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TI: Okay, so it's interesting, so he settled there, your grandfather, and then, actually, a few years later is when the Tufts' came, you said, 1925 or something, so even preceded them, and they were neighboring farmers. Tell me a little bit about your grandfather, his name and why he came from Japan to the United States.

FS: Well, his name was Itaro Shimomura, and he grew up in Wakayama. And he came to California in 1906, and actually arrived in San Francisco like a month or so before the big earthquake. And fortunately, he was in the East Bay area, I think he spent some time in Martinez, which is probably only about 15 miles where we're having the interview now, north.

TI: Yeah, I actually know this area pretty well. After I graduated from college, I worked up in the Concord, Walnut Creek area and lived down here for about two or three years.

FS: Okay, then you know the geography. But then he moved on to Winters, because many of his friends who had left Wakayama (came) from the same little village (and) had gone to California and Winters and kind of wrote back that, "Hey, there are a lot of jobs here and there's opportunity." So he decided to come because he was kind of an orphan in a way and was raised by his mother. So he wasn't in a position to inherit anything, he wasn't the oldest son in that sense. So he decided to... well, about that time, the Japanese were fighting the Russians, that war was going on. He tried to get in the army, but he got rejected because his teeth were too bad. And one of his friends also got rejected, and so they couldn't even get into the army, so going to California was probably one of the better options. Although my father said that my grandfather's friend always laughed, because he told the person who rejected them, he said, "I thought my job was to shoot them, not bite them," the enemies.

TI: That's interesting, because about that same time period, just to show contrast, my grandfather on my dad's side also came. And because of the war, he came because he did not want to fight in the war, and so, in some ways, he was evading military service, because in his case, he was the eldest son and didn't want to fight, so he actually came, that was his reason. So it was kind of interesting the difference there. [Interruption] And so going back to your grandfather Shimomura, so he settled in this kind of rich farming area, what did he grow?

FS: You mean on the Horseshoe?

TI: Yeah, on the Horseshoe.

FS: They raised apricot and almonds, and when I grew up there later on, it was exactly the same type of trees.

TI: And so was he quite successful doing that? It seemed like if he was in this, with rich soil, it looks like he picked a crop that seemed to work really well there if it still went on and on for decades after.

FS: Well, it kind of depends on what period of time you're talking about. But I say by 1940, according to the census information, he was making something like eight or nine hundred dollars a year, which doesn't seem like a lot now, but in those days, if you were just a farm worker, you might make maybe three hundred dollars, a hundred and fifty. So he was making maybe two and a half to three times as much as just a day laborer. So I think by his standards, he felt like he doing okay.

TI: Now, did the family ever purchase the land, or was it always under a lease, or how did that work? I know the alien land laws prevented the immigrants from buying, but did the family, either with a corporation or with a Nisei ever try to buy the land?

FS: Well, before the war, like you said, they were prohibited from owning property because of the alien land law. And so he was basically a sharecropper and worked for a family called Stinson/Bassett, they were kind of two families that were like partners. And that was kind of the arrangement at that time, but then the Stinsons, they died around 1920, '21, about the same time there was this transition. So Bassett took over, the Bassett family, and he was already pretty elderly at the time. I'm seventy years old now, but he was like sixty and not in good health. And so besides running the farm and everything, they ended up having to do a lot of elder care there, and my grandmother used to cook for him. But he lived for about ten years, but in the late '20s, he was an invalid, and they said that they had to give him a bath, and he would wet his diapers or pants and everything, and it was a big job. So they did a lot for the farm, more than just being a tenant farmer, they were a full service, you might say, family. I think a lot of this came from my grandfather's training, because he actually came from a samurai family, because his father's name was Bunzaemon Shimomura, and you know, if you have the "emon" at the end of your name, it signifies that, I mean, that's a traditional samurai name. They don't name the kids that anymore because the samurai were abolished, but they came from that family. But the interesting thing, Bunzaemon, my grandfather named my father Ben Shimomura, and it's my belief that Ben is a shortened version of Bunzaemon, because he took the first and last letters and then the E is the "e." And I suspected that, and then when I was doing some family research on Japanese names, they said traditionally, the names of the sons would be based on the grandfather's name, but kind of derivative from it. So we never really understood that, but later on, through research, I think that that's kind of why my father ended up being called Ben. Because my grandfather was paying tribute to his father.

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