Densho Digital Archive - Frank Miyamoto Interview I (denshovh-mfrank-01-0008)

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SF: Okay, so your dad starts this furniture business and he has a pretty thriving business with other ken folk and...

FM: Yeah, the business thrived. In a way, one might ask how come he got into this kind of business. Well it was kind of, kind of natural. You might say hotel business was a natural because here are these immigrants coming in that have to have immediately a place to stay, and a hotel is one of them. Well very rapidly it comes to the point where there are not enough immigrants for all the hotels that are developing, but then once they get themselves established, then they begin to trade with non-Japanese and so that's how the hotel business grows. But initially, that's one of the ways in which the hotel business gets a start. Similarly with the grocery business, as soon as people start establishing housekeeping arrangements, they need Japanese food. And so the Japanese community has these Japanese groceries that develop and once they learn the grocery trade then they move out into the larger community. And cleaning and laundry, barber shops and restaurants, these are all things that grew out essentially out of the need of the community the immigrant community to have places where they could get their clothes laundered or hair cut and whatnot. Now it happened at the initial stage of the community's growth that there were not apparently that many furniture and hardware kinds of businesses, and so my father, for whatever reason, sees this as an opportunity. I think he was probably clever enough to make furniture and remodel furniture and take second hand furniture and upgrade them. This was the kind of thing that was initially involved. And seeing then the opportunity of selling furniture then to these immigrant families that were getting established by 1910. You recall the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement moves towards bringing Japanese families into this country. And so he then, by 1910, finds an opportunity for selling furniture and hardware, which he also got into as something that Japanese families would need. So he gets into the business simply because the community required that type of service. One of the men, incidentally, who became very prominent in the Japanese community of that time, a man named Okuda, was in the transfer business. Well again, you might say, why transfer business? Well you needed trucks to move things as the immigrants come in. And so he's in the transfer business. And so it goes with all these people who got into businesses of one kind or another.

SF: So it's...

FM: The other thing I should mention here is that there was a strong orientation throughout, among all these immigrants getting into a line of work where they could make money, relatively rapidly and do well in that line, and working as a railroad hands or sawmill workers didn't offer that kind of future. So there's a long, there's a strong push towards getting into independent business which was noticeable, particularly here in the Seattle area. And so you got people going into various kinds of individual trades.

SF: So in a sense, your dad's move into the furniture business was, was partly caused by the shift in political situation because of the Gentlemen's Agreement and...?

FM: Yeah, I think that's a valid observation that something like the Gentlemen's Agreement wasn't intended to have any kind of an economic impact, but it does, and precisely in that kind of sense that you're talking about. Ultimately as a matter of fact, another political legislation, namely the Immigration Act of 1924 shuts down his business, because no longer is there a need for furniture and hardware in the degree that existed while the immigration was continuing. But that's the tail end of his furniture business story. Uh, let me expand on that. Hotel businesses, as I said, moved outwards from the Japanese community once the family learned how to do the hotel business, they would move into, for example, Belltown and be quite successful because people, whether Japanese, or white, or blacks, or whoever, often would be looking for some place to stay that was relatively clean, but inexpensive and the Japanese were providing that kind of place. Now the furniture business was a little more difficult to (move), less flexible in that sense. It was much more difficult to move out into the white community and establish oneself. It was certainly possible but, you had to develop an entirely different kind of clientele, and you see the furniture business was much less flexible in that regard than let's say hotels or grocery stores or dye works and cleaners and so on. So you don't find the Japanese businesses like the furniture business or the transfer business, or businesses of that kind moving out into the larger community so readily.