<Begin Segment 24>

TI: So let's go back now to Honolulu. So when you return to Honolulu, how had things changed?

AO: Well, it didn't seem to have changed very much because, well we, of course, the families got together and everything is... everybody is happy but we tried to get together with our friends and a lot of our friends were not back yet. And then I felt that I should go back to school and get my degree anyway, I had one more semester left and I think I made an application to go back to school. I did get... they did let me go back to school but I needed a couple of courses but I had the hardest time because I think my mind just was not attuned with the type of training because of the time I spent in the military. And I had the hardest time graduating, making it one course. But I did graduate, I graduated the same time as my kid brother who also graduated and that was in 1947 I think I took one semester of course and I completed it.

TI: And how was the business doing, you know, the fish business?

AO: Well, it was still in an infant stage at that time although my brother was running it and he was, like I said, he was not a well man but he ran it good considering all the difficulties he had. But those were the growing days and I guess that's how the honor that would bestowed, that's the hardest time that my brother and my dad had trying to rebuild the business because there were no boats, very little boats still in existence, they were all the wooden sampans and he had to start -- well, not he but the industry had to start rebuilding itself. As the demand for fish became greater and greater we found that we needed boats, we needed men, in fact, as we got more boats we found that there was not enough men to man the boats as crew members. So somewhere along the line my dad got together with the Japanese consul general as well as people in the industry and made it possible to negotiate with the Japanese government and in fact they referred us to go to Okinawa and bring in some imports of Okinawan fishermen to man some of our boats.

TI: So what happened to all the sort of old time fishermen, before the war, you know all... it was an active fishing industry.

AO: Well, they had all disappeared, they had died or had gotten too old and during the war years they couldn't go out fishing, you know, just as we were kicked out of the army they couldn't man the boats, they couldn't own boats and they couldn't run, even become crew members.

TI: That's interesting, you never think about that, but you're right, so this industry had just sort of disappeared.

AO: Yeah, you know, there were no boats or very few boats and so boats had to be rebuilt and then once they started getting a few boats, no matter how small they were, they needed crew members and that's how my dad got together with the Japanese government, the consulate general, and made it possible for one of our managers and me to visit Okinawa and negotiated an Okinawan... the American army was still in control of Okinawa then and it was very fortunate that some of our, the guys that we knew in the army together that were the special aid and they were in the Okinawa military government who controlled the country anyway, the Okinawan community. So it made it possible to import initially maybe fifty then later on over hundred Okinawan men to work on our boats which was very helpful you know. And even to this day I think there are maybe two or three of the Okinawan fishermen still left, the rest of them all went back and they became millionaires because at that time, the few five, six, seven hundred dollars a month they were making, you know, made them millionaires back in Okinawa.

TI: So you essentially bootstrapped the industry, I mean, you know, you had some boats and then you got the crews, and then once they were able to start fishing, you had this market.

AO: Yeah, my dad, yeah, made it possible for the industry to start gradually being built up again because the boats without crew members... even right now today the industry is short of actual people who will work on boats. There's no Nisei and there's no Sansei, there's no Yonsei, there's nobody that want to work on a boats. So what happens is actually for the longest time Vietnamese fishermen were brought in, Korean fishermen were brought in and today they're trying to get Filipinos and other nationalities through special arrangement but it's been very, very difficult to find.

TI: So why is that? Is that because the work is really hard or is it because it's not very financially rewarding?

AO: It's very hard, it's a hard life. Long line boats would, you know, these boats are maybe... a small boat would be fifty-feet in length, the bigger ones a hundred twenty feet, they each carry maybe five, six men but they stay out there for... some of them at least three weeks, some of them five, six weeks at a time. It's not that easy of a life and then it's still a gamble. If they do well they do very well and if they don't do well they get a hard time. And there's no guarantee of wages or anything so it's not an easy life. It's hard to get men to go out fishing on a commercial basis.

TI: And when they do that do the crews usually share the risk? I mean so if they get a good catch everyone makes more money or it just really the owner or the captain?

AO: No, the crew... the system is such that a crew always shared... from the total proceeds of the sale of the catches, our auction company takes a commission off the top. The balance goes to the boat owner, now the boat owner has his own arrangements with the crew members, of course, first of all he got to take care of his expenses. His expenses of the fuel, the ice, the food and whatever repairs that had to be made to the boat. And the expenses of the sale and for the balance the boat owner takes maybe thirty, forty, fifty percent depending on what kind of investment he has in his boat and the balance is shared among the crew members. So if they do well, the crew members do well. If they do poorly, they can hardly make the expenses.

TI: Right, so the crew would get hardly anything.

AO: But the only thing is that they would have had been fed along the way, that's about it. But if there are family members, they get hard time.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.