the same piece of land year after year after year, you rotate. You rest the land and you put in other crops, like other grain crops, like summer crops like barley, wheat, oats, something like that. And then after a few years, you come back and plant rice again. We had the mishap of the Depression and bankruptcy. He moved out of the rice field and moved to the east side. It was better land, but the land was unimproved and we had to remove trees. Now, this (...) was still under Harry Fukushima, and we were buying that property. This was not leased. And they cleared the trees, the oak trees off the land, and they leveled it the best they could, and they planted peaches. And they had to level because we have to irrigate peaches. It doesn't have to be perfectly flat, but you have to get water on the peach trees. We had small equipment. It's not like today that they have large equipment that they can... if you want your land perfectly flat, today, they can laser it perfectly flat. But you have to have some way of draining water like in the wintertime, if it was flat, it wouldn't drain. So they put a little high side and a low side, maybe it's one degree or two degree. And this helped drain the land and makes farming much easier. And eventually, the land was transferred. The one that my father was clearing was transferred to my brother's name, because he became older. We made payments on it until it was finally paid off, but it took a very long time because we couldn't plant large acreage, 'cause we had the small equipment to level land and you couldn't plant peaches on ground that was hilly, 'cause you couldn't get water to 'em. So after he got it down to where he could level, he planted some more. It took several years to do this. Eventually, my dad got enough money to pay off the land. But it took a very long time. I think it took about fifteen, twenty years before the land was paid off. And, 'course, in those days, the value of the dollar, one dollar was worth one dollar. Today, one dollar is not worth one dollar no more. But inflation and everything else has reduced the value of the dollar. And the land value at that time when my father was starting, clearing that land, I don't know what it was. Probably about five, six hundred dollars an acre. Today, that same ground is worth several thousand dollars an acre.

TI: And so going back to 1941, so right before the war started, what did your family control in terms of land, both bought, and, if any, leased land?

JT: Well, in 1941, the land that we got was under our name, under the Tanimoto brothers. And we had just purchased 55 acres here in 1940, and we grew our first crop, we harvested our first crop in 1941. And we had started our second crop in 1942 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and we evacuated in July. And peaches usually start harvesting in July, the early variety starts. So we had all the, all the expense, all the labor, when we had to evacuate. And this is, peaches is a lot of hand labor, which makes it an expensive crop to farm.

TI: And so it sounds like you lost a lot of money just by not being able to harvest that.

JT: Well, when we had to evacuate, we moved out in July. In fact, it was my brother's birthday that we got on the train. We arrived at Tule Lake a day later, July 10th. And July 10th usually may be about a week or so later is our first crop, first variety to harvest. And the rest of the varieties, it's just a matter of keeping it irrigated. So the expense is all put in there now. This is the time that you're gonna get some money back, and we didn't get any money back.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.