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BN: To your knowledge, did your grandfather ever talk to you or to any of the family about his time when he was interned?

DA: That was taboo, it seems to me. It's just like most families that I knew, the Isseis didn't talk very much. And so no, I didn't get a whole lot of feedback from them. Plus, I didn't speak Japanese, and their English was very, very poor. Both grandparents, as long as they were here, they didn't really get to learn the language very much.

BN: I know this is secondhand, but did you have a sense of, while they were farming down in Orange County, that they were part of this larger Japanese community down there in terms of attending Japanese churches or Japanese schools or those types of things?

DA: Well, I got the sense that there was a community of farmers down there, right? But that part, that was it.

BN: Right, right.

DA: For me, my life was more here in Los Angeles, right?

BN: Sure, and this is all before you were born.

DA: Right, right. And my grandfather must have been part of some kind of community because he had a place to come home to. The community took care of his property, so he was very fortunate. So when he came back, he didn't have to scrounge around, he was right back to farming, it sounds like, fairly quickly. So we were lucky that way.

BN: Do you know much about who it was that was able to watch over the farm?

DA: Yeah, I used to know that, but not anymore. My understanding was it was a couple of hakujin guys, other farmers that he had befriended, or befriended him.

BN: Was he able to own the land?

DA: No.

BN: So this was leased land.

DA: Leased land.

BN: That they were able to retain during the war.

DA: It might have been owned by my uncle.

BN: Right, right, yeah. That was the common way to get around the alien land laws.

DA: Because they were all citizens. But I think that was... yeah, I again, I can't...

BN: Right, it's all before your time.

DA: Yeah, yeah.

BN: Okay.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.