Densho Digital Archive
Emiko and Chizuko Omori Collection
Title: Jimmie Omura Interview
Narrator: Jimmie Omura
Interviewer: Chizu Omori (primary); Emiko Omori (secondary)
Location: San Francisco, California
Date: March 21, 1994
Densho ID: denshovh-ojimmie-01-0002

<Begin Segment 2>

CO: So your family had settled, and what were they doing?

JO: My father was a meat market butcher, but by the time I was born he had changed, I guess you could say he was promoted to foreman of the Winslow shipbuilding and dry dock company. I was born on the 27th day of November, 1912, and they tell me I was born in a storm, you know. [Laughs] So I've always had this problem where they say that according to the elements I would be, well, have a rough time in life, you know. And I did. But I was the first of the family to be born under the care of a practicing surgeon. At that time the frontier west had very few doctors. And I think the reason for that was my father was a foreman at the ship-building company.

CO: And then, what was the United States like around that time?

JO: What?

CO: What was the United States like in terms of Japanese Americans at that time?

JO: Well, Bainbridge Island had a peculiar sort of society where the Japanese and the white people lived together but separately. In other words, it was like a separatist society similar to Quebec. And because the Japanese had pioneered the growing of strawberries, which replaced the lumber business on the island, there was a certain amount of tolerance that they, they left us alone, but you could feel the tenseness underneath. Prior to that, Port Blakely was the main, primary city, and Japanese were treated very badly there. They threw stones at schoolchildren, threw stones at domestics going to work. But by, but by the time I came along, that was all underground. But there was this feeling, this tense feeling, you could feel it in the school. You'd go to school -- no white people would, white children would speak to you or, or associate with you. So it was, the prejudice was very strong at that time.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.