<Begin Segment 6>

DG: Did you have special celebrations?

TS: Beg your pardon? Oh, we had annual New Year's celebration where my mother would prepare all kinds of delicacies. And notwithstanding that my parents were good Christians, my dad somehow had a supply of homemade sake, and I remember he used to hide the sake in the sawdust pile that we kept for the horses. And I remember I used to have to clean the horses' stalls.

DG: Did they have horses for the farm in those days?

TS: We had to have horses for cultivating and we had tractors. And it was an old farm house. I could remember playing on three or four wagons (in the barn). We never used any wagons, horse drawn wagons on the farm, but they were there in storage. And it was a good thing to play on. Guess I had a lot of fun.

DG: Did you have electricity and everything?

TS: It's a long ways that we have progressed since those days. We had three bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, outside toilets, pump for water. Then we proceeded to get some running water and we got electric lights. Then we got a electric pump for water. Then from the kerosene lamp, we went to having a gasoline pressure lamp, then to electricity.

DG: So when you were little, you didn't have any of these modern conveniences yet?

TS: Very primitive. But we've seen a lot of changes.

DG: But you pretty much stayed in the same place and so did your parents lease it or did they...? Who owned... did they put in your name?

TS: No, it was always leased and the owner had about five or eight acres of orchard and the rest was, about twenty-nine acres (which) were leased by my parents. And we lived on that farm until the outbreak of war and evacuation.

DG: So you never owned it?

TS: Never owned it.

DG: Oh, you never owned it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.