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BY: Today is October 25, 2022, and I am here doing part two of an interview with Stan Shikuma. We are located in the Densho studio in Seattle, Washington. I'm Barbara Yasui, the interviewer, and our videographer is Dana Hoshide. So, Stan, we're going to kind of pick up where we left off. And you mentioned, right at the end, that there had been -- I'm going to pick up with this -- the firebombing of the Buddhist temple in 1945. So do you want to relate what you know about that?

SS: Sure. So what my uncles told me is that after the war when people started coming back -- of course, many people had lost their homes as well as their farms and businesses -- so a lot of people were staying, and Japanese Americans were staying at the Buddhist temple and basically just camping out there. It basically became a homeless shelter. And early on one night, there was an attempted firebombing. Someone threw a bottle of gas or flammable liquid at the building, and fortunately hit a wall, bounced off, and just burned a circle in the grass. But what my uncle said was that it hit the wall about four feet away from a window and that was the window of the room where all the children were sleeping. So there were a lot of vets among the Watsonville Nisei guys, and so a bunch of them went down to the sheriff's office the next morning and told them, "We just came back from the war, we know how to defend ourselves, and if you won't defend us, we will do it ourselves." So the sheriff ended up having a cruiser around or parking one outside for the next week or so, and there weren't any more incidents like that.

BY: So that was then an isolated incident?

SS: Yeah.

BY: And do you know, did your uncle characterize that as being kind of, the kind of reception that returning Japanese Americans got, or was that sort of like just a one-off, do you feel like?

SS: I don't think it was a one-off, because Watsonville has this history of racism against people of color. In the '30s there had been basically race riots against Filipino workers mainly because there was a dance hall and some Filipinos were dancing with white women. And a riot ensued, and one guy, one Filipino got shot and killed. And there had been other incidents of racism, I never got any of the particulars. But I think that was one of the reasons why my family decided to split up Grandpa and Uncle Heek moving back to the farm in Watsonville, and Dad and Uncle Mack, the two ones with little kids, went out to Oregon.

BY: Right. And so for your dad and your uncle then, did they ever tell stories of any sort of racism or discrimination that they encountered after the war when they went back to Watsonville?

SS: No. Our two families didn't return to Watsonville 'til the mid-'50s when I was about two, so it was about 1955 when they went back.

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