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Title: Min Tonai Interview I
Narrator: Min Tonai
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: September 2, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-tmin-01-0032

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TI: I want to go to your parents a little bit, and wanted to talk about their readjustment. So your dad and mom, they had this thriving business and it was taken away. What happened to them?

MT: When they came back my father wanted to go back into the same business that he had before. He tried to, he went back to the Fitzsimmons stores where he had the right of first with he and his partner, and they said, "We had a great relationship. We really liked you, but things have changed from the war. We now have self service. We're running it and so we cannot use you anymore. I'm sorry, we just can't use you anymore." So my father and partner said, "Well, we'll have to do something here." So my father thought about it, then he went to my mother and he said, "We, we have to start all over again and let's get, let's buy Pop and Mom grocery store and start as we had started at the very beginning." And my mother said okay, 'cause we had to have some kind of income to come in. We had lost everything. So my father said, "Okay, okay, get the money." And my mother said, "I don't have any money. Don't you?" He said, "No." They both thought that they somehow had salted something away someplace. I think Japanese call it hesokuri, they put it away, in the umbilical cord, hide it there. But they didn't have any, so they couldn't start. They had to have money. So now they had to do something, and my father, his partner had a farm through his, in his wife's name in, in Cutler, California, which is near Dinuba, California. And so he decided he's gonna, he has to farm. He tried different things, tried to start a, start again, but he couldn't either, so he'd, he'd lost almost everything too. Now, he went out to, to start a farm and then my father went to help him, and one summer we went out to help him and I realized that I was not a farmer. It's really hard work. [Laughs] And he --

TI: And at this point your, your, how old was your father about this point? He must've been --

MT: My father when he came out of camp was fifty-seven.

TI: Okay. And so he, so at fifty-seven he's starting, starting all over again.

MT: Fifty-eight. Fifty-eight, I'm sorry. He was born in 1887 and it was '45, so he was thirteen, he's fifty-eight years old.

TI: Fifty-eight, okay.

MT: So he, and he had some back problems, got hurt when he was lifting crates and stuff and so on, so there was some problems there, too, but he was a hard worker and he worked... he was a person who could pace himself. He knew what his capacity was, amazing. I'm never like that, never was and never will be at this age. He could pace himself so he could, he can work forever. He would take -- I remember once we were helping a next door neighbor dig a flat area in his backyard so he could put clothing, his clothesline up, and we were taking as big a shovel as we can, throw it in the barrel big as we can and so forth, and so was the, so was the man. He was a judo man, next door Issei man. And he was doing, we were all working, and my father would only take half a shovel. Well pretty soon we're tired; we have to rest. My father doesn't stop. He keeps doing. And then Mr. Nagano saw, he said, "See that? He's smarter than we are. He'll end up doing more work than we did 'cause he knows his own capacity." And that's how it was. Any time he did... he gauged what he had to do and he would, he would do that. So anyway, worked on the farm and did all kinds of things, but being deaf he couldn't get another job, he couldn't do anything else. And, and they were not farmers, so they really didn't make any money. So that summer I went to help, my brother and I went to help them, we, I told them at the end, I says, "Don't pay me. I got paid from working outside, helping pick crops, grapes and things like that, so that's good enough." Said, "One of these days when you make enough money, then you can take your..." I said, "But forget about it." 'Cause I knew he would have to, he didn't have any money, and so then, and so we worked all summer and, and also I determined the only thing I, fun I had was driving trucks or driving the tractor. I hated that stoop labor, and so, or hoeing or whatever have you, picking crops and bending over all the time. And so we, I came home and I couldn't do what I wanted to do, buy things I wanted to buy or anything like that, and I also couldn't go to school. So I had to go work, and friend of mine, high school then, his brother, his uncle had started a fruit stand in Grand Central Market in Los Angeles. It's a low cost market. It's a, it's a concession, bunch of concessionaires, lot of fruit stands, lot of, some grocery, some, a lot of meat markets, so forth. And they would buy the inexpensive stuff and sell it. If something was expensive they wouldn't sell it. So anyway, I started working there on Saturdays and then finally when the, the year ended I went to work on a full time basis until I was ready for school, saving up money. And I would give my mother one check and I would keep the other check.

