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MN: Now, your family is not Christian, but did you celebrate Christmas?

TY: Well, that's the Western way, so in a way, we lived in a Western society so we'd go to school, grammar school, wherever, and when Christmas, it's Christmas. So not because we're, we are, how do you say that... we lived the Western style living, so then we had, it's not that we had to, but we did.

MN: So you exchanged presents.

TY: Yes. We celebrated Christmas every year, yeah.

MN: What was Christmas like in the Yamashita household?

TY: Well, it was Christmas. We didn't have any kind of a sermon or what Jesus said or what God said and all that, but it was just a gift opening type of a thing for Christmas, so the kids know Santa Claus and so and so.

MN: Did you have a Christmas tree?

TY: Yes, every year. Every year. We still do. So you live, you live with the Western people, you got to act as a Westerner, otherwise you're out of the society, right?

MN: What other holidays did your family observe? Did you observe, like, Fourth of July?

TY: Oh yes.

MN: What did you do for the Fourth of July?

TY: [Laughs] Not much, but, not much, but we used to wait for Fourth of July -- you're talking about Fourth of July, right? Fourth of July we'd go buy fireworks, blow fireworks and enjoy ourselves. That's all we done for Fourth of July. We really didn't celebrate, but when the day come everybody blow firecrackers, well, we'd blow firecrackers too.

MN: So you didn't go on a picnic or anything like that?

TY: No. Well, there was no special picnic or anything, but, say like Kagoshima, Kaseda kai, kenjinkai, they didn't exactly have it on the Fourth of July or whatever. They had it on their own convenient days.

MN: And where did they have their picnics at?

TY: Their picnics? We had, we used to have a lot of picnics at the Elnedo Park on Hawthorne Boulevard and El Segundo Boulevard, Elnedo Park. Nice park over there. We used to have it over there. Then we used to have it at a different place, San Pedro, let's see, Brighton Beach, I think we went to Brighton Beach for a picnic every now and then. And then Kaseda kai that we were in, they used to have a meeting and they used to reserve places and have a picnic wherever campground or park we can get.

MN: So when you went to Brighton Beach did you have any interaction with the Terminal Islanders?

TY: No. It was nice. We'd just reserve a spot and we had it over there.

MN: And then this Kaseda kai that you were involved with, what, what is that?

TY: That is a, they formed the Kaseda kai because the Exclusion Act, due to the Exclusion Act. And then Japan people, they do have a tanomoshi, okay. Do you know what that is?

MN: Well, share with us what it is.

TY: Tanomoshi is a savings. Say like Japanese bank don't pay no interest, right, so then why put the money in the bank? So then tanomoshi is everybody puts their money in together in a certain place, five dollars a month or ten dollars a month or whatever, and they would accumulate the money and then whenever they accumulate so much money, and then -- at the beginning, this is the beginning -- they accumulate so much money, then they will start to loan the money to the people that are contributing to the tanomoshikai, the kai, the group. And so then that was advantageous to them to put five dollars or ten dollars a month into this tanomoshi or kai, and so that they can borrow the money when they want the money, and they return the money at a low interest rate. Banks would charge five percent or ten percent, where the kai would charge maybe one percent or two percent. It was advantageous. So then Kaseda kai was formed due to the Exclusion Act because when the Exclusion Act came they could not come to United States, and then the people that came to United States -- [clears throat] excuse me -- United States, came by Mexico or Canada, so they had to walk into United States. And then they didn't have no money to go home because they walked to United States, and then they didn't have a bank account and so and so, and they wanted to go back to United States to come as legals, so then they started the tanomoshi or Kaseda kai so that they could gather the money. And when the people would want to go back to Japan to come back legally, well, they can borrow the money from the Kaseda kai or tanomoshi to go back to Japan to buy a citizenship of somebody else to come back over here. It was a method of depositing money and borrowing money. That was, that was the key thing.

And then especially when the Exclusion Act was in the, in the legislation and passed, well then what can you do, you see? So then that's how our Kaseda kai was formed, for the advantage of people going back to get their citizenship or buy whatever, and so it was a good thing. Then at one time they had lots of money. Prior to the war they had lots of money, and because nobody would borrow because things were getting better. Then the government confiscated that money, which is a big sum of money, and that was more or less the end of the Kaseda kai. So then after, after one or two years they released the money, and so the Kaseda kai had a big meeting, what shall we do with the money? Shall we keep up the Kaseda kai going or shall we just disband it? Well then they decided to disband it because everybody, they didn't have really much use for the money --

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.