Densho Digital Archive - Fred Oda Interview (denshovh-ofred

<Begin Segment 24>

TI: And in thinking about Watsonville, when you got back to Watsonville, had your dad reestablished his business by then?

FO: Yeah. And before, you talked about how the business was, all the Japanese businesses were, like, on Main Street, in that area.

FO: They didn't come back, a lot of them.

TI: Yeah, so I was going to ask you, so how, what was the difference between before the war in the late '30s, and when you come back in the late '40s?

FO: There were no more Japanese town anymore, because most of them didn't come back.

TI: And where did everyone go?

FO: Huh?

TI: Where did people go?

FO: Well, some of them, they went back east and they stayed back there. Then some of 'em came back, and they all headed to Los Angeles, San Jose.

TI: In general, when you came back in the late '40s, how receptive was the overall Watsonville community for the Japanese to come back?

FO: It was bad; it was bad. Yeah, they wouldn't, some store wouldn't serve them, and the gas station wouldn't sell them gas and all that. It was bad.

TI: And was it still bad when you got back? Because you got back a little bit later.

FO: Yeah, it wasn't that bad then, yeah. Because when they first came back, I heard it was really bad.

TI: And so that was probably the reason why the Japantown never came back, because it was hard for people to come back there?

FO: Well, then a lot of 'em had nothing to come back to, you know what I mean?

TI: Oh, because a lot of the stores may have been leased or something, so they didn't own the stores?

FO: Yeah.

TI: And so about how many Japanese businesses were there when you came back? I mean, you said it was smaller, how much smaller?

FO: Way smaller. Hardly any of them came back.

TI: So was your dad the only barbershop, for instance? There used to be four, I think, before the war.

FO: No, let's see. Yeah, there was two after that.

TI: And like how many grocery stores after the war?

FO: After the war there was two, I guess.

TI: And before the war, there must have been, what, five or six?

FO: Yeah, yeah.

TI: Okay. So it sounds like it was, like, maybe a quarter or a third of the businesses came back. And so you came back to Watsonville, you were working, you mentioned the short hoe, so lettuce thinning, things like that.

FO: Yeah, but see, that was temporary because we were, well, we were doing all different kind of work, you know. We went to work in the lettuce one day, and next time we're picking tomatoes and stuff like that, yeah.