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MN: Your friends. Well, your school at Ninth Street, was that, what's the ethnic demographics of the school?

JM: We had a mix of a lot of different kids, but primarily, as far as I could remember, it was Japanese American and Mexican Americans, there were some whites. But I remember my Mexican American friend who lived just a few houses over from me, never had a lunch. So what little lunch I had, I had to share it with them, which I did. Gave him half of what I had, otherwise he had nothing. And I just thought it was some sort of an oversight on the part of his parents. One day I went to his house, and there was nothing. I mean, not a shred of furniture, it was, it was empty. So, wow.

So I think poverty was, well, we were all poor. We were all poor. It was just a matter of what level of poverty we were talking about. 'Cause I was used to every, every other day or sometimes every day, these, I guess you'd call them hobos, and these were young, young white males that were jumping the trains once they reached the Grand Central Station, and we were only about three or four blocks from that, from the station. They would, they would come off the train and they would be hungry and looking for food. And they would always come up to me and say, you know, "Can you go get the lady of the house?" And I knew exactly what they wanted. So I'd run back there and say, "Hey, Mama, somebody wants to see you," and she would just make a peanut butter sandwich and give it to me to give to him. I'd just rush back and give it, you know, that's, that was a given. So being poor, and I think a lot of Japanese from the Central Valley, because a lot of the food prices and everything fell over there, so the Depression hit them a lot. And they were going through what you saw in The Grapes of Wrath. Did you ever see that? Where they would get tons of people... and so, yeah, the Japanese Americans, there was quite a few of 'em. That's where a lot of 'em went. But instead of hanging out there and starving with the Joads, you know, like they did with all the influx of the Okies and all that, they fled, I guess, to say, that's the only other word for it, into, say, San Francisco or southern California. So there were a lot of them living around here, scratching around, making a living. And there were still, like, immigrants coming in. Well, they stopped it in '24, but I still remember this lady that was, she went off her mind wanting to go back to Japan, I think she left her children back there. So she would roam around the streets, literally crying, and say, "I want to go back to Japan." So this was this polyglot of, you know, things happening in that environment.

MN: I'm assuming she was going and saying that in Japanese, also, walking down the streets?

JM: Yeah, yeah, she was saying, "Nihon ni kaeritai, Nihon ni kaeritai." That's all she kept saying, "Nihon ni kaeritai," and crying. That was pitiful.

MN: Because there was no mental health care or anything, people just kind of left her alone?

JM: I asked around, I said, "You know that lady that was..." they said, "Oh, she's, when she went back and she was reunited with her kids, she was all right.

MN: But it sounds to me like your family, despite the Depression itself, you, you never really starved and you had enough to eat. You didn't have to go dumpster diving for food.

JM: No, not at all.

MN: What, what did your father do for a living?

JM: He worked at a drugstore, and I think he was, he was sort of like the stockboy or something. Amazingly, he made enough to where my mother never had to work. And we never had, you know, what you would call... oh, I don't know what you would call first-class food in those days, but no, we didn't, we were fine in a way. I mean, all my sandwiches were bologna and peanut butter and jelly, but, well, what the hell? I mean, we were still better off than the whites coming off of the (trains)... the white hobos and my friend didn't have nothing to eat. You know, in those days you had to be grateful for anything you had.

MN: And you mentioned that your parents were from Hiroshima. Were they active in the Hiroshima Kenjinkai?

JM: No, not at all. They were just rank and file. [Laughs]

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.