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TI: Okay, let's go back to your childhood, and, sort of, your friends. What are some of the things you did for fun around here? You talked about some of the work things, but in terms of...

JT: Well, to me, in those days, it was fun, what I described about finding dynamite and stuff like that. We don't know nothing about dynamite, we don't know... we found, about that time I got interested in hunting. And my dad, he had a shotgun, and they had shotgun because they had rice. They had to chase ducks around because the rice, the ducks would consume their crop before the harvest time, so they used to herd ducks, and that's why he had a shotgun. He did a little hunting also, but the main purpose for the gun was to scare the ducks away from the rice. And, well, anyhow, we inherited, "we," my brother Jack and I, inherited the shotgun. So we wore it out. We shot and shot and shot and shot, but we did all kinds of things with this shotgun. Getting back to that county dump yard, we used to scrounge around that thing, and we used to find shotgun shells. And they were different gauge. We didn't have any spending money, so we took the lead out, the BBs out of the shotgun shell. Our shotgun was a twelve-gauge and the shells that we found was a different gauge. So we had to reload our own shells. And we didn't know nothing about reloading shells. It was just like the dynamite experience. We did it without any knowledge. And, yeah, we would push out the primer, we'd open the top up and take the cap off and take the BBs out and take the powder out. And eventually we'd take the primer out, and we'd take the primer out on one of our twelve-gauge shells that we shot, and we would put the new primer in that we just took out from the one that we found, and we would reload. And somebody must have been looking after us, because we had no mishaps. We did things like that. Looking back at it now, today, I don't know how we ever got by without getting hurt.

BT: It's a wonder you still have your hands. [Laughs]

JT: [Laughs] Yeah.

TI: How about, sort of, how did the different races get along? So you had a lot of white friends. Did it ever come up that you were Japanese, or were you ever, did you ever feel like you were treated differently because you were Japanese?

JT: You know, as far as the discrimination goes, there was no such thing as discrimination. This guy was, we never talked race, white guys, black guys. Fortunately, Gridley never had too many black guys now. Maybe a black person would have been different than the Japanese or Oriental. 'Cause everybody accepted everybody with no problem. Race was no problem until after the war, or during the war.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.