<Begin Segment 24>

TI: Okay. When you think back to those times, those prewar times, what were some of the things... because I know you're really proud of Walnut Grove, and this sort of small community feeling, but it's really tight, it's really close. What's really fond, what's your, like, fond memories of that? What are some of the things that you hold so dearly?

LW: Well, only thing I know is that people, it's not a family, but everybody in the community is pretty close. They know each other, and you could trust them.

TI: Which was, probably for you, was special, because your parents worked so hard. You said they worked 365 days of the year. So for you to be out there and...

LW: They never, yeah, they never worried. Because, see, in the community, somebody's always watching you, babysitting you.

TI: And so it was common for other adults to, maybe, scold you or whatever because they...

LW: Well, some family are little bit stricter than our family was. But it's community, everybody know each other, so you can't do anything bad, otherwise you hear about it, and they don't like that. You know, the rumors start, something like that. So they really stay away from it. So we didn't have anything to do, anything bad, it's just...

TI: And there's one other thing I wanted to touch on that I had listed. I'm thinking of farmers and kind of the cyclical, their business, harvest time. And so sometimes they'll get paid when the harvest comes in. But then when they're planting and buying fertilizer and all that, a lot of times farmers don't have money. So I'm wondering if there was, in the town, like a credit system. Did the...

LW: Well, what they do is, Japanese people, they trust each other. They don't pay until they got, finished the crop. Because they spend so much money, they don't have the money, so it's just like you go to the bank and loan, borrow some money. So the honor system, they pay it when the crop comes, and they're pretty good at that.

TI: So the stores and things would have kind of this...

LW: Yeah, stores, that's all you do, they charge you.

TI: They would do like IOUs or something, so they would list it...

LW: Yeah. That's mostly for the farmer, not for us.

TI: But in your store, your restaurant, I read about how... it wasn't the same, but how some people would pay with these little cards? Punch cards.

LW: Yeah, well, we used meal card, they call it. That's good for, anytime you eat, you get punched in. They got five, ten, twenty-five cents at the most, I think. And for breakfast, maybe fifteen cents, so you punch five, so you issue the card. And end of the week, they get paid. See, they get paid every, once a week, so when they get paid, then they'll pay the meal tickets and the room and board.

TI: Oh, so this was a way for them to keep track of how much... so it wasn't prepaid, they didn't buy the card.

LW: No, because nobody carried any cash or money. So it's just like a credit card. That's with the grocery, I mean, the rest of the business.

TI: But again, so that was kind of the honor system. So they would come, because they would have all these punches, they wouldn't have to come back and pay for that.

LW: Yeah. Well, I guess you'd take the loss or something. But my father was pretty generous because he would feel sorry for... something like homeless comes in, they give 'em a free meal because they're hungry. That's the reason she never got rich, because she was too generous. Because by the time we went to the camp, and we could have collect all that money that people owes, but how you gonna collect it when we went in the camp?

TI: Good.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.