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TI: So let's talk about kinda your early childhood memories. What are some things that you remember growing up as a young child in a farming family?

BS: Well, I remember sometimes we used to go around barefooted. It was just running around the farm, going to group picnics, like my parents were in a couple of Japanese groups and we would have picnics out at some park or go to the beach or sometime we would have movies, Japanese movies.

TI: So tell me about that. Japanese movies, what would, how would that work?

BS: Well, they would rent some kind of hall and they would get some outfit to show Japanese movies, and so the whole community would come out. This is out in the rural area and we weren't living in Los Angeles, and so I guess the rural people hardly went into town to see movies.

TI: And so it was a Japanese movie, did you understand the Japanese in the movie?

BS: No, not that much, but it was fun to watch those samurai films and, and so we just watched them, and it was also like a social gathering. We would go there and play with other kids your own age.

TI: I mentioned Japanese because I was actually curious, too, in terms of the language that you, that was spoken between you and your parents. How did you communicate with your parents?

BS: We had to speak Japanese with our parents, but with our friends it was all English. I think our Japanese, as kids, was very poor.

TI: And so things like Japanese language school, did you attend Japanese language school?

BS: Yeah, at El Monte we had to go once during the week, after the American school, and then on Saturday we would go, I don't know, from nine to three or something like that.

TI: And, so let me make sure, so on Saturdays you went from nine to three and during the week you also went, what, one day or every day?

BS: Once, once or twice a week. But I don't think we learned that much. We had only one teacher for the whole school. I don't know how many there were that, say, there were, like, forty, fifty students, it's pretty hard for one teacher to handle all of them.

TI: So there's a fairly large Japanese community in El Monte at this time, if there were forty to fifty maybe kids. I mean, there were quite a few families to support that.

BS: [Sneezes] I got the sneeze. Well, there were, in San Gabriel Valley, oh, there were maybe, at least half a dozen different Japanese schools, so just about every small community had their own Japanese school. It's amazing.

TI: And you mentioned earlier picnics, so the Japanese organizations, were they kenjinkai or were they Japanese language school picnics? What would, what were the groups, I guess, the organizations in, like, El Monte?

BS: Well, we did have Japanese schools, we had a judo, at a nearby town there was a kendo, and so I have photos of where several Japanese schools would get together and have a picnic. Let's see, so those kind of things were going on. We went to beaches.

TI: And in terms of the population at El Monte, what kind of percentage were, were Japanese, compared to the other groups?

BS: Gee, hard to say, but there were many Japanese farmers.

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