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TI: So let me back up to your father a little bit. Tell me a little bit more about him. He sounds like a really interesting person.

MK: Yeah, he was really something. He was an entrepreneur that...

TI: Do you know any other businesses he tried? So he was a transfer business, he did logging.

MK: Logging. Well, he would try anything. Like, I don't know if you know fern, you know fern?

TI: The... you mean to eat?

MK: Yeah, you know the fern, zenmai they call it.

TI: Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

MK: We had, in Canada, mountains of them. And my father, they went, a crew went to pick it, they salted it down and they, and they shipped it -- well, in Japan they don't know my father, so it was, that was a complete loss. But that --

TI: Because the Japanese didn't like it? They didn't buy it?

MK: No, I mean, they got their own fern. Why would they, you know.

TI: I see.

MK: Yeah, so, but they went, he would do anything to make money, even with us kids. He'd take us as a team and we'd all go down -- and when we moved to the farm, well, other famers come and they'd, they need like eight kids or six kids or something to pick up potatoes, well we'd go harvest that whole field in two or three days. So my father took us all out of, like a crew, and that's, he never, said we would never rely on getting what we call relief. Well, over here it's welfare, but in Canada it was called relief, and he said, "We're never going to get relief." So we just, didn't matter what, we all went, all of us went to work.

TI: And within the Japanese community in Vancouver, how was he viewed? Did people like to work with him, or what would you say?

MK: Yeah. But he was a drinking man. "Good Time Charlie," you know everybody. People remember him for his drinking, but all Japanese men, especially successful men, they were, they were really, I mean, sake drinkers.

TI: Now, when he was doing businesses, and say there was a failure, like something that didn't work out, how would he react? I mean, do you, did he get angry or did he get sad, or how would you describe that?

MK: Well, being an only son, he'd blame, he'd blame Mom or blame, you know. He was really, really kind of a, I thought all Japanese men were like that, but if things weren't done or if anything failed, he was, he would, it would be somebody else's cause and my mother would have to take the... but he was a very, very far-thinking person. For our kumiai, he's the one that brought the water in from the mountain, he's the one that put the electricity through. He would try to get everybody together and be the first to put pipe water in our chicken houses and stuff like that that he... so I'm sure he's the one that started the kumiai. We had Japanese school, they built the Japanese school, my father. Even the American, I mean the Canadian school, if they're gonna put in a cement floor my father went down there and put the cement basement in. He was very...

TI: So anything that was, like, new or innovative, he would be part of it.

MK: He would be, yeah.

TI: And so the kumiai, I mean, so this is like a cooperative of Japanese farmers in Strawberry Hill?

MK: That's right, yeah.

TI: About how many farmers were there?

MK: There was like fifty farmers or so.

TI: And what kind of farming did the group do?

MK: All truck farming. But mostly it was like strawberry, or the berries. But we grew everything. It didn't matter. My father would come back, "We're gonna grow beans this year." One year we grew, we went and grew acres of beans and it got to where it'd be only worth half a cent a pound, and my father, he plowed it all under and he took us all to pick hops in the prairie.

TI: So because he lost money on the beans, he took --

MK: Yeah, was no sense picking beans at a half a cent, so we all, all five of us went with Dad to hop yards, and we picked hops for a whole, one month and made enough money to live through the winter.

TI: Interesting. And so going back to the cooperative, so you mentioned he brought, like, piped water in, so before that people were just using wells or something?

MK: Yeah, and the wells would dry up and they'd have to buy water. So they went and piped, got these big pipes and they piped it all the way down to the, to what they call the River Road, and then everybody brings their trucks and fills their water and takes it. And we had one of these, it looked like a reservoir, huge, huge tank, and they would dump the water in there and then we'd feed our chickens. Not so much the land, because Vancouver rains like Seattle and so, but the chickens had to have, and the animals had to have water, clean water, so they did.

TI: Okay, so that was the water. And then you also mentioned electricity?

MK: Yeah, well, BC Electric, we used to have lamp and, kerosene lamp and stuff, but when they brought in electricity, the British Columbia Electric Company, they came, so my father got a few of the Japanese people and they all, I don't know how much it was, but they went and put the seed money down. And they, all these farmers that put the seed money got their electricity pulled to their place. Well, when the, later, the people, other people wanted to get in it, they charged them more and so it was like my father was reimbursed, or all the people that were the first, first investors got reimbursed for... so it was kind of like a, what do they call that, investment type of thing. So because that, I know my father was saying, well, when we pipe the electricity into the chicken house, the Canadian winters, it gets sundown at four o'clock and then sun rises probably like nine, and the chickens wouldn't lay any eggs, or every other day maybe.

TI: Because it wasn't enough sunlight, or light?

MK: Yeah, so then when they went and wired the whole chicken house, they would put two sets of lights, a light one and a bigger light. And so they would put the bigger light on and then they'd put the little light on and the chicken would go up to roost, and in the morning it would be the other way and the chicken would get up, and all the chickens would lay one egg a day. And so my father figured, so he would... and he did it himself. He wired the whole place himself and all were thinking, "How weird." But he'd say, "As long as you can read, you can do anything." So he wired all the chicken houses. We had two story chicken houses.

TI: So he was essentially a self-taught electrician?

MK: That's right, everything. Yeah, even the, you know the water for the chickens, just like a toilet. The ball would come up, when the ball went down the water'd come, go in, just like a toilet bowl.

TI: So he'd invent these things.

MK: Well, I don't know whether he invented it, but he made all those things. Yeah, so the, you can't go away unless you, so in the summertime the chickens, never have to worry about them dying of thirst or anything like that. So he really invented everything.

TI: And how many chickens did you have?

MK: We had like two or three thousand chickens.

TI: Two or three thousand chickens. Wow. That's a lot of chickens.

MK: That's a lot of -- and then that's an industry. We have to go and collect the eggs, and then every day we have to clean the eggs and grade them, and then morning and night we have to clean the chicken house. We had the cleanest chicken house you could ever, you could... my father was a believer in neatness and tidiness. And every fifteen days the chicken house, every room would be cleaned.

TI: Okay, so this makes sense, so electricity, if you got another extra egg a day, it would make a huge difference when you've got a thousand, couple thousand chickens.

MK: Yes, that's right. That's right.

TI: Now, the electricity, did he also wire the house? Did you guys have lights?

MK: Yes.

TI: So you got a house...

MK: I could remember when we used to bring the lamp, kerosene lamp down, and we used to use newspaper and clean that, the lamp, the lampshade. And then after that, so I was very little when we already got electricity and water. Ofuro, we'd bring the tap water into the ofuro and we would, my father built the ofuro every place we went.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.