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TI: Well, you know, to give a sense of your hard life, what would be an example of a chore or something you did to help out on the farm?

FM: (...) The only mechanized equipment that we had was a tractor, which we did our plowing and cultivating and things like that. When we were cultivating, Dad would plow it. When you plow a piece of land, you needed to have the strength to drop the plow where you wanted to turn the soil. But once that was done, to cultivate the land with a disk, and then later with a harrow, you had to just drive the tractor around and around. We had a tractor, it wasn't a Caterpillar, but it was a Cletrac tractor, had tracks on it, and the way to turn that was to just brake one side of the tractor. If you brake the right, that is to stop it, you stop the right track, the tractor would move to the right. And so when I was (...) seven years old, Dad would get me on the tractor with him, and he would get me started on doing the disking or the harrowing. Any job that didn't require any activation of anything behind me. (...) He'd get me on, and get me started, and he would jump off and he'd do something else. And this two or three hours that it took to harrow the land or disk the land, here I am, I couldn't stop the tractor because I was too small and didn't have the strength to stop it.

TI: But you could drive it.

FM: But I could move it, yeah, I could drive it around and around and around, and prepare the soil. I did that sort of thing. But it wasn't much after that, though, that we learned to drive cars. We had a pickup, we had a '34 Ford pickup, and I know that by seven or eight years old, I was driving that, not on the highway, street, but on the land on our property carrying things and doing things. But the time I was maybe twelve, thirteen years old, we were doing work. Just like the people that we had hired that were farmhands, I remember coming home from school and maybe picking up a sandwich, so within an hour or half an hour after I got home from school, we were out in the field working with the farmhands that we had. So it was a tough life. It was a hard life. That was about the time I realized or decided that I wasn't going to be a farmer, Tom. I just wasn't going to be a farmer. Although now I think about it, probably if I had fifty acres of land someplace around town, it'd be pretty good. But it was a hard life.

TI: I'm curious, what did that kind of life teach you? I mean, I'm thinking, boy, you worked hard at a very young life, but how did that serve you later on in your life?

FM: Well, as I say, (...) I determined that I did not want to be a farmer. But we were fairly responsible from the time we were probably twelve, fourteen years old, we were doing the work that any of our farmhands did Saturday and Sunday and after school and during the summer vacation. We were there, we were just one of the farmhands.

TI: Well, so here's a question. During the war when you went to camp, now you come across other Japanese Americans, and I'll use my dad as an example, he grew up in the city, so he's a city boy and you're a farm boy. What differences did you see? Like when you come across someone who you know grew up on a farm, do you think differently? I mean, do you think that they approached life differently? What's the difference between a farm boy...

FM: (...) I would imagine your dad (...) all did harvesting when we got to camps. You may have heard about that.

TI: Sugar beets.

FM: Yeah, sugar beets and potatoes, for sure. But when we had to go and do that, and we did that, of course, there weren't too many farm type, kids that grew up on the farm there. But we did get together a crew of six or eight guys, and we would go out and it was easy. It was easy for us to do that.

TI: That's so funny, because from my, the other stories I hear from city folks, they said that was the hardest work they've ever done. [Laughs] It was backbreaking.

FM: It was that for sure. On the other hand, when we went, I remember the first time that I ever went out with a group of guys, most of us (...) were the city guys, maybe six city guys and a couple of guys, couple of us from the farms. Well, we would get jobs like digging the potato or the sugar beets on a tractor, because we knew how to run that sort of thing. So it was easy for us to get on a tractor and just dig the beets up. Whereas the other fellows, they had backbreaking jobs of topping the beets, and it was a tough life and tough work for them, yeah, for sure.

TI: Yeah, because you knew how to do the equipment, and that's what made it, made you have a different type of job. That makes sense.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.