<Begin Segment 3>

MN: Now in 1936, your family moved. Why did your family have to move?

YK: Well, we were restricted to a three years' lease, and so we moved to San Clemente, which was the next town over. And we were up on a high mesa there, so out in the middle of nowhere, we were the only ones up there. Although there were a few other farmers, Japanese farmers. And so since there was no water, they got together to build a pipeline all the way to the San Juan Capistrano River, and so then they were able to grow farm crops. But after a couple years, the farmers, the white farmers in San Juan Capistrano said, "No, we don't want any of the water taken away," so the pipe, the water was cut off. So we became kind of dirt farmers in a sense, dry farming, mainly beans. But we survived, and it was the Depression years, so they were hard times. But I don't remember feeling that poor, and I don't remember feeling hungry, 'cause we always grew our own vegetables and we had our own chickens.

MN: What did you grow?

YK: What did we grow? Well, spinach and carrots and lettuce and cabbage and things like that that grow easily.

MN: Now, before, you just mentioned dry farming. Can you explain to us what dry farming is?

YK: Dry farming is you have no irrigation, and in the wintertime you plant the seeds and hope that it gets enough rain that later on it will spring up, and that's mainly beans.

MN: And you know, when your family moved to San Clemente, you said your father had built everything at the San Juan Capistrano farm. Did you folks dismantle that house and then bring it over to San Clemente?

YK: No. In San Clemente, we were... well, I don't know. It was kind of a, my vague remembrance of it, that it didn't look too much like a house. It looked like a big, almost one huge truck or warehouse kind of thing. It just had flat sides and a flat roof. And I remember I slept on the floor on a mattress between my two sisters, so we didn't have too much money. But I guess with the sack of rice and the vegetables and chickens, we survived.

MN: Now this was during the Depression, so I know with some farms, the government would truck in city people and have them work on the farms to try to get food that way. Did any of the government people truck in people to your farm?

YK: No, we were such a small operation.

MN: And then shortly after you moved to San Clemente, your mother had the tenth child, Chieko, and you mentioned earlier she had passed away?

YK: Right.

MN: Can you share with us that story?

YK: Well, yeah, we were... (...) one of my older brothers was learning to drive the pickup truck in front of the house. He was going back and forth learning how to shift gears and back up. My younger sister and I, we were back in the back of this pickup truck and we were laughing. But then my brother stopped the car and then he picked up my youngest sister Chieko and she was bleeding from the head. So apparently she had wandered away and nobody knew that she had wandered where the pickup truck was moving back and forth. (...) I do recall that night my mother bathing me and my younger sister. So that was poignant moment, because we bathe every night no matter what. And then there was a big funeral, and the typical, I have the picture now, of showing all the people, and there's the casket, and my daughter, I mean my younger sister Toshiko and I were sitting on the grass in front of the mortuary there.

MN: Do you know if Fukui Mortuary organized the funeral?

YK: I doubt it. This was way back when, and way down in Orange County.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.