<Begin Segment 8>

SF: Well, let me go back a second just so we can put this in the context. So you graduated high school and then you got drafted, I guess, in 1940.

SI: Well, I got drafted in 1940, but before that I went to an auto mechanic school and the reason for this was that there were very few opportunities for young Nisei to get into business or some profession unless you're a physician or a lawyer or dentist or... so she realized that I was quite adept mechanically so they thought I should go to an auto mechanic school, and they scrimped and saved very hard. By this time we'd moved to town. My parents ran a furoya, a bath house, a Japanese furo with the men and woman community bath and a few western style tubs. They sent me to school in San Francisco to learn the basics of auto mechanics, which I very, I was very happy to go. I enjoyed the one year of college that I had, and I would have liked to continue, but I relented and I thought well, it's best for me. I was eighteen, I guess then, maybe eighteen going on nineteen. And I finished a year of auto mechanic school. We learned all aspects of various parts of repairing cars, which I find it to great advantage for me because I repair everything now, including snow blowers, lawnmowers, outboard motors, or whatever mechanical; and I enjoy doing it. But after I finished school I worked on the brake shop in Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco and they wanted to hire me there, but it was a union shop. Well, I was working there for nothing, that was fine, I was just a extra hand. But when I wanted to join the union, they said, "You're Japanese." I never met the union officials face-to-face, but the little shop had put me in. They said, "I'm sorry, but you can't work here anymore because the Union won't accept you." So I really didn't feel very bad about it, I don't think. This was the time of the World's Fair in San Francisco. I think it was 1939 and I remember going to the Treasure Island and so forth. So I went back home. I had a car by then and then I worked for a little Japanese service station in Sacramento. Then that was kind of a hassle and it wasn't very pleasant so I worked for a Ford dealer in Lodi, which was nonunion.

SF: How come the little shop, the Japanese shop, wasn't pleasant?

SI: What was I doing?

SF: No. Why wasn't the little Japanese garage a pleasant situation for you?

SI: Well. I live in a little boarding, not a boarding, a Japanese yadoya, a little room across the street, and I took all the meals with the family running the garage. It was a little family affair and it was right near the bridge by the Sacramento River. And I must confess the work got a little boring after a while. You do the same kind of engine rebuild or... I wasn't as good as an experienced mechanic.

SF: But you were trained for a whole year.

SI: Yes, I knew the basics and I could do it. But after repairing cars for a while, after you do several of the similar procedures, it gets a little boring. [Laughs]

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.