Densho Digital Archive
Preserving California's Japantowns Collection
Title: Eddie M. Inaba Interview
Narrator: Eddie M. Inaba
Interviewers: Tom Ikeda (primary); Jill Shiraki (secondary)
Location: Sacramento, California
Date: December 11, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-ieddie-01-0015

<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Now, did you travel very much? Did you have to travel to different cities and meet people?

EI: Yeah, that's right. I traveled all over the place.

TI: So tell me some of the cities. What were some of your major markets? Where did you have to travel a lot?

EI: Every other week I'd go San Francisco, San Jose, Bay Area where all the people are, and Watsonville, Salinas. And this way... although I have help or two, you know, I go every week to Stockton, Lodi, and Sacramento, it keep us busy.

TI: And when you would go to each of these cities, who would you visit? Who were your customers in these places?

EI: Japanese people.

TI: Japanese people or Japanese businesses? Would you go to the...

EI: Japanese businesses.

TI: So were these grocery stores?

EI: Grocery store. Yeah, I went to, many times, Seattle and Portland, Chicago, that's where I traveled to in those days.

TI: And so when you have all these customers in all these different places, how did you ship your food to all these places? Did you have your own shipping, or did you use other shipping?

EI: We have our own, sometimes big shipment, we have our own truck. Not my own truck, I got a special truck to work, delivery, and mostly by ship and truck, train.

TI: And so it sounds like, as you got more and more customers, it got bigger and bigger and bigger because you would order more food, you'd have more customers, then you started shipping to all these places.

EI: Uh-huh.

TI: How did you manage all this? This is, again, a big operation. How did... did you have lots of workers to help you?

EI: Yeah, working.

TI: So tell me about that. How many workers did you have to hire to do all that?

EI: Oh, we had about thirty in Sacramento. San Francisco about thirty, thirty-five. And I have...

JS: Los Angeles?

EI: Huh? Los Angeles, you know, it was different corporation.

JS: Oh, different corporation.

EI: Yeah. I have a chance to buy that, I went down, I sent the boys down to get the inventory and everything, and those people said, "Let us take care of this," he said. So, "Okay, okay." I'm too busy anyway. But still, I have stock in there. I have stock in Hawaii, I mean, Japan, shipping department, [inaudible] company in Tokyo.

TI: And in all these places where you have workers, you need places for them to work, you need warehouses, so it becomes a very large operation, all, it sounds like, mostly West Coast places. Very impressive. Do you recall, at your peak, how many assets you had on your balance sheet, like the size of the business, how big it was?

EI: Money-wise, you mean?

TI: Yeah, money-wise, like on your balance sheet, asset-wise, how big you got.

EI: I don't know. I hate to tell you. Involved everything.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2009 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.