<Begin Segment 8>

BN: And then after you were at Hunters Point...

HT: We came back to Japantown. Yeah, Japantown, because it was, Fukuda-sensei had three houses. And then I think later on, he bought others. And there was, next door was a local that lived, and one next to them, they were Peruvians.

BN: So this was housing owned by the church?

HT: Church, yes, it was by the church. So they were, it was connected up to the Konko church, to the backyard, it was connected.

BN: And then how long did you live in...

HT: I lived there until... let's see now. Then I moved to a place across the street, there was a small, two-bedroom place when I got married. And a lot of the people moved out, because right next door was Japanese people that bought the property, there were three families that had that. But it was Japantown, and everyone started getting organized there.

BN: So you lived there for, it sounds like, a long time.

HT: Yeah. And eventually, I moved to the Sunset area.

BN: So earlier you had mentioned that, while you were living in the houses owned by the church, that that's kind of where you started playing basketball?

HT: Yeah, and the backyard was basketball, and then they had ping pong tables and the kids would come and we would play basketball with them. And even the girls there, there was a Peruvian girl, she used to play basketball. When they see you there playing basketball, they come out and play with you. She was from Peru.

BN: And then did you eventually play in the Japanese leagues?

HT: Yeah, the Arbees, we played.

BN: Was that through your team game?

HT: Yeah, it's in that booklet. All of us played because all of us, I was the oldest, my oldest sister never played, and I played, then my sister Nancy, and then Janie and Pat, we all played basketball.

BN: And then Arbees is how spelled hot?

HT: A-R-B-E-E-S, Arbees.

BN: Was there a reason for that?

HT: I don't know. They have that picture in there, you know, Arbees.

BN: Yeah, I remember that.

HT: Yeah, there's still one lady that lives out of town that's still around. I think most of them are all gone.

BN: What did you enjoy about playing?

HT: But see, when we were playing, when we were learning how to play in the backyard, we played like boys. So when we first started playing the league, we got kicked out of the games, and Nancy, my younger sister Nancy, she used to tell, yeah, we got kicked out all the time, because we played like boys.

BN: Meaning you were too aggressive?

HT: Rough, aggressive. And at the beginning there were so many people, you played half a court. And after a while it gets to be different, and then we were, when you get used to playing with boys, you play like boys. You don't play like girls. And we used to play like boys, all of my sisters. We were sort of tough.

BN: Were people scared of you?

HT: I don't know. We were just like that, when you grow up like that... my younger sister was really good, too. Really good, because that's how you do. And then the Konko church had a television set, we never had a television set. We didn't even have radio kind of stuff. So when you grow up that way, you play things that are... but that's how you grow up.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.