<Begin Segment 8>

TI: So let's talk a little bit about the community. You said you're about ten miles outside of Sacramento, so what was your area called?

HU: Florin.

TI: Okay, so the Florin area.

HU: Yeah, Florin area, there were about twenty-five hundred Japanese living in that area and they were mostly strawberry and grape farmers. In fact, Mr. Sulu, George Takei, his mother was from Florin, from, her family was, they were growing in strawberries, so it was a community and in that Japanese community was sort of divided according to the grammar school areas. So Florin, the town itself, had their, their own sort of an area and in fact, in that area they had two American school, English schools, one for white, one for Japanese only, and I think it was nineteen, either 1940 or '41 that they integrated, so that was one of the few communities where these grammar schools were segregated.

TI: That was in the town of Florin? That was more --

HU: Town of Florin. I guess, I guess you could call it a town. There was a couple of stores. There was Akiyama, Akiyama, he, they sold food and thing. There was Tanikawa, they sold dry goods, like shoes and that kind of stuff. And those were the only two major stores. There was a Japanese garage and there was a Christian, Japanese Christian church, I think. Oh, and they had the Buddhist church and Buddhist church was one of the bigger churches there and whenever they had movies, Japanese movies, they had these young people, Young Buddhists Association that, that kind of young people's group, and to raise funds they used to hire this guy named Mr. Ban from Los Angeles and he would come down and show these movies. In the early ages I would, yeah, when I was at a earlier age, it was talkie. It didn't have the sound, so this guy would stand in front next to the screen and he would dub in the words himself. And then later it became the talkie and when that happened we used to say, "Oh, it's talkie, talkie." It was the greatest invention of the time, sort of. So anyway, at the Buddhist church all the, everybody in that surrounding area would go to the Buddhist church to watch the movies. Also Bon Odori, they used to have the Bon Odori at the Florin Buddhist church and that's where they used to get together and have the Bon Odori type of thing. But then otherwise it was sort of separated. There was Florin, there was Elder Creek section and there was, our area was called Taishoku and there was Mayhew area, so there were this different sections within the Florin area, but when there was some activity or something we would get together and have it at Florin.

TI: So your, your little area was called Taishoku?

HU: Yeah.

TI: What does Taishoku mean? What, what --

HU: Taisho is, it's Japanese year, like right now it's, what, it's Heisei, I don't know what it is. It's Heisei or something, before that was Showa and then Taisho and Meiji, and so it was built in the Taisho era, so they just called it Taishoku.

TI: And when you have these different, like, areas, was it sort of also separated by where people came from in Japan?

HU: I know there's, oh, there's one area that's, that was... in Japan they used to call these people eta, which is not a, not a complimentary name. I hate to used the word, but there was this certain area where there were, there were concentration of people from that culture or whatever.

TI: This was in the Taishoku --

HU: No, it was away from...

TI: Away from, a separate area. And back then, did people discriminate against them because of, of their background? When you say --

HU: Sort of, yes. Sort of, because before the war it was, it wasn't too civilized and when they got married there they had this in-between, the baishakunin, and they would ask their relatives in Japan to check up on the background of that and so yeah, there was discrimination there.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.