<Begin Segment 10>

BN: How many Japanese were there? I mean, roughly, percentage-wise?

JB: There was quite a few. Quite a few Japanese and we all knew each other. We had problems with a young gang of girls, for some reason they wanted to fight the "Japs." And we kept saying, "We don't want to fight, we don't know how to fight," and they kept saying, "We want to fight." Finally, they started picking on some kids going home from school and I heard there were some fights. Then the African American girls came by and protected us and fought for us so that we didn't have to fight. We were saved by them. [Laughs] That was growing up, junior high school and high school in Denver. One boy got his face cut with a knife, he still has the scar. So it was kind of rough.

BN: Was that, do you think, connected to the World War II events?

JB: Oh, yeah, it was right after the end of the war.

BN: Stereotypes.

JB: Yeah, stereotypes, right after the end of the war. And I don't think these kids that tried to pick a fight with us, I don't think they even felt that way. It's just something for them to say, they're trying to get us angry, but it didn't bother us. We still said we don't want to fight.

BN: As far as where you lived and so forth, was it a largely Japanese area?

JB: Yeah. In Denver, too, I think coming out of camp, all the Japanese hung out with each other. We didn't even try to mix. Maybe some did, but most of our friends were all Japanese. The businesses also being right around there were all Japanese. So the resettlement of Denver, I think at one time there were thirty thousand Japanese there. I'm not sure. But they had their own newspaper, the Japanese newspaper, they had a JACL, it was very active. And our store was right in the middle of everything, so in a way, our store was fun because we would have people coming from the East Coast going to the West Coast, they had to stop in the store. And then people coming out of camp would stop in our store, and so we'd have to meet a lot of people going back and forth from the East to the West Coast.

BN: Your father and family bought the store, right?

JB: Uh-huh.

BN: It requires a certain skill, ability to make the...

JB: Right. My mother called my brother from Chicago and Detroit because he wasn't working, so my brother came and he learned how to make the manju, and my mother also knew how to make the manju. So with the two of them making the manju in the back room, and then I was in the front selling, so this is how our store operated. We had another salesgirl, plus my brother had a couple of other men working for him who were Japanese speaking, knew how to make the manju, so that helped a lot, too.

BN: Did you have any competitors, or were you the only ones?

JB: We were the only ones at first. Later on, just about the time we were ready to close, the Japanese population in Denver was going down.

BN: People were going back to California.

JB: Going back to California. So then my parents decided to go back to... the way my father put it was he wanted to go back to the place, he wanted to die in his home. So I thought he meant Japan, but what he meant was here, Los Angeles. He wanted to come back here to die. And just after we moved back to Denver he died about six months later.

BN: After you moved back to L.A.

JB: Uh-huh.

BN: What year?

JB: 1953, and he was ill, but he said, "I want to go back to my home to die," so we came back to L.A.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.