<Begin Segment 7>

TI: So I'm going to now jump back to your, kind of, when you're growing up. Did you have time when you were in school to do extracurricular activities? Like in junior high school, high school, did you do sports?

FM: Not too much. I enjoyed sports, and I played in junior high and in high school, we did sports activities during the winter, when we were not working on the farm. And so I didn't play (...) football and baseball, but those were sports in the spring and fall. But when it was harvesting and work on the farm (...). But we did play basketball, and at the time, I was on the wrestling team. But again, that was complete winter sport, so we did do that, Tom. (...) I enjoyed that sort of thing. I enjoyed winter because we didn't have to work that hard out on the farm. That was the times when (...) it was raining and snowing, and no crops were on the ground. I remember, though, cauliflower, cabbage and things like that grew. But through November, we were harvesting pretty much through. And for about two months there, maybe December or January was about the only time that we didn't have work to do on the farm.

TI: Now as a kid, did you do things like matsutake or clam digging or things like that?

FM: Very little. We didn't do that. (...) I wish we had.

TI: Was that pretty common down there for...

FM: It was pretty common. Like I said earlier, that our social activities, I think, early on, was always with the Japanese people in the area. We had Japanese school that we went to three times a week. And again, it was after the school that we, after school we would be let off near the Japanese school, which was fairly far away from our farm.

TI: So this was like the school bus would take you from the regular school and then drop you off by the Japanese school?

FM: Yeah. And we would do some amount of studying, but I think most of my time, I think I was just out playing Kick the Can during recess, you know, sort of thing. (...) When I was in junior high school, we're studying first grade Japanese school work. (...) I did not do too well. I wish I had done more, and I think part of it was my not wanting to learn it too much. Later on in life I realized that had I been more diligent, I think I would have done better at certain things.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.