<Begin Segment 6>

VY: So you said you would take it to the market, is that the San Francisco Flower Market?

FN: Flower market.

VY: Do you want to talk about that and tell us what you know about the history there?

FN: Well, the San Francisco Flower Market was started by the Issei, and they've already celebrated, way long time ago, the hundred years of the San Francisco Flower Market. But they had three markets, the Italian market, the Chinese market, and the Japanese market. And so my father was in the, he sold our product in the San Francisco Flower Market, and people came from the different areas like the Hayward, San Leandro area. Also from South Bay, Mountain View, from as far as San Jose. And in those days, it was a big job to come into the flower market, because we didn't have good highways, so it was a long trip. And you had to get in early in the morning to have your product ready, so you would get up at, like, three o'clock in the morning to be in the market by three o'clock. You would get up at three o'clock in the morning to have your product ready and go to the market, and be ready to sell your product by six o'clock in the morning So they had a long journey, had a long day, and I really don't know how many people had their stands in the flower market. Maybe a hundred different nursery people. But it was, for them, it was a very social time, too, to get together with fellow Japanese flower growers, and also to sell to their customers. So it was a very thriving place. They would start at six, and the bell would ring, and all the buyers would come rushing in to buy their flowers because they wanted to get the best flowers for the shops, and it really was fun. We would ask our father to take us to the market when it was summertime and we would try to go and help him, and it was exciting. To us, it was exciting. It was very, very good. And there were, also, Japanese retail florists, so my father just would not sell to Caucasians, but he would also sell to the Japanese florists.

VY: Yeah, so who were the primary customers at the flower market?

FN: The primary customers were the large retail shops all over the East Bay area, and also San Francisco, the Bay Area, this whole area that we were in.

VY: I see. So your family and other nurseries, they would pack up their flowers, bring them into San Francisco to sell at the flower market, and then a lot of them would end up back in the East Bay with other shops.

FN: Right.

VY: And how did you prepare the flowers? They're so delicate, right? How did you prepare them for such a long journey?

FN: Well, the flowers would be put according to varieties, it would be bunched in a certain part depending on what the crop was. Like chrysanthemums were treated differently from carnations and roses in the Richmond area, their primary greenhouse crop were roses and carnations. And about half of the families, so, say, ten of the families in our area were carnation growers, and then the other half were rose growers. And most families did not grow two crops, most families specialized in growing one crop. And then if they had outdoor crops, then there would be all kinds of different seed crops, like I said, sweet peas or snapdragons, different kinds of cut flowers that are suitable for retail selling.

VY: Was one flower more hearty than the other to kind of survive the traveling better?

FN: Well, I think that roses are pretty hardy. I think that carnations are pretty hardy, chrysanthemums are very hardy. And in those days, before the war, most everything was sold locally. But, of course, that all changed after the war when we had much better transportation and things really, really changed in the late '50s and early '60s when freight on jet airplanes started and that just really changed the industry in California. Because when those big jets came in, we could get our crop across the United States in five hours. And so we could be in markets like in Chicago, where there were a large population of people, we could get into places like New York, Washington, with the jet planes, and that really changed the floral industry in California when that happened.

VY: Okay, that's great. Let's talk more about that a little bit later, too. Okay, so are there any other memories you have of this time before the war that you can think of?

FN: Well, for me, it was a time of not having worries, because no matter what our problems were, our parents didn't talk about it. And so I really did not, I think that our childhood was quite happy, and our parents tried to do what they could do for us, so I think that our early lives were very, very happy for all of us.

VY: Okay.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.