<Begin Segment 2>

BN: Before we get there, I want to ask you a couple more things about prewar. Do you know how your father and mother met? Was that arranged?

[Interruption]

JB: As I understand it, my father's first wife passed away, so he went back to Japan. And as I understand it, my mother had originally come to San Francisco as a "picture bride," but the man that she was supposed to marry, it didn't turn out well, so she went back to Japan. And so now she was considered an old maid, not marriageable. So when my father went back to Japan to find a mother for his seven-year-old son, it worked out fine and the two of them got together. So it was sort of an arranged marriage.

BN: She was sort of considered already married, right?

JB: Not married, but I guess --

[Interruption]

JB: But I think the fact that she had been, I guess, sort of promised to another man here, but that didn't work out so she went back, so I guess that put her in a category of not marriageable. So it turned out good for my father, and they came back to L.A. For some reason, I don't know how he ended up in L.A., but he had a pool hall near Cahuenga, Sunset, and I was born right around RKO Studios at that time. It was a large community of Japanese Isseis, and my uncle had a store near Hollywood Boulevard, and so the men would gather around the table in the morning to drink coffee, and they take their lawnmowers and they would just roll it down Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard. [Dog barking] Sorry, I'm trying to keep him quiet. So they would roll their wheelbarrows, I mean, they would roll their lawnmowers without a truck, just walk it down Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, and just ring the doorbell and tell the lady or the man, "We'll cut your lawn for fifty cents," and that's how the gardening got started, I hear, in Los Angeles. So then they would cut the lawn, and then they'd have to walk the lawn mower back to the store, and then they would bring a wheelbarrow with a gunny sack, and then they would gather all the cuttings, put it in the wheelbarrow and take it away. So that was gardening before trucks, gardening trucks. And then later on he had enough money to, I guess, buy a truck.

So then my father, being the gidayu teacher, we were very involved with the Japanese kabuki and odori and culture here in L.A., in Little Tokyo. We used to perform at the Yamato Hall, which is no longer there, but it was a big hall where they had gambling on the third floor and performances on the second floor. It was an all-day performance. People would bring their lunches and sit there and we would perform dances and kabuki plays. Miyoko Watanabe was... oh, it was an all-girl kabuki, it was called Shojo Kabuki, and all the actors were women, no men. When I was in Japan, kabuki actors are all men. So here it was all women, and some of the notable women that became noted in their careers, like Miyoko Watanabe went to Japan, came back, and she came back with the Grand Kabuki, the first tour, and she was a translator. And then later she taught kabuki at Columbia University. And then there's Michiko Iseri, who was on the kabuki troupe, and she became the first dancer after teaching Japanese dancing in Heart Mountain. She became the lead dancer for The King and I with Yul Brynner. And there she did other Broadway shows. There were quite a few other girls from that kabuki troupe that went on to become dancers. I was still about five to seven to nine years old, but we all did kabuki in those days. We would practice on First Street, and we would do odori dancing on First Street at another studio, and we would walk over to the kabuki practice studio to do our kabuki. So I had a lot of Japanese language training through kabuki.

BN: Did you also to go Japanese language school?

JB: Yes, I did. Hollywood Gakuen in Hollywood. And I went up through the fourth grade, learned kanji, hiragana, and katakana. We used to have to go every day after school, we hated it. So when we went to camp, we were so thrilled there was no more Japanese school so we could play.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.