<Begin Segment 13>

JS: So where do you live now?

TS: I live in Clarksburg.

JS: And do you see, are you involved with social activities there now?

TS: Yeah, I'm pretty busy. Tomorrow I'm going to garden club, and it's mostly social. Talk, talk. And then I go to knitting class. Our little community has all those things, so I just walk over there and just go learn.

DG: Is it at the church?

TS: Yeah, it's at the church there.

JS: The community church?

TS: Yeah.

JS: Do they have, like senior lunch or --

TS: Yeah, they have that too, so we all go to that. It's a lot of fun just getting together and talk, talk. Then our knitting too, we just, I just made a lot of scarves and hats for the children's home. I just give it to them. They're waiting because Christmas's coming up, they want it for their Christmas baskets, so I just give it to them. And then there's a quilting class, so they do beautiful work. I'm not into quilting. I thought about it. I have a lot of pieces of material, but then after, later on, I thought, oh no, so I gave it all away. There's a lot of things to do. I'm out almost every day doing something. I enjoy it. But then, I don't think I could stay there that long 'cause I have to take my driver license next year, and maybe they won't give it to me, I don't know. I never got into an accident, but you never know.

DG: So we're working on documenting the history of the Gakuen in Clarksburg, and we know that the Sakata family would like there to be a continued life for the Gakuen. We're not clear what that would be, but I wonder, do you think it's important that that...

TS: I don't think so. There isn't any... what would you use it for?

DG: Do you think it's important --

TS: It's too far out there.

DG: Yeah, it is pretty far.

TS: Yeah, and there's not that many people around that would use it.

JS: What about any of the people in town? Like if the schools went out, or school visits or anything like that?

TS: No, there's nothing.

DG: Do you think that it's important for the story of Japanese in the Delta to be told? Or is that...

TS: I don't think, there's just not, there's not that many Japanese around to keep it up. It's just like in Walnut Grove too, with all the Japanese that used to live there, they're almost all gone now. So I think it's gonna fade away. They have a church and everything there, but -- I go to Walnut Grove church, but I don't think that's gonna keep up too long.

JS: So you went to the Walnut Grove church after camp, then, started going?

TS: Yeah. Well, my husband says, "I belong to that side," so he didn't want to belong over in Sacramento. He's always a Delta, he said, so we just go to Delta, Walnut Grove church. That's the closest.

DG: So when he was growing up, was he on any of the sports teams around here?

TS: He told me that they were so poor with nine kids, "We couldn't go to a lot of things," he told me. But he was in, he played baseball, he said. Yeah, he liked sports, but he just couldn't participate in those things. Too much. It was rough for them before the war. They all had to work hard, and they had a bunch of kids.

DG: And what were they growing before the war? Do you know?

TS: What did they say they grew? I guess they had tomatoes too, tomatoes and beets, sugar beets and all that. Now Clarksburg all, like Napa Valley, it's all grapes now. Every place you go in Clarksburg, it's all grapes.

DG: Things change.

TS: Yeah, it sure changed.

Off camera: I have one question. What, why, of all the families that returned to the Delta area, Clarksburg, why were the families like yours successful and others didn't return? Why were there just those four or five families that were able to come back and make a living and the other couldn't? What, what...

TS: Well, if they didn't have any... well, if they didn't have, like my husband's, well, the father-in-law used to say, "We got five boys, we should all stick together and make it grow and farm together," he would say. It wasn't easy, but... and they worked hard and they came out ahead, I'd say. They built it up. Yeah.

JS: So your brothers, after they, you said they served in the Korean War, did they come back to farming, the Shimada brothers?

TS: Yeah, they went to Woodland and they were farming tomatoes too. They had no education, so that's the only thing, farming is the only thing they could do. Some went to work in the stores, but then, if you're not used to that kind of life, well, it didn't...

Off camera: Did you have some of your friends, who were, did you have some of your good friends after the war that didn't come back?

TS: Yeah, they didn't come back.

Off camera: Who were some of your good friends that you had as a teenager that come back?

TS: Well, like the... Mary Matsu, I think she went to L.A. someplace. I'm not too sure, but I think they went to L.A. She's gone now. And then this other girl, Otsuji girl, she didn't, I didn't, I don't think they came back either. I've never seen them.

Off camera: And did you try and stay in touch with them? Did you try to write letters to each other?

TS: No, no. We didn't know where they were. No address, no nothing.

Off camera: That's hard. Everybody really lost touch.

TS: It is. Yeah.

Off camera: And you made, did you make new friends okay when you came back?

TS: Yeah. I mean, go to church and find new ones, communities, neighbors.

DG: And your neighbors were all races.

TS: Yeah, all races.

JS: Yeah, I have one more question. So your daughter Janet has been very helpful to us, both in the Walnut Creek history, Walnut Grove, collecting that history, and this. What do you think about the work that she does now in kind of collecting stories and documenting --

TS: It's kind of interesting, yeah, what they did and all that.

JS: Okay. Well, thank you so much.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2012 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.