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TI: So I want to talk a little bit about landownership and how the Japanese community navigated the alien land laws.

MS: You couldn't. You couldn't. And I don't remember, like, where Amy had to sign for things. She was still young, a teenager. But that was okay, too.

TI: So oftentimes they would put property under Amy's name.

MS: You couldn't buy property.

TI: Oh, so even just signing leases, she would have to sign those.

MS: Yeah. But it was really very casual. I remember going to the bank because all the farmers would go to the bank in springtime to ask for a loan. And one day I went along with my father and I think it must have been Amy or somebody, and went in the bank, it was very nice, he asked, "How much do you need?" And I don't remember them signing the paper. If they did, they signed it, but he got up and shook hands and that was it. And that's still very vivid in my mind. It was very, kind of a casual, they knew you were there. If you're signing for a loan and you've got a farm, they know that you're not going to run away. So as I said, in looking back, it really was a very secure place to live at that time.

TI: Do you have a sense of how large... when you say your community, when you think of Wapato, how many people were living there?

MS: I don't know. I don't know. But when we evacuated, I think there were about thirteen hundred. But there was a difference between those who lived in town and those who were on the farm, you see, because you had like the grocery store, the restaurant, the garage. The people in Yakima, most of them ran hotels in the kind of the flea, low-rent hotels, and they were different.

TI: Okay. So it was a sizeable community, thirteen hundred for the whole valley.

MS: Yes.

TI: Yeah, that's significant. Actually, yeah, I thought it was more in the hundreds, but I didn't realize it was that large.

MS: Oh, no. Because the valley is really quite big when you go from upper valley, lower valley, and Zillah and so forth.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.