Densho Digital Archive
Twin Cities JACL Collection
Title: Bill Hirabayashi Interview
Narrator: Bill Hirabayashi
Interviewer: Megan Asaka
Location: Bloomington, Minnesota
Date: June 16, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-hbill_3-01-0002

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MA: And so I wanted to ask you a little more about the White River Valley Corporation, and a little bit about why they formed it and how they were able to buy land at that time.

BH: Well, originally, as I understand it, see, it was a dairy farm that they bought. And they cleared these stumps and everything, but they built three new houses on it, the Katsunos, and then Gordon's parents and my parents. And they did everything that a typical American person would do with a lawn in the front and things like that. And they tried to, as I could see, they tried to live the American standard as much as they could. This is why, and naturally, as you know, all the Isseis wanted education for their kids and they continued through that way. So my memory is naturally the fact that when I was a kid, I followed my brother Martin's footsteps and was in the Boy Scouts, things like that. Went to the Auburn Christian Fellowship, it's a youth fellowship that the Reverend Murphy used to take care of. And from there, it was the war, and in the meantime went to high school and that sort of thing like everybody else. And to me, I thought that the beginning of my [inaudible] was going to come after I graduated high school, but that's when the war stopped all that.

MA: So you told me earlier that there was some sort of lawsuit against your father's corporation?

BH: Yeah. What happened, there was different articles on that that I read, but there was a... I forgot what political thing, some kind of a politician anyway, he wanted to make a name for himself. And so he picked on the White River Gardens to say that they bought the property by fraud. But, see, Mr. Katsuno, their plan was that Mr. Katsuno was going to have Aiko, that's the oldest daughter, use her name so that they could transfer it out to her. And that's what many people like the Kosais and many people did that, and they got away without any problem. They went to court and they won. But in our White River Gardens situation, they lost, they even went as far as the Supreme Court and still lost. And way back in the '60s sometime, that's when Mr. Katsuno followed through some more, and they kind of finally settled saying, yeah, they were wrong. But it took all that time. So naturally, back in the '20s when they said that the property was all bought by fraud and so on, everything was all paid for and all that, and so they were paying taxes. So the government made an agreement, that the way I understand it, that as long as somebody, a member of the family stayed on the property, that they could lease it for ninety-nine years. And beyond that, like my mother said, "I'm not raising my kids to be a farmer," and that kind of a deal. So naturally when evacuation came, there was no one to stay there, no one to pay the taxes, and so we didn't go back 'cause we lost all that. Mr. Katsuno and the White River Garden just kind of disbanded that way.

MA: So the Court said, so you no longer owned the land after the court case?

BH: I guess, I don't think we even bothered to ask any question. We just didn't go back because of what the situation was before the war. But see, because of the fact that they said you could have a lease as long as someone lives there, this is why my dad built another house. 'Cause the family kept growing, so he built another house behind the main house that he built, and then we had a skyway on that so we could go between the two houses. Because in between the two houses, he had to have space there to drive the truck in between to go to the hotbeds to take care of the plants that he was raising for the farm there.

MA: So how close were the three families, the Katsunos, Hirabayashis and your family?

BH: Well, they each had 10 acres, so as far as the distance between us, it wasn't very far. I would say we were within, as I remember, probably about 120 feet between each other where the houses were.

MA: And like how, did the families interact a lot, were you very close in terms of relationships?

BH: Yeah, because of the meetings that they used to have with Mr. Murphy, Reverend Murphy and all that, and the other things that, whatever came along in the Japanese community, they were very close. In fact, our telephones were all hooked on the same party line as you probably know from those days. So they were on the phone and different things. And I remember going back and forth to the different, the other two families by a case where I was a messenger, I guess. "Can you take this over to them and come pick up something?" or that type of a deal. I was a gopher, and I'm in a gopher state. [Laughs]

<End Segment 2> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.