<Begin Segment 6>
TI: Okay, so what grade were you in regular school? That'd be about...
JH: Let's see, we moved from Cupertino to Alviso in, I was in, yeah, fourth grade -- no, third grade, third grade. And I started Japanese school in the fourth grade, and this is fine. What else is there to do? But when I went into high school, then to get out of work I took up track, just to get of work. [Laughs] Excuse me. This is fine, but finally I was graduated from Peter Burnett, then San Jose High --
TI: I'm curious, when you say get off work, what kind of chores did you have to do? What kind of work did you have to do?
JH: Got to pick berries, got to groom berries, this kind of stuff. And then this, let's see, I was, yeah, I was seventeen, we were still making money on, in other words, after the maritime strike was over, making money on berries, blackberries, but the price of prunes were, collapsed. And so the prune growers would knock down some trees and they'd recruit Japanese families to raise berries. Well first thing you know, there's a glut of berries in the produce market because there's only so much limited demand. And my father said, "Gee, this is gonna be a problem." Coincidentally, a neighbor comes to me -- or my, yeah, to me -- and he says, "You know, I got bare land, got a good well." Says, "I want to rent it." And my father went to look and it's, like say, I said, "With it up and down like that you can't irrigate." And he says, "Okay, I'll put in an underground line, concrete pipeline. Then you can put the valve wherever you want, up high or down low." So my dad says, "Yeah, looks good." And I said, "Wait a minute, I'm only seventeen." He said, "Tell you what. You pay me six months' rent and I look the other way and you look the other way, and nobody complains, then everything is legal. If somebody complains," meaning the law or whatever, "Then," he says, "I'll give you your money back." [Laughs] My dad said, "That's a good deal."
TI: So explain that to me a little bit more. So was he selling the land to you?
JH: What's, with this...
TI: This land, I mean, what was the legality? Was he selling the land, or why couldn't he, what was, what was wrong with the transaction?
JH: I'm illegal. I have to be eighteen to rent. Is that what answers your question?
TI: Okay, so he was renting to you, not to your father, to you.
JH: No, no, to me. But still, I'm seventeen.
TI: I see. Okay. And so why did he rent to you and not your father?
JH: He can't rent.
TI: 'Cause he's not --
JH: He's an Issei.
TI: He's Japanese.
JH: Yeah. I'm a citizen. 'Til I'm eighteen I'm legally...
TI: I see, so the laws were that he could lease to a U.S. citizen, but they had to be eighteen.
JH: That's right.
TI: Okay, understood.
JH: Well, here's an example. A child is maybe twelve years old and that's the eldest son. The family wants to farm, so the, there was a good, I won't say a religious leader, but I guess he sympathized with Japanese, named Jerry O'Brien, and he would sign all the legal papers and the family would become sharecroppers. And he would give the family a number, JJ-10, JJ-12, whatever, so that when the produce goes to the market, the commission then can recognize the difference. Well, the checks come to J.J. O'Brien, then you go to his house and once a week he figures it out and then he takes his cut. That made it legal because you're sharecropping under O'Brien. Basically, you're renting. He rents the land and, supposedly. [Laughs]
TI: Now, when the son got to be eighteen, though, did he transfer the land over to the family? If someone, like --
JH: Well, that part I don't know, because this happened way before me. Like the president of San Jose JACL, Shig Matsunaga, he's ten years older than I, and that's how it went. And same thing with Judge Kanemoto's family.
TI: Okay, good.
<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.