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TI: Okay, so let's talk about your mother a little bit more in terms of, so what was she like? I mean, what did she do in the house and what was she like?

HU: She used to get up early. And she used to do whatever farm work she had to do, and in those days, I still remember when I was small, when I was little older we had kerosene stove and things like that, but I remember when I was younger they used to call it hetsuisan. Hetsuisan is a... well let's go back, I remember one time when they had to rebuild this hetsuisan and what we, they did was they got, there's a hard pan area in the, on the farm. It's clay, and then I remember my brother used to cuss every time he was plowing that because it's hard, so they took that soil from there, put it in a bucket, bucket tub, and mixed hay with it. And I remember stepping in it, in water and I remember kind of mixing it up, standing in there. I was having fun with my bare feet, and then they would mold that into a kiln like. It's flat surface, maybe that tall and wide and couple of holes and inside you would burn the, the wood. And the wood came from the, where we pruned the grape vines. There's these strands of branches and they would save that and they would use that. My mother used to use that to cook, fire up, and that, we used to use that for bath, too. In the furo, we had that separate little shack and there was this box made out of redwood and you, you would put the brush and boil the water, and that's how we lived.

TI: So you really lived off the land. I mean, you took the clay from the land and made the kiln, you used the wood from the grape plants.

HU: Yeah. Even food, that tsukemono. I remember, it's winter, springtime, they used to have all these weeds come up and there was this mustard grass, they call it. Beautiful yellow flowers, but before it becomes a flower there's buds and I remember helping my mother trim that thing and she would make tsukemono and that was the most delicious tsukemono I have tasted. And mushrooms, all around us there were empty land, pastures, hay ranches and things, and I remember going with my mother to this pasture, our neighbor, hakujin neighbor's pasture and there's these mushrooms growing up from under the cow dung and I remember picking those up.

TI: So it sounded like you really lived as much as you could off the land.

HU: Oh, yeah.

TI: When you did go to the store, what kind of foodstuffs --

HU: Bacon, rice, shoyu. Shoyu came in a tub like this, five gallon tub, bamboo, made out of bamboo, and after it's empty it's usually used as a bath for tsukemono, so tsukemono -- oh, miso because we used to eat, for breakfast we used to have gohan rice and miso shiru, and until, until my brother got married. When my brother got married my sister-in-law, she, she got out of high school, out of high school she went to housework. A lot of girls used to do, my sister went to house work where they got exposed to American culture, so when my brother got married and my, then my sister-in-law started cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast, so that's when we started having bacon and eggs for breakfast, but before then we had miso shiru and umeboshi, so a lot of the food that we bought in the early days were Japanese food like that. And my mother grew all the vegetables, eggplant, you got everything you could think of and she used to make tsukemono out of that, and then she would always leave one plant for seed that she would dry it out and then use it for next year's crop. So yeah, we did live off the land a lot.

TI: And about how old were you when your brother got married?

HU: That was 1937, so about nine years old, eight or nine years old. So he got married in February, so eight, seven, eight, so yes, I was eight.

TI: And can, do you remember the, the wedding and what that was like?

HU: Yeah, they went to a China-meshi, I remember that. Yeah, and in those days they all went to this China-meshi thing and then, they were Isseis, I mean it was Isseis' world and so the Isseis would drink and they would, everybody would take turns singing. Yeah, I still remember that.

TI: And how did the routine, other than getting bacon and eggs for breakfast, what other, how, how else did things change in the household now that you had another woman in the house?

HU: Well, she was the only high school graduate in our family, among our relatives. She was the only one, so I thought, I think she was very intelligent, until one day I ask her, I asked her where Oz was, because I was about fourth or fifth grade and there was a teacher named Mrs., Miss Milner and everyday she would spend maybe half hour or so reading this story about Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, whatever you call it, and to me, I mean, she was really good at reading and so I was captivated. I was just, to me it was real story, and so one day I asked my sister-in-law, "Where is Oz?" She said, "No, that's just a fiction. There's no place like Oz." And I kept saying there is Oz because my teacher tells me a story of that, and then we just kept going for about twenty minutes and finally it was settled and I decided that she didn't know too much about geography. [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] That's, that's a good story.

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