<Begin Segment 9>

JS: And so talk a little bit more about the Japanese section and some of the businesses or stores that you used to go to.

DM: Like, well, gee, there's how many grocery stores that had... let's see, one, Oda, Hayashi, Inaba, Tsuruda. Well, they used to have about three, four grocery stores, a small town like that. And we had a (butcher store called Kuwabara also, and a) drugstore, shoe shop, dry cleaning, and a lot of the hotels, like that seasonal worker comes in for... I don't know if they call that hotel or what is it.

JS: Boarding house?

DM: Boarding house, and then they had a couple of bath, private bathrooms, you know.

JS: Bathhouse.

DM: Yeah, they had two of those.

JS: Did you go to any of the bathhouses?

DM: Huh?

JS: Did you go to the bathhouse?

DM: Well, not when I was a kid, but when I was older, a couple times we would, you know.

JS: So when you were a kid, you had a bath, ofuro at home?

DM: At home, (yes). We had a bath, (Japanese-style). In fact, my dad had a, when we came back from the camp, you know where Japanese school is, that's where a lot of people went because they have no place to stay after they got back from the camp. My dad tell us to take a bath early so that people from that Japanese school could use the bath. Dad had it opened up for the people in the Japanese school.

JS: Was there a certain order in which you had to take a bath? Like if you were the youngest, did you have to take the bath last?

DM: Always.

JS: Always.

DM: Always. Oldest one takes the... [laughs].

JS: Takes the bath first? And then did you have to heat the bath and get it ready, or did you have any chores like that?

DM: No, no. Ours was nice. The way Dad had it made, you press this little switch, and it comes on automatically, the heater. So we have a shower, you wash yourself before you go in. So a lot of time, older guys put a lot of water in to cool it off, we just pull the switch and it turned the heater on, so it comes right back on.

TI: How big was the bath? How many people could go in there?

DM: About four. It's a square, but we were small, so four could go in. [Laughs]

JS: So can you tell us a little bit about the shoe business that your father had?

DM: That's one thing I don't know too much, because Dad didn't want no kids to be at that store, see. We were small yet, so he didn't want nobody at the store. Only time we could go to the store was some emergency or something happened or something, but other than that...

JS: He didn't want to be bothered.

DM: No. Only time we got to go in was when the store was closed. [Laughs]

JS: And so who helped your father at the store?

DM: Well, he had his brother's son, cousin, from Hawaii, and he was doing it for about three years. And my oldest sister was in UC Berkeley, and when the economy started going bad, he had to lay off that cousin and had to let my sister that was going to quit the school to help him. I thought that was pretty sad because she was a pretty sharp woman, my sister. Had to quit school to help Dad.

JS: So she never finished at UC Berkeley.

DM: No. After that, the camp, so we had to go to camp.

TI: And this sister, was this Bessie?

DM: Bessie, the oldest one, (yes). So I think she was (working at the store) in '39 and '40, so '41, (before) the camp. So she helped about two or three years.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.