<Begin Segment 5>

[Outside the teachers' residence building.]

SH: You're now looking at the original teachers' residence home. This was probably built several years after the school was erected, and once they found probably a teacher willing to come and work in this area, they needed housing, so I'm sure the community got together and went ahead and built this residence for the teacher and his family. Again, this is well before my time, so through the years, after the Japanese school had disbanded and probably postwar, after everybody returned from the war, then I think the residence was occupied by Tom and Stan Sakata's family. In fact, I remember the boys growing up here, and probably catching the bus up on the levee here and going to school in Courtland. And so they lived here probably for, oh, I'd say at least twenty years, possibly more, until the boys finally moved away. Tom had lost his father early on, Mom had remarried, and so she had moved, and so left the house vacant. Probably in the later '80s, I needed... I was farming again, right across the street, mostly, and in this general area, and I needed housing for my laborers so I basically rented the property. And I kept it up probably for about ten, fifteen years, I used it as labor housing for my farm labor. And so with that, I'm pretty familiar with the area. We redid a lot of the plumbing, did some remodeling inside, and whatnot.

DG: How many rooms in there?

SH: Pardon me?

DG: How many rooms in that?

SH: Two, I believe. With a bathroom way in the back. It was kind of an add-on.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2012 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.