<Begin Segment 2>

CO: I remember you were once telling me about when you were a child, a boy, you were a newspaper... and you delivered newspapers, and you used to run around delivering Japanese... were they in Japanese, these newspapers?

FM: Oh yes, this is, again my father's business connection in the community was the basis for this Japanese newspaper delivery job. His friend was the publisher of the North American... Great Northern Daily. And he, my father asked this man if he could find a little job for me and the little job I got was delivering newspapers in the downtown area of Seattle. So by virtue of delivering all the way from Yesler Way up to Bell, the Bell Street area, I got to know the downtown area of Seattle and its Japanese offices and shops and the like better than I possibly might have...

CO: So you had a pretty intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the community.

FM: Yes, I did, in various respects.

CO: How would you characterize this Japanese American community, prewar?

FM: It was an outward-looking community, much more than the Chinese, and that is a complicated story that I won't get into. But on the other hand, because of the discriminatory background in the West Coast situation, and the prejudices and so on, it was also, the Japanese community was also a strongly inward-looking community. That is, the opportunities outside the community were relatively limited except for what the Issei immigrants were able to make, shape out of the situation. And for that reason, I would say, the inward-looking tendency was in a sense more prominent than the outward one. What I refer to as the Issei making, taking, or creating opportunities for themselves in the American society refers to this: namely that in the business area, the Japanese very early got into small shop ownership, private entrepreneurial activity, especially in such fields as hotel management or hotel ownership, restaurants, grocery, dry cleaning and this sort of thing. And the reason why this became a source of Japanese employment was that when the immigrants from Japan were arriving, these were the kinds of facilities which the Japanese immigrants required, namely places to stay, places to eat, cleaning and laundry facilities and the like, and having gotten into this area, then it became apparent to the immigrant Japanese that they could branch out into, or expand out into marginal areas of the larger community in these occupations, and that's what they did. Now, the other reason why the Japanese got into this activity was that their background gave them a certain competitive advantage which the other people might not have had, namely the fact that the Japanese families could become involved in hotel operation or the restaurant operation or grocery sales and the like. And the labor being relatively cheap, considering this kind of connection, it made it possible for the Japanese to compete very successfully in these small enterprises in a fashion in which they would not have if they did not have this kind of disposition in their background.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.