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Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Hubert Yoshida Interview
Narrator: Hubert Yoshida
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Emeryville, California
Date: April 7, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-506-5

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TI: So your father went to Berkeley. Does he have any stories about Berkeley? Or do you remember any stories that he told you?

HY: [Laughs] No, I guess he loved the college life. He would go to all the games, and I could see him, photographs of him, he would be dressed up with a sweater. I guess he really got into the college life while he was there.

TI: So I would imagine, I just know a little bit about this, but I know they call it "The Game." You mentioned Kenji was Stanford, your dad Kenzo was Cal. Was there a pretty strong rivalry between the two?

HY: Yeah I guess a friendly rivalry, Stanford and Cal, yes.

TI: Even up in Seattle, I know about that rivalry. And so after he graduated... well, what did he study?

HY: He was in business administration.

TI: Just a note, I went back to the government records. There's something called the Form 26 that people filled out when the war started. He wrote down on there "social sciences and mathematics," in terms of what his degree was, just as an FYI. He did that in the government records. But after he graduated from Berkeley, what did he do?

HY: Oh, well, of course, there weren't any jobs for him as a Berkeley grad, but so he was working for a commission house, buying and selling... you know, farmers would sell to a commission house and they would sell it to retailers. He did that for a little while and then got into farming himself. And he did, I guess, quite well. He was farming in Salinas, lettuce I think was mostly what he had. I did come across a receipt. When he, I guess, was selling off his property, going to relocation, I mean, he had a Caterpillar tractor, he had a John Deere, he had quite a bit of equipment that he was trying to sell off before he went to camp. So apparently it was quite a farming operation.

TI: Do you have a sense of how many acres the farm was?

HY: I think he just rented land. In those days, I think they would rent land and grow crop and then rotate and go to another.

TI: Did he ever talk about, so even though he went to Berkeley, business administration, did he ever talk about the frustrations of not being able to use maybe that training more in the, I guess, in the larger business world? Did he talk about the doors that were closed to him?

HY: No, he didn't. He kind of mentioned that, yeah, there were no jobs for him when he got out, but not with any kind of bitterness or regret or anything like that. He enjoyed farming, I think.

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