<Begin Segment 23>

TI: So one more story I want to talk about. I read someplace where you would play this game hide and seek in the town.

LW: Yeah. That was when I was about maybe seven, eight years old.

TI: So describe that and where you would play hide and seek and how you would play...

LW: Well, lot of time, like I said, you go to that, where the, out front, you know where that porch is? You could swing around and, on top of the roofs.

TI: Okay, so let me describe this a little bit. So in the front town, you would have these buildings, and a lot of times the retail would be on the first floor, and the second floor, there would be more, where people would live.

LW: Yeah. But then they'd have steps on the side there where you could get up there.

TI: Get up there and then oftentimes they would have a porch. And so there would be porches on all these buildings, but the buildings would be separated probably by about four or five feet.

LW: Yeah, but somehow, I don't know, we got together. Like from my house to that bathhouse place, we used to go climb over there. That's quite a...

TI: And no one ever fell or got...

LW: No, nothing like that.

TI: Now, so I'm curious --

LW: Not everybody played hide and seek like that, though. As long as you come home by midnight, the parents are not worried.

TI: So I'm curious, when you were playing this game, which, as a parent, if I saw my kids doing this, I would probably be upset, because it looks a little dangerous to do that. Did anyone ever catch you and get mad at you?

LW: Oh, yeah, you get hell from the people that lived there, I mean, owned buildings. So we just, when they say something like that, we just all take off.

TI: And jump to the next porch? [Laughs]

LW: Yeah, or stay away from there for a while.

TI: That's funny. And so these were, you did this with other boys your age, you would play this game?

LW: Yeah, some groups, you know, friend, two or three people, something like that, something to kill time.

TI: Now, in general, I remember walking through the town, and you had the buildings, but they were connected by this little alley. And it just looked like a great place for people, especially maybe on a hot summer's night, to sit out there to try to cool off. Was there really a -- I'm trying to get a sense of the community, especially maybe in the evening, on a hot day when people are outside, where they sat and how that was, what that was like.

LW: Well, most of the time, those people that, they lived there, they used more like a back, backyard. Then you always run into somebody that you know.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.