Densho Digital Archive - Hisaye Yamamoto Interview (denshovh-yhisaye-01-0002)

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CO: Tell us about this place that you were, right before the war.

HY: Oh, well, we moved around a lot because, because of California's alien land law that didn't permit Japanese to own property. And so most of the time, we rented, leased for about two years, like most of the people that my folks knew. And we would generally move around in these little communities, you know, set up little colonies so we, from Redondo Beach we moved to Downey, and from Downey to Artesia, I think it was. And then to Norwalk, and then before the war, we wound up in Oceanside. And there were about twenty fam-, Japanese families there, growing mostly strawberries, but there was one family that grew flowers, and another family that specialized in celery. And most people grew strawberries and tomatoes and zucchini. And that was fertile land there because it was on Santa Margarita Rancho, and a little area called Stuart Mesa. And the first thing they did was all get together -- everybody lived in unpainted wooden houses, some better than others. But the first thing they did was get together and build this fine Japanese school on top of the hill. And it's a beautiful place because you could see the ocean, and it was really a bucolic area then. But as soon as we were evacuated from there, it became Camp Pendleton, and if we had been paying attention, we would have remembered the engineer corps that was billeted in town coming up the dirt road to do surveying in the hills back of the farms, and huge loads of pipe that were stacked up here and there, you know, if you walked around on the mesa. And they'd been planning that all along, I suppose, so maybe one of the reasons Japanese had to go was because we occupied strategic land like that.

CO: Did it have a name?

HY: Yeah, well, they called in "Kumamoto Mura" because so many of the people, farmers, were from Kumamoto. Like your own parents and Matsumoto-san, and the Noguchis, I think, and the Takegumas, they were, they were all from Kumamoto.

CO: How was it doing economically?

HY: I think fine, because that was virgin land and Japanese agricultural people would come down to see how we were managing to produce -- not me, but the farmers there -- were managing to produce such beautiful strawberries and, yeah, economically, it was an up-and-coming project.

CO: How would you characterize the Japanese immigrant colonies and society and such, prewar?

HY: What do you mean, "characterize"?

CO: Well, you know, your impressions of like the social organization and --

HY: Oh. Well, we were pretty insular. You know, like my aunt, she lived in Orange County, but she managed to get along over fifty years without learning much English. And, well, like my folks, they studied English when they first got here, and so they knew a little more than some people. And then, of course, some people studied it intensively, and they spoke English quite well. But mostly, we stayed with other Japanese and traded with other Japanese. You know, like we would go to Little Tokyo for functions, and the Japanese school was the center for some functions, and there were Japanese pastors of churches. And there was no need to go out among the white community, which didn't accept us that much anyway.

CO: I know you were interested in writing, like, before the war. Tell us about kind of like, like creative activity that...

HY: Oh, well, the Issei, they contributed to the newspapers with their poetry, their haiku and senryu and tanka. And by the time I was fourteen, I started writing for the Kashu Mainichi, and after a few years, they gave me my own -- they let my write my own column. And the Kashu Mainichi, especially, had this feature page where they encouraged all kinds of contributions and you could write about pretty much anything you wanted to. And so I was still doing that before the war started.