<Begin Segment 8>

MN: Let me ask you a little bit about whether or not you took music lessons. Did you play a musical instrument?

MO: Yeah, I hated that; violin. I hated it. My father thought we'd be the next Jascha Heifetz. I took it for about two months, and then we got sent to the camps and I left my violin behind. Because people make fun of you. "Oh, you got machine gun in there?" Bam, you'd hit 'em with the violin case. [Laughs] Yeah, I didn't like it. But my brother got quite good, he played in the Manzanar symphony orchestra. But I didn't care for that. Then they said out to learn the accordion, and looked at that, that thing's heavy, I don't want to learn that. [Laughs]

MN: So I guess it was your dad's idea to start having you take these kind of lessons?

MO: My dad liked classical music. We had one of these, we used to call it Victrola, big wooden thing that had a lid on it, and you had to turn the crank. And he would listen to classical music. And he met a guy in Burbank, his name was Henry Schumann-Heink, and I think he became one of his gardening customers about 1940 or thereabouts. And his mother was the famous opera singer Madame Schumann-Heink. She was really famous in the '20s, and you can look at some classical records and you'd hear her voice. So we had a lot of Madame Schumann-Heink, but I didn't understand what she was singing. All I knew was I'd turn the crank. [Laughs] you know, you remember some strange things about your childhood.

MN: Your parents, they had planned to send you to Japan but you didn't go?

MO: No, no, my father wanted me to go to Japan. I learned this later from my mother, and apparently I used to get in trouble because my mother used to tell me, "Your father used to always want to give you yaito and I wouldn't let him." Because I was a mischievous, apparently mischievous kid, just had a lot of energy. And he wanted to send me to Japan, according to my mother, to learn discipline, and my mother wouldn't hear of it. So I'm thankful, Mom. Because then I would have been a Kibei, and being Kibei is a difficult thing in this world.

MN: Let me ask a little bit about the holidays. Did kids, before the war, did they observe, like, Halloween?

MO: Yeah, yeah. We went around. Actually, we took a pillowcase with us, that's what we did. And a lot of people would give us things they made, cookies and cupcakes, because they were cheaper to do than buying candy and giving it to us, yeah. And then the only thing we'd have was a mask, and then you get a sheet, you know, whole sheet and put it over us. We didn't buy costumes; we couldn't afford them. But yeah, we had Halloween. And we always went up to where the rich people lived. [Laughs] People in our neighborhood didn't have a lot of good stuff now that I think about that.

MN: How about, like, Christmas?

MO: Yeah, we always got presents for Christmas. And I don't remember when I was kid what we got except we got a used bicycle, might have been 1939, 1940, somewhere in there. But the three of us had this used bicycle. And that was a treasured thing because you don't have bicycles. And I don't know where my father got it, but we'd work on it and fix it up and made certain that it ran properly, fix the flats all the time. I remember going down to Pep Boys and buying this little tire patching kit. If the inner tube got a hole in it, you could patch it up.

MN: Were your parents Christians?

MO: Yeah.

MN: Do you know how they became Christians?

MO: I think my father became a Christian when he was in college, or he might have become a Christian when he was a houseboy. All I know is that he was never a Buddhist. My mother was a Christian, although she grew up in the Buddhist community in Dinuba. But they might have had a Christian church there. Because there were certain communities in California, Japanese immigrants were Christians, and that included places like Livingston. That's where my sister-in-law is from. But that was a Christian community, Yamato Colony.

MN: So when you were growing up, was Christmas a really big thing?

MO: No, no. It's never been a big thing for us, even as an adult. When my kids were little it was a big thing for them, but Christmas is just another day. It's another day where you have to go out and get things you don't want, and buy things that maybe people don't want. The last Christmas was really neat because we had it at my niece's house, and everyone had to bring a gift that had been advertised on television. [Laughs] So you go to some of the stores like Sears and some of the other places, and they have a whole table full of this stuff. It's easy to buy; it's all twenty bucks. And, yeah. Stuff we got, we'll never use. They got something to chop stuff with.

MN: So if your parents are Christian, did you have to go to, like, Sunday school?

MO: Yeah, we went to First Baptist Church. Yeah, we got Baptized there. Yeah, we went to Sunday school, we went there because they had a Y group there, and the Y group would go and, they would take us to the Glendale Y which had a swimming pool, and it was a segregated Y but they let us swim in there. They didn't let the Mexican kids into that Y. But, see, the Mexican members were Catholic, and you don't have a YWCA in the Catholic churches. Yeah, when I think about it... yeah, I guess a sizeable amount of our social activity came through the church, because it's the only time we could go places. They'd load us in a truck and take us to the baseball game. I remember seeing games at Gilmore Field, minor league, and they were the Hollywood Stars. And then Wrigley Field, the Los Angeles Angels, and they would take us in an open stake bed. We'd all be in the back, which you can't do today, but in those days, that's what we did. They'd take us to -- I remember we went to the fights at Hollywood Legion Stadium, I thought that was pretty neat. I'd never seen a boxing match before. Oh, I had -- I'm sorry, I take that back. Because when we were little, we would go down Victory, and there was a place called Jefferies Barn. And Jim Jefferies owned that. He had been Heavyweight Champion of the World before the black champion... what was his name?

MN: Muhammad Ali?

MO: No, no, way back there.

MN: Way before.

MO: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we would sneak in there because part of it had a tent, and one day we got caught, and Mr. Jefferies said, "You guys can stay here, but you got to help clean up." So after the fights, we had to pick up all the trash on the floor. And so any time we went down there, we could watch the fights free if we agreed to stay after and help him clean up. Yeah, he was a big, big guy. He was just a huge guy, Jim Jefferies of Jefferies Barn. And it had been an old barn that was converted into an arena, small arena for boxing.

[Interruption]

MN: So you were talking about, we were talking about Sunday school, but I wanted to ask you about your New Year's. How did you celebrate New Year's before the war?

MO: We used to go to Mr. Awamura's, and he lived in the Virgil district, and he, to the best of my knowledge, was our godfather. He had been the person who sponsored my father to come to this country. And so it was always, Mrs. Awamura was always... what a nice lady. She'd been a teacher in Japan, and he had been samurai, so they always were very proper. And he always let us play cards. He had these little cards, not the regular sized ones, but the little ones, and he would let us play with those, and sometimes let us play with his dog. But he lived in what's called the Virgil district, or what they now, younger people refer to as J-flats. But he lived on Westmoreland and I remember his house well. But we frequently visited with them.

MN: The cards that you're talking about, was that Hanafuda?

MO: No, no, just regular American playing cards, yeah. They were smaller, but no, we didn't play with the Hana cards. We didn't understand the pictures.

MN: And then you were sharing about visiting the Sakaguchi family in North Hollywood?

MO: Yeah, they had a truck farm, and his father and my father were friends. And occasionally we would go there, and I'd always ask my father if we could leave before it got dark. Because before I got in the car, I always had to go to the bathroom, and I hated that place 'cause they had an outhouse. And I always figured I'd get bitten on my pecker or something like that. [Laughs] I hated that outhouse. But you've got to remember, this is 1930s. The farms didn't have a sewage system. Many of them, well, most of them had running water. I think all of them had running water, because San Fernando Valley had water. But yeah, that was a place I didn't care for. And that's a remarkable family.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.