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TI: Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like growing up? You had four younger brothers, and what was your relationship like?

DI: Oh, I was the boss until the boys grew into their sub-teens and physically grew stronger than I. That's when I quit being boss, I guess. They became their own person, no longer under their big sister's thumb. And big sister became a mother's helper by then, helping with the cooking, coming home early from work to put the rice on, coming home from school, putting the rice on the stove. Anyway, I helped with the cooking, the cleanup, the housework, laundry, things that girls do in those days. So I think I was typical in that kind of sense. All my classmates worked on the farm after school. We went to Nihongakkou and then we went home and did what we had to do.

TI: And you were, this was still your, was it your grandfather's farm originally still?

DI: Well, I don't know. I've never met my grandfather. He was already gone back to Japan when I was born. And he was here during the early 1900s, I guess. And had the farm where he had other Mie kenjin farmers do a lot of farming under him. And he took care of the shipping of the fruits... not the fruits, but the berries and such. I didn't know about this until I read Bittersweet. I knew that my father had this trucking business where he trucked all these huge boxes of berries to the city. But I didn't know that it was part of this farming operation that Grandpa had. I found that out just reading about all the families who worked on the Kobayashi farm. And that was all news to me; they never talked about it.

TI: They never talked about that business?

DI: That era to me. So I never knew.

TI: So when you were growing up with your brothers, were they doing berries, farming berries mostly, your family?

DI: Oh, we just farmed on the Peacock Farm. He was an Englishman who leased out his farm in Mountain View. It must have been around sixty acres between the city limits of Mountain View and Permanente Creek, which used to overflow in the winter. And my father has always farmed as far as I know. But he was a man of many talents, but farming was his vocation, that's what he made his living on. And so his brother, his older brother also helped after he became a widower. He helped on the farm with the irrigating and such. The younger brother, my father, was the one who ran the farm. And my mother was out in the field helping him right along. He needed her.

TI: Did you help on the farm, too, and your brothers?

DI: Oh, we all worked out on the farm. As soon as I was able to pick berries, I picked raspberries, I picked blackberries. When the beans got ripe, I picked beans, I picked cucumbers. We did whatever the farm had, we harvested. And before we were able to do things like that, we played in the irrigation ditch in the water. We played with whatever was out in the field, the stacks of cannery crates, we built homes and houses and such and made paths, roads, and played out in the field. And so we, with the five of us growing up together, we never lacked for other children to play with. That's all I remember. We had the neighborhood children who were of Hispanic descent, my brothers played with them, and there were two older girls in one of the families, they used to come over and I played with them, but they were older than I. But I never needed other children to come over and play because, I don't know, somehow our lives were so busy just within our own big family.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.