<Begin Segment 5>

MN: Now your family is farming about twenty acres. Did your parents have to hire outside help?

KK: Yeah. During the, when there was nothing to do, just the two of them did all the farming. Maybe it was fifteen acres, I'm not sure. But anyway, it wasn't that big of a farm, but it was called truck farming. And we had somebody come and pick up the finished product, and he would take it to market for us.

MN: So truck farming produce like lettuce, carrots...

KK: String beans, tomatoes, seasonal things. Spinach, green onions, corn.

MN: Now where did your parents sell these produce?

KK: We had, at the Ninth Street Market. We had somebody come and pick it up, pick up the finished product, then he would take it for us. So we had broccoli and carrots, parsnips. We used to grow parsnip, and not too many people know about parsnips. It was not too well-known, because you don't see parsnips in the market nowadays, not too many. But that's one thing that's hard to do. It looks like carrot, and you pick it, you take a stick and you have to, you know, a stick that's made like a cross, and you have to stick the parsnip in there and you have to wash it. It's too hard to wash, just wash it, so we just stick in a great big tub of water, and we used to get on top of the tub and swish it around to wash the parsnip. That was one of our jobs. [Laughs]

MN: And you said not many people grew parsnips.

KK: Even now, I see that they don't use too many parsnips, because I don't see them in the market.

MN: There aren't too many ways to eat, I mean, I think of like tsukemono, but that's the only thing I would think of to cook parsnip or eat parsnips. How did your family eat parsnips?

KK: Oh, they used to cook it, that's all. Eat it like carrots. There isn't much ways to eat parsnip, you know, not too many people like it.

MN: Now how young were you when you started to help out on the farm?

KK: When I was going to school I'd come home from school and help. And then I'd come in and then help my mother, help get dinner, and study a little bit, and then go to bed. Not much.

MN: So you helped out, like, after school, not before school?

KK: No.

MN: Did you help out on the weekends also?

KK: Yeah.

MN: What did you do on the farm?

KK: Well, we'd go help weed, that's one thing we could always do. Thin carrots, you know, the carrots are all coming out, go around thinning it. So all these sorts of things. Easy things. Not always.

MN: Now, you're the oldest also, so did you have to do a lot of the housework?

KK: Yeah.

MN: What kind of things did you do around the house?

KK: Well, sweep the floor, stuff like that. I'm not a good housekeeper anyway. Never was. [Laughs]

MN: Did you have to cook the food because your parents were working out in the fields?

KK: Yeah, if they're still working out there, I'd come home and at least cook the rice.

MN: Now did your parents have a separate garden, a smaller one where they raised Japanese vegetables for home use?

KK: Well, they used the closer part for nappa and stuff like that. But otherwise... yeah, once in a while they had daikon and make tsukemono.

MN: How about chickens? Did your farm have chickens?

KK: Yeah. We had chicken roaming around. But I didn't do the... I never cooked the chicken, cut its head off or anything like that. Never did in my life.

MN: So I guess your father probably killed the chickens?

KK: Yeah.

MN: Plucked them.

KK: Between my mother and father, they used to do that, plucked the chicken and cut the head off.

MN: How often did you eat chicken?

KK: I don't know. I think most of the time we had chicken or fish. Oh, we had a fish man come around, so we had fish quite often. Fish and tofu and stuff like that.

MN: How often did the sakanayasan come?

KK: Once a week. So we had tofu and stuff like that, kamaboko, anything you want, he'd have.

MN: So he didn't only sell fish, he sold tofu, kamaboko...

KK: Yeah, other stuff too.

MN: A lot of the perishable stuff then, huh?

KK: Yeah, perishable. And then he had, he would carry pumpkins, like kabocha and daikon and stuff like that, too. So it helped.

MN: What sort of fish did you grow up eating?

KK: Saba, sashimi.

MN: Sashimi, would you use maguro?

KK: Yeah, mostly maguro.

MN: At home, what kind of food did your mother cook?

KK: Okazu. [Laughs] Chicken with vegetables, vegetables and tofu with soy sauce.

MN: Now, you had the sakanayasan come over, but if you had to get, you know, sacks of rice or things like that, shoyu, where did you go and purchase that?

KK: I think, I don't know where we got those things. But then I think my parents went to Japanese Town to buy those.

MN: Did they take you to Japanese Town?

KK: Hmm?

MN: Did your parents take you to Japanese town when they went to go buy things?

KK: Well, most of the time they didn't. We stayed home most of the time. Just my father went to buy stuff.

MN: Now, you're growing up during the Great Depression. Did that affect your family farm at all?

KK: Oh, yeah. Carrots were selling for five cents a crate. That was lots of bunches. It was just like giving it away. So we had to eat a lot of carrots and vegetables because we were growing vegetables. We didn't have to suffer that much. We didn't have to go and buy stuff. So we had enough to eat. We'd just eat vegetables if we couldn't buy meat.

MN: Now I know the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, used to bring some of the city people to the farms. Did they ever bus?

KK: No, we never had anybody like that working at our place.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.