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MN: And you grew up in the Little Tokyo, what was considered Little Tokyo at the time. Can you give me a description of what your neighborhood looked like?

JM: You know, the best, the best way to really, sort of, visualize it is that movie they had. Is it The Sting, or was that the name of the movie? Yeah, and they had pictures of the old 1930s. You almost kind of get a feel for that in the Godfather when they took pictures of little Italy when there's so much street traffic. And we didn't have the tenements like they did in New York, but we had all these different older-type buildings, and people walking around on the streets, and the streets were full of, like, vendors. When you would go walking, you would see the popcorn vendor, and he would be popping... it was wonderful, actually. And you'd see the grocery guy come by with the grocery truck honking his horn. There'd be a fish truck... the only thing they didn't have was a meat truck. There would be an ice truck pulling up because not everybody had refrigerators. I'd say the majority of people had just plain wooden iceboxes in which you had to replace the ice every so many days. So all of these streets were just full of people walking around. And we happened to live right, right by the, I believe, the real heart of L.A., which was Fifth Street. And I say that's the heart of L.A. because all of the streetcars, which we had so many, would funnel down Fifth Street going toward the Grand Central Station, which was the hub of Los Angeles. We didn't have Union Station at the time, and I don't believe they had, they had LAX or any of the airports at the time. So everything came and went through the Grand Central. All your streetcars went through there, and so there was a tremendous amount of foot traffic going out around there. They had bars. It wasn't, I would call, the nicest part of town. You could almost call it... well, I would call it 1930s seedy, in a way. I don't know, it was kind of vibrant with life, it was an immigrant community. There was all types of ethnicities, whites... I didn't see too many blacks at all. Mexican Americans, primarily Japanese in this area.

MN: You know, that's a really nice description of the area. Tell me, what were the smells of the area?

JM: Oh, yeah, you would get, well, one of the, one of the real strong smells I would get was stale beer. 'Cause we had all these old... they had a lot of bars, you know. And it was primarily all these white folks were in there, these white males, and they would get drunk, they would spill out into the street fighting each other. And that was really something. You'd walk along and on Fifth and Towne, we had this rather tall building, and we were in the, right in the midst of the Depression. They think about the Depression as 1932 or 1928-'32, and right around '35 to '40, we were still in the grips of a terrible depression. And I remember many a time, my father, we would be walking toward Fifth Street and we'd have to walk around the body of someone that jumped off of the taller building there. Usually he'd fall right dead on his butt, and his stomach would burst open and he'd be sitting there with the intestines... I mean, it was a horrible sight. We'd look at that, and at the same time, you could smell the popcorn guy going at it, you know, then you could get this drift of stale beer coming at you from the bars. And the bar doors would be open, they'd be blasting the Andrews Sisters singing "Roll out the Barrel." So it was a very vibrant, life and death was all around you. Nothing quite like, you know, we were rather sterile, even in our gamiest areas compared to those times.

MN: Now you yourself, you said you went to Ninth Street grammar school?

JM: Yes, I did, uh-huh.

MN: And other than school, did you go to Japanese school?

JM: No, luckily, I avoided that. I don't know, they didn't push me into that. And luckily, they didn't send me to Maryknoll. My two sisters were sent to Maryknoll, which was a Catholic school. But my parents were members of Nishi Hongwanji, which is the Buddhist church there. The interesting thing about Maryknoll is that Maryknolls are usually set up in foreign countries. So whenever they set up, it's to convert the native populations in a sense. [Laughs] That's sort of like the origins of Maryknoll. They saw this as a, as a foreign section of Los Angeles. But to their credit, I'd say the Maryknoll fathers came into, came into Manzanar, actually, followed us in there. So they had a very loyal following in a sense. And well-deserved.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.