Densho Digital Archive - Hank Shozo Umemoto Interview (denshovh-uhank-01-0010)

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TI: So anyway, you mentioned how you were very green. I mean, is that, it's a common term now in terms of a popular term, in terms of being green, but you essentially recycled everything.

HU: Everything. Wires, we used to make our own crates for grapes. We had to pack (grapes in) it, so ever since I was seven years old I was using a hammer (to make these crates). They used to wrap this lumber with wire, so we used to save the wires (...) to bundle (pruned grape vines) with that wire, so everything, there was nothing that, I don't remember anything going to waste. Except cans. Cans, we used to have this well -- in the old days they used to dig a hole for the well -- and the water wasn't that deep, thirty, fifty feet you hit the ground water, and then they used to pump it up from there. So we, and then later we got a pump up on the surface, so we had this empty hole where the well was, so we used to dump all the cans in there. So cans, that's one thing we didn't have any use for, except for milk cans. Milk can, you would go like this and put it on your feet and squash and then clop clop clop clop.

TI: Right. I remember that.

HU: I guess everybody, yeah, used to do that.

TI: So yeah, recycling, how about things like, so I'm guessing that even, like table scraps or, were, like, compost. You would compost things. How about like even the used bathwater? Would you do something with that?

HU: Oh yeah, absolutely. That would go, flow into the garden, my mother's vegetable garden.

TI: Wow, so everything was just, everything was used.

HU: Just about everything, yeah. And table scraps, we had a stray cat. He was a black cat. He never, he was very, very unfriendly; he wouldn't come near us, but we used to feed them, feed this cat a scrap. And there was one time when she had a baby, about three or four litters, and then we found her eating that. I mean, we, we just found the carcass, just the skin there because apparently she ate her own kittens. It was a mean cat.