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TI: Well, so going back now to the job at the World's Fair at the Japan Pavilion. When you took that job, did you then still stay with the family, or did you go someplace else?

CH: No. Like I said, I knew this Moriyama family, Bif, and their friend Aki. She was from the country, Concord, California, and they were family friends. And so I got acquainted with her, and she applied for a position, too, and she got a job at the fair. So between the two of us, we decided to get an apartment. So we found an apartment for a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month in Japantown. So it was just a one room with a kitchen, I mean, a gas burner, really, heat and water, and a double bed. That was all it was. And the bathroom was down the hall, and the rest of the people on that floor would be using the bathroom. That's the bath and a toilet. That was our first, very first apartment. Well, we stayed together for a while, and we were working at the fair. I mean, that kept us pretty busy because we had to take the streetcar across Seventh down to the Ferry Building, and then take a ferry. And we had a pass to get on the ferry and get onto the island. So that was our very first encounter with... and we were what you call, they gave us a tour of the building and told us what we had to do, and what was being done here and there, and there was food there, too. They had a teahouse, and they were gonna sell food. So I think like there were sushis and stuff like that made for the guests. And so we were pretty much shown what to do. And with my friend Bif there, I was real comfortable just being with them, especially Japanese men are, they're very firm looking. But my boss seemed to be more like a family man. I got to know him, and he was very, he wasn't giving me orders or anything like that, he was just very friendly. And he showed me a book, it was printed in Japanese, but it was translated on the side, so I read the translation part of it.

TI: So I was curious, when you communicated with the Japanese, did they speak English, or how did you communicate?

CH: That was a little bit on the hard side. Generally they know English pretty much. They prefer to use Japanese if they can. If I didn't understand, they translated in English, but majority of the time I understood a little bit, I mean, quite a bit, I guess, of Japanese. But their Japanese, of course, was a little bit more on the formal side. The Japanese language, there's a formal side and there's a... but they tried to use English words, because they were in America and they were trying to show off their... so it was okay.

TI: So when I think of the Japanese and then Japanese American workers, was there... what am I trying to say? Maybe like different...

CH: Classes?

TI: Classes almost? Or yeah, just a distinction between...

CH: I will say, maybe not openly, but Japanese, the men that are, the ones that were bosses and things, I would say they were kind of standoffish, I mean, they were more, feel like they had authority. But that didn't bother me as much as the people I worked with. They were not that kind of...

TI: Okay, so the Japanese that worked more directly with you, they were...

CH: Yeah, uh-huh. Well, mostly in the tearoom were San Francisco women, of course, they were Niseis, so they were okay. Except there was a boss there, not a boss, but somebody to oversee that.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.