<Begin Segment 2>

SY: So when he came here he didn't immediately... it took a while for him to establish himself?

FK: Well, I don't know what you mean about establishing because he was, again, in doing various types of work to support the family, but somewhere he decided that he would like to go into the kamaboko business. And again I don't know why, he never explained to me and why he selected that business to go into. But he knew of a young man in Vancouver, Canada, which is a hop, skip and a jump from Seattle, that was in the business and this young man, he was in his late teens, he took over the kamaboko business in the Vancouver and the name of company was Yamasan, yama and san, ichi ni san. And the proprietor, he was old so he wanted to retire and he sold the business to this young man. And somehow my dad met him and convinced him to teach him, teach my dad how to make kamaboko. And he did and in fact he shared a few of the equipment, equipment in those days is a usu, a stone bowl that is a piece of machine where it is motor driven and the usu turns as the clocks turns and then there's four legs that goes counter. So it's a mixer and that's where they put the fish and --

SY: Fish parts.

FK: Well, okay, let me go back. To make the paste which is called surimi the fish flesh is taken off the fish so you get a fish and you take the head off and you take the innards out and then you would fillet it in such a way where you have two fillets and one bone in the center and you get a spoon and you scrape off the white meat and you would leave the stomach portion which is the fatty part. And then the white meat portion of it is then rinsed and re-rinsed and re-rinsed in water to take out the fish smell, the oils and the blood. And so when you squeeze the water out of it you have a fish protein that is not dry but is pretty well dehydrated. And that would be refrigerated overnight and then the following morning you would get through a hamburger machine, you would run it through there and then into the usu, the bowl. And then you start the bowl and start mixing it and you would add your sugars, salt, water and then flour or starch and then you would make it into a paste, and then it turns white, a white paste. And from that you have your knife and then you got your kamaboko board and you would place the flesh onto the board, shape it and then put it on a rack and then it's steamed and then it's ready for sale.

SY: So originally when your father first got into the business, most of this was done by hand except for the usu.

FK: The usu, yes.

SY: So he had to actually do all of that work?

FK: Yes, I remember because as I used to come home from school if there's some work to do and if there was unfinished work I would be part of the scraping the fish and so forth and cutting the fish and things like that. We did a lot of that during the Christmas break, the summer vacations, I had no vacation time. Every time there's a school break you'd catch me in the factory working. And this is just not me, it was in that era people that had businesses, the children would be involved in the business. So I thought nothing of it, I didn't like it but I didn't think that it was unfair or anything like that.

SY: Now backing up your father... when your father bought this equipment and was taught how to make kamaboko, did he decide to stay in Seattle?

FK: No, again he obviously figured that there's a lot more Japanese in southern California than in the Seattle area, which was true. So he packed us all up and I do still recall George Hosaki he's the young man that taught my father how to make -- well, he in his Cadillac mind you, and he's a young man, he had a Cadillac in those days, and he drove us from Seattle to Los Angeles. I remember the huge car and my mother, my two sisters and I, we drove really in high fashion.

SY: In style and this George Hosaki was such a young man. You don't know how he made his money?

FK: Well, he was caught in the same web that we were... all of us were. In that I'm sure he was very successful in doing the business, the kamaboko business, but when the war broke out they also in Canada they were placed in camps. And they pulled him away from the Pacific ocean, Pacific side, and he was in camp somewhere in northern Canada which is very cold and it was terrible. They had it much rougher than we did.

SY: But he actually must have been pretty close friends with your father to come drive you all.

FK: I really don't know how close they were. Many years later after I got out of the army and then I was running the business he and his wife visited us and I had some kind of feeling that there's some kind of a connection. So I asked him and he said yes, that he was the one that shared the technology as well as the equipment and so forth with my dad but my dad had already passed away.

SY: So you met him after?

FK: Many years after.

SY: That's interesting.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.