<Begin Segment 11>

MN: Now when you returned to the U.S. how much English did you know?

AI: None, I had to start from ABC.

MN: How did you learn English?

AI: I started with first grade in grammar school.

MN: You went to a grammar school?

AI: Grammar school because the Artesia area there was no special class I can attend so I had to go to first grade start from the ABC and I was there six months. Then moved to sixth grade after six months and I was in there six months. Then I moved to eighth grade and I was there one year then went up to high school.

MN: And is that where you were supposed to be in high school?

AI: Yes.

MN: Was your brother in the same class with you?

AI: Yes.

MN: Other than attending the grammar school and moving up is there other ways you were trying to learn English?

AI: Mr. Hamano don't speak any English so when we come home from school we speak nothing but Japanese so that was one of the drawback I had. And I was thinking about going out schoolboy, move out and... but I don't know how to do that and I don't know where to go and who to ask, and before that happened the war started so that never happened.

MN: Now you started to move up into high school, skipping up to there. Once you got into high school did you join any clubs or sports groups?

AI: I wanted to play in football but I was not big enough, I was too small, but one of the problems I had is we had to help the farm so we couldn't stay after school so we really couldn't join any team.

[Interruption]

MN: You weren't able to join a lot of the sports clubs although you wanted to because you had --

AI: I wanted to but because I had to help the farm so I couldn't.

MN: Did you have any spare time on the weekends?

AI: No, I was house maid on the weekends. Where somebody would have to clean the house, do the laundry and that was my job.

MN: What about your younger brother?

AI: He took off every day.

MN: Who did the cooking?

AI: He did, uncle did.

MN: Was he a decent cook?

AI: We enjoyed the food so it was okay.

MN: Now how well financially was your uncle's farm doing?

AI: He wasn't good because it was right after the Depression and he was really struggling on the farm. That was the reason that I had to help after school and weekend and so forth.

MN: Now holidays, what did you do on the holidays like Oshogatsu?

AI: Oshogatsu we used to have the Kirikushi village people, originally there was about close to fifty families in the L.A. area so they organized the club and then oshogatsu they used to meet and they used to feast on oshogatsu. That's where we spend oshogatsu.

MN: Whose house was it held at?

AI: One of the farmhouse because free parking, lot of playground for children to play and you can make all the noise you want, it wouldn't bother the neighbor so they always had it in one of the farms.

MN: So it changed from year to year.

AI: We have a volunteer.

MN: Did you do mochitsuki?

AI: Yes, we did.

MN: What was that like?

AI: We used to get together three family, yeah, three family, and everybody make hundred pound. Can you imagine? That's a lot of mochi. We start two o'clock in the morning until later in the afternoon to finish that 300 pound of mochi.

MN: How did you eat the omochi?

AI: Ozoni basically, ozoni and the yakimochi.

MN: So for a while is that all you ate?

AI: Oh, yeah, one month straight probably we eat every morning.

MN: Because omochi goes bad really fast.

AI: Those days we didn't have a refrigerator, there was ice box but leave it at room so what we did is we soak in the water and we change water like every day or every other day, change it to fresh water and we kept that way and it would last like a month or two months.

MN: Now in 1939 you had to get surgery. Can you share with us what happened?

AI: 1939, oh, I had the appendicitis. I had a stomachache and I couldn't go out to the field so I stayed in and eventually the pain was so severe that couldn't do, I couldn't sleep. So finally when one of my neighbor's kid came to see me I asked him to go Mr. Hamano to come back and take me to the doctor. So we went to neighborhood doctor, Caucasian doctor, and he said, "You have appendicitis, you have to have operation." I guess Mr. Hamano didn't want to have the unknown strange doctor do the operation so now he took me to Japantown and we had Dr. Tashiro look at it. By then my appendix was burst and the pain was gone and as soon he looked at it he says, "Oh, you have a busted appendix, go to hospital right away." So from there we went to hospital right away which was in the east L.A. and same that afternoon I had the surgery. But the funny part is that all this surgery done used to be... after surgery they used to insert the tube to remove any pus or whatever involved. He had something new came out, still was in testing stage which is the sulpha drug that he told me after surgery he sprinkled that in my stomach then he sew back completed. Usually appendix everybody stay two weeks in the hospital those days but I got out in one week. After I went back to doctor he says, "You know you were my guinea pig," which was good.

MN: Now I want to get into the war years now. When you left Japan in 1937, 1938, did you have any idea that the youth in Japan would get into a war?

AI: No, no idea.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.