TI: So for the family, was this probably one of the, the toughest times, I mean, in terms of, of financial...

MT: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. My mother then started to work. She didn't have enough English skills, she felt, to do work in offices or anything else. In fact, she would love to have worked in an office. She told me that later, if she could have spoke enough English. So she knew how to sew, so she became a seamstress, worked for a custom... couture, you know, somebody... and she went to work for them and did that and finally ended up at the end working for, getting a job working for Saks Fifth Avenue, in their, into alterations. She worked in there. And, and so anyway, my father got a, later on got a job with the next door neighbor of his partner's place. Mr. Nagano had, he was a guy that the world was good for him, financially. I mean, he could no longer get his, he was a wholesale, wholesaler of produce, Nagano Produce, and he was also a little bit of a gambler. He would, by gambler meaning he would invest in cheap stock, penny stock, and before the war he invested in movie studios. They were the cheap stocks. Well, his assets got frozen and during the war they did great. The people wanted to go to movies 'cause they couldn't do anything else. It was cheap and they had to make a lot of wartime movies for the military and stuff, so they made a lot of money. So his stock prices went way up, but he couldn't trade. He would've, normally he would've traded right away, but he couldn't trade until the war was over and he made a lot of money on that and decided to open up a ranch market, produce part, so he opened a ranch market and it was doing well, and to help my father decided to give him a job so he can get social security. So my father went to work for him, trimming vegetables in the back 'cause he's deaf. He couldn't do any of the other things, so he started trimming vegetables in back. The problem was he could not, they asked him also, 'cause he's a fill guy, to work the, the midnight shift, graveyard shift because the person on graveyard shift had to have night off, so he would take that night shift for him. I never knew how hard that was. I just accepted that he worked that night, one night. And he, he said it was hard at night. He said it was, he got sleepy, so he would trim vegetables, so he would trim vegetables next morning. So he would do that, trim lettuce and wash carrots and whatever have you. And later when I came out of the service I told my father at that time, I said, he's over sixty-five, so I don't want him to work anymore. He could get his social security 'cause Mr. Nagano made sure that he would get his social security. So I said, "I'll go work for you, take your place 'cause I know how to do that." My father said, "I'd rather work another ten years than not have you finish school." Now the onus is on me, so I had to study, get good grades, do well, everything else, so that's what I did. I studied hard, got good grades first semester. But I went to City College first instead of East L.A. --

TI: And before you go there, I just want, what do you, how does it make you feel, I mean, when you think about how hard your parents had it after the, the war?

MT: Well, the thing about is that that, what I'm talking about is that when I, when I started to go to school I decided "I'll take his place," every holiday I had, summers -- I was going summer school, but I would take other times -- Easters, any time I had some time off I would take his place, so he didn't have to work, and he was happy about that 'cause I knew how to do those things. And the, and the Naganos were happy 'cause they knew I could handle it and I could lift things more, I could do more things, I could, I could do, they didn't have to have someone to help him lift things and things like that, so they were happy with that. And that was my father's salary, so it was cheap for them. So it worked out well, except when I worked the four days and that one night, that's when I realized how hard that was. I was like a zombie at night, to be working all day four days and on the fifth day having to work at night. I was trimming vegetables and I'm still falling asleep, I'm doing things trying to keep awake. It really was hard. It was really, really hard and I fully, really, really appreciated what Father did. It was just something that I would never wish on anybody else, to break a day, like, break days like that. It's easy if you do it at the same time, but you, if you have to, or something else, but to break it between night and day, it's just so difficult. Really appreciated that.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.