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BN: So your siblings, then...

AM: They were born in Seattle.

BN: ...were born in Seattle.

AM: And I was born in Los Angeles.

BN: Largely sort of raised there 'til a fairly good part of their life.

AM: In '35, yeah.

BN: Can you talk about your siblings just in terms of the birth order?

AM: Well, the oldest sibling was Fumi, Fumie, but with an I-E, no Y. And she was fifteen years older than I, and then my brother Naomi, and he didn't like that name, so he took on the nickname of "Nails," so everybody knew him as Nails. He was, like, two years younger than Fumi. And then Shogo, my third sibling, was ten years older than I.

BN: Yeah, your first brother threw me as well. You immediately assume that's a girl's name.

AM: Right. So it's significant, his nickname that he chose was Nails. He didn't want anybody to think he was feminine or soft or anything.

BN: No mistaking that. Do you know why they chose to move to L.A.?

AM: No, I really don't know. So many things I didn't ask them.

BN: Right, sure. But essentially you only really knew L.A. So can you tell us a little about where the family lived in Los Angeles?

AM: We lived in what we called the Virgil area, it's East Hollywood, actually. We lived on Westmoreland which is a street between Virgil and Madison, it's not far from Vermont, and it's a very special street because Tak Hoshizaki was born there on Westmoreland. And I need to apologize, but my forgetting names and being able to get them is very hard.

BN: You're thinking of Frank, Frank Emi?

AM: Frank Emi, he lived there. I even babysat for them.

BN: Really?

AM: Yeah.

BN: Oh, you babysat... because I was going to say, Frank's much older, but you babysat for their children, you babysat their children.

AM: For their children after the war, after the war. And it was a very nice Japanese community, they had two grocery stores, Japanese grocery stores that were walking distance from my house, so my mother could send me for errands there. There was a gas station which was kind of a gathering place where people, men could bring their cars and talk and see friends. There was a judo place, a dojo on the same block as the Emis and the Hoshizakis. There was a Japanese church, Christ Presbyterian Church, and it was run by a Japanese minister. His first wife was white, and when she died, he remarried a Japanese woman, and I only knew the second wife. See, there's a Japanese school, there must have been some Buddhist church nearby, too, but we weren't involved in that, so I didn't know that.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.