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SY: And how did your father meet your mom, your mother?

HS: I really don't know. I think they were just two families... they never said it was baishakunin, but my mother was ten years younger than my father.

SY: And did he, did they marry before your father came to this country? Well, he couldn't have 'cause he was so young.

HS: No, he came first and then he went back, and I think the family set up the marriage. And he didn't have enough money to bring her back, so he had to work one year in America, then he sent her a passage to come one year later.

SY: So she came, do you know when she came to this country?

HS: I think she came in 1920.

SY: And by then your father was, what was he doing in the United States?

HS: He was doing gardening, and then... I thought he was doing in gardening in southern California.

SY: So he came directly to California?

HS: No, he went to San Francisco first, and then I think he came down slowly because I got one picture of him, it shows him in a farm picking, I think it was somewhere near Fillmore because we had Kagoshima friends, good family friends in Fillmore. And so when we were young, several times my father used to drive up to Fillmore to meet this, called the Arima family. That's what I remember. Being Kagoshima, they...

SY: And so he worked primarily, it sounds like he was a farmer, but then somehow he became, he started doing gardening work, before the war?

HS: Well yeah. It was, after he married my mom they were living on Cordova Street, which is one block south of Washington Boulevard, and then --

SY: In Los Angeles?

HS: Uh-huh. And then --

SY: Can you sort of describe that area, because I don't know if everyone knows Cordova and Washington. Is it, was it...

HS: It's, that area, there's very few Japanese. There was only one other family, Uyemura family, that were real, our family had a hundred year relationship this Uyemura family from Japan and the United States. But Washington and Vermont is probably where it was, and it's only about, the next big street, Pico, and then Olympic is where the Japanese town is around St. Mary's area, which covered... but between Washington and Vermont and past Olympic, there was about five thousand Japanese living in that area. That's why they called it St. Mary's or Uptown area.

SY: So that was Uptown, and then you were sort of in between Uptown and Seinan area.

HS: Yeah, just exactly halfway in between both areas.

SY: And there were lots of Japanese in both Seinan and Uptown.

HS: Yeah.

SY: But you know why your dad picked this area in between?

HS: Cordova's right next to Washington Boulevard, and the Uyemura families were, my father lived with them and my mother when they got married. And then what happened was a little later, one of the neighbors on Washington Boulevard had a florist, when he's going back to Japan, he came over and begged my father to buy the florist. And my father didn't know anything about flower shops, but the man kept begging him and begging him, and my father took pity on him, so he bought the flower shop. And there was a house built right onto it, I think it was a little two bedroom house and it was attached to the flower shop, so that's what my father did, florist work, up until evacuation.

SY: So the florist shop was in the area in between these two, so he didn't have Japanese clientele mainly?

HS: It was all, all hakujin. But big Fox West Coast Theater was a block away, and we used to get, people from the theater used to come buy flowers. But the cemetery road's, the cemetery was just half a mile down, people would stop and buy flowers on the way to the cemetery.

SY: So you were raised, then, among a lot of...

HS: Mostly hakujins, because I didn't have, until I went to junior high school, that's when I started meeting all the friends from the Uptown area.

SY: And can you tell us what order your family, where you are in your family and who your brothers, if you had brothers and sisters?

HS: I had one brother, John Atsuo, he was two years older than me. Then I had a sister, Masako, she was two years younger than me. And my youngest brother, Takao, he was two years, so each of us were born two years apart.

SY: And your older brother was named John?

HS: John Atsuo.

SY: And so did he give himself that name, John, English, an American name?

HS: No, my dad gave it to him. It's on his birth certificate as John Atsuo.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.