<Begin Segment 10>

TI: Okay, yeah, let me ask this, make sure I understand. So before, yeah, before we go there, let me ask a few more questions, then we'll go there. You know, the farm was being really successful during this time, who was running the farm?

MK: My brothers and us. My two sisters and I, we didn't go to school. We stayed home.

TI: To work on the farm?

MK: To work on the farm.

TI: And so was there a brother in particular who was --

MK: Yeah, my brother Billy. And then my two older brothers were going to school, so we had to run the farm, my mother.

TI: But how about the business side, in terms of negotiating, selling the produce and the eggs?

MK: Because the kumiai did all that. They had kumiai trucks come at twelve o'clock midnight, pick up all the strawberries. We didn't take it by ourselves. The kumiai had trucks coming in. When we buy, they're called shiyoka, I think it is, with the boxes that you make the strawberry boxes, we buy them and then we make the boxes ourselves, so every farmer orders so many. At twelve midnight every day, every day the strawberry truck comes and they pick up everybody's strawberries and they take it to the, or to the cannery, wherever it's going. It was all done by the co-op.

TI: Okay, so that really helped the family, to be part of this co-op because they would --

MK: Oh yes.

TI: -- they would handle a lot of the business, make sure you got fair prices.

MK: That's right. And like the bird food, the chicken food and all that, I mean, when you buy in tons and tons of it, it's, you have a bargaining power.

TI: Okay. No, that makes sense. That helps. And so your father comes back, like the summer of 1941.

MK: It was almost, it was almost September.

TI: September, okay. While your father was gone, what did the family think of him? Did you guys talk about your father very much?

MK: I think most of us thought good riddance, you know? Because he was so demanding and he treated Mother like... I mean, if you really, I liked my father, but the rest --

TI: Yeah, I was gonna ask how you felt because you were sort of his favorite.

MK: Yeah, that's right. But my brothers and my sisters, I think they, they just felt like, because he was so, the word wagamama, or he's just so... they didn't even... and when he came back he'd dyed his hair, and he came and we couldn't figure it out. And there he, he looked like ten years younger. We were just surprised. Well, then when he comes back, and here comes these letters from Japan from these ladies, "When are you gonna call us, call me?" and stuff like that, my mother hit the ceiling. She threw him out, and we helped her. [Laughs]

TI: Okay. [Laughs] So he wasn't that welcome.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.