<Begin Segment 5>

JS: So what else do you remember about growing up in Chinatown?

KM: In Chinatown?

JS: What was that like?

KM: Saturday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, oh, god, you couldn't find a place to park, it was so busy and so many people around. And all the restaurants were busy, and they had several Chinese restaurants and they were busy. It was like the present Ferry Building in San Francisco, just like that on a Sunday. Just people all over the place. To find a place to park, you got to go around the block three or four times and still not find a parking space. That was really busy time, before the war and after the war, pop, it stopped.

JS: So you noticed a dramatic difference?

KM: Oh, yeah, uh-huh. And then, of course, we evacuated. So a lot of the Japanese restaurants in Chinatown, they were patronized by the packing houses, lot of packing house workers would come and they'd have their breakfast or lunch or dinner, and they'd go home. That's the way they were supported there.

JS: So who worked at the packing house?

KM: Oh, gee. Lot of Mexican people, Italian people, Armenian people. Lot of... I don't know. I don't think any of the Japanese people were working in the packing house. They were mostly farmers and ranchers, and their own vineyards.

JS: And where did you live? So the shop was on F Street.

KM: Shop was on F Street, and we, it was about two, about a mile from the shop, half a block from the Lincoln Elementary School, and we were in the, what they call Germantown, we lived in Germantown.

JS: So tell us about Lincoln Elementary School. What was that like?

KM: That was really integrated school, yeah. Lot of different nationalities, everybody got along together. Yeah, it was nice, yeah. But it was made out of brick, so they tore it down because of the earthquake fear. Fresno earthquake? [Laughs]

JS: So you went to school at Lincoln, and then what did you do after school? Did you go to a Japanese school?

KM: Oh, yeah, we had to go to Japanese school after class. And I think we went to Japanese school from 4:30 to 5:30 through grammar school and through high school. And during the junior high, I went to Edison, rode a bicycle, came home for lunch, enough time riding a bike, have a warm lunch, and then you go back to school. I think we had forty-five minutes, something like that, yeah.

JS: Did your friends ride bicycles, too?

KM: Oh, yeah, uh-huh.

JS: Everybody did?

KM: Oh, yeah, everybody, yeah. Better than eating a cold sandwich.

JS: And what activities did you do after school?

KM: After school, we had to come home and grab something to eat, and then we had to go to Japanese school right after that. So we got out about three-thirty at school and then run home. About an hour, about four-thirty, we'd go back to Japanese school and stayed an hour in Japanese school and then came home. Then we had to do homework. [Laughs]

JS: So were most of the friends that you hung out with Japanese?

KM: Mostly Japanese, yeah. And, of course, there were a lot of German people around, too, paling around with them. And then our neighbor was the Helmuth, and they had Bill and Alex, and Alex worked for PG&E, and they had three girls, and they stayed home. And then the neighbor north of that was, his name was Harry Hyde. And his nephew became mayor of Fresno. Yeah, he was a classmate of mine, too, when I went to Fresno High, and then he went to Congress.

TI: Now, were these German families, were they immigrant families?

KM: Yeah.

TI: So the kids were like Niseis, or kind of...

KM: Yeah, right, they were Niseis, too, yeah. But mostly, they call 'em German, but they were Russian Germans. They went, they got sent to Russian and Russia, they came to United States. Hardworking families, oh, wow, hard to keep up with 'em.

TI: Hard, more hardworking than Japanese, you would say?

KM: Yeah, because wow, you go by their house and their front sidewalk is clean. They use a brush to sweep it with, all the gardens are pretty, wow, it's hard to keep up. Then I was the one that had to do all the hard work outside in the garden, mow the lawn.

JS: Oh, because you lived in Germantown, you had to keep your property up?

KM: Uh-huh. Oh, yeah, those Germans, boy, they were something else.

JS: So your, did your mother work at the store, too, or she stayed home later?

KM: Later on, when we all grew up, yeah. My mom says, "No, we don't want to stay in Chinatown. It's a ghetto," she says. And she says, "We're in the United States, we should mingle with the hakujins." So she found this house on C Street, so we moved over there. She was kind of a forward-thinking woman. "We got to live here, we got to act like it."

JS: So was she friendly with the German neighbors?

KM: Oh, yeah, she was, really.

JS: Uh-huh. So did you... I've heard other stories where people have recipes from their neighbors as part of...

KM: Uh-huh.

JS: Did you have any German dishes?

KM: Oh, yeah, uh-huh. We would go to the next-door Germans, they'd have a, kids would have a birthday party, we'd go to that, and we'd have a birthday party, we'd invite them. So we were real friendly.

TI: Now, was that pretty common for Japanese families to be so close to a German family? So that birthday parties...

KM: Oh, yeah.

TI: So that was pretty common.

KM: It was pretty common, yeah. Discrimination, you didn't see it. You didn't see it. In fact, my sister would kind of intermingle. Many times something happened, my sister would be invited with the girls, neighbor girls. Her picture even appeared in the Fresno Bee, one of those Sunday periodicals, Japanese kids' team, and all the German kids. Discrimination, Fresno, you didn't see too much of it.

JS: But were you one of the few Japanese families living in that neighborhood?

KM: Yeah, we were, uh-huh.

JS: Right outside of Chinatown?

KM: Uh-huh. It was a fun place.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2010 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.