Densho Digital Repository - Robert Moriguchi Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-515-15)

<Begin Segment 15>

BN: Did you have to help out on the farm?

RM: Yeah. You know, I don't know exactly what the main crop was. We had, I know we had cabbages, cabbages and... they harvest those at wintertime when it's cold. Your fingers are like ice already, the cabbages are cold. But you had to cut the cabbages and dump it onto the truck. One time, must have been the fall or something, way out in the sticks, so you don't expect anybody out there. But there's a car roaming around in our field out there. I had a whistle, I blew that whistle, scared the heck out of them, they're trying to steal our cabbage. [Laughs] Then one time when we're going to school, we're on a school bus. And the driver stooped down to pick something up, went off the road down in the ditch, threw me off, and landed on the back of the seat onto my stomach, boom. And I ended up in the hospital.

BN: What did you injure?

RM: I don't know what it was, I can't remember now. But it was just for a while. But backseat, I hit my middle in the backseat, because I went up and landed.

BN: Were there other Japanese families in the area?

RM: No. My cousin was farming there also, June, Haluto's sister, who was the same class, we were in the same class. So, in fact, before he went overseas, he came to the class and gave a talk. So my classmates knew that I had relatives in the army. The other... this is after the first year farming, my father quit and went back into the, we moved to the city, to the property of this guy that we farmed for the first year. We lived in a chicken coop, a converted chicken coop, we lived in a converted chicken coop. My mother went -- this is in a town now, and the outskirts of town. So there was a chicken processing plant, so she went there. That's where they defeathered the birds, then they'd go down the line and dip them in wax so that it becomes hard and you could take the wax off and all the hair would come off the chicken. Then my father went to work in the turkey farm up in the Wasatch Mountains behind Provo, way back in the mountains there, they had a turkey farm, so he went to work taking care of the turkeys. And I went there back one time, and I had a slingshot. I made a slingshot, and I go bing, I hit in the turkeys, ping it, mean guy hitting the turkey on the head. That I remember. What else is there?

BN: So how long in total then were you in Utah?

RM: Let's see, I was there from '43, spring of '43 'til September of '45. So when the war ended, we went back to San Francisco. But I faced a lot of, in American Fork, which is between Provo and Salt Lake City, I faced a lot of discrimination where they threw rocks at me and called me names, and then tried to drown me in this water, an old gravel pit where they had dug the gravel out, and then the water seeped up and made a nice water, swimming pool. So everybody used to go swimming there, cold water. But some of the people didn't want me, so they said, "We're going to drown you." So I quit. I quit swimming there.

BN: You said earlier, was it the first, it was the first Spanish fort, there wasn't much to see. What was different about...

RM: I don't know. I don't know why. It just, people were just different. Then the Morimotos, my uncles and my aunt and my grandfather, they farmed the next town over, Lehi. They didn't have any trouble either, and he was going to high school, my uncles were going to high school there, and they didn't have any trouble. They grew tomatoes and celery. And in wintertime, when we were out in the boondocks, the irrigation ditch where the water was always flowing would freeze up, and we would skate on there. And in the summertime, we would go to my uncle's place, my cousin's place, and dam up that irrigation ditch, make a swimming pool out of that, and sometimes we would even have a carp, carp would come up through there. A carp, we would catch a carp. So that's some experience.