<Begin Segment 18>

JK: Was there any effort to try to draw in more mainstream customers? You mentioned that, that there was an association put together to, to appeal to the Caucasian population, or the surrounding communities. Was there anything specifically that Dobashi's did to draw in that mainstream, that outside community? Perhaps different food items or any other marketing tactics?

PD: I remember we used to take out ads in the Mercury newspaper, and do things like fliers and community advertisement programs. And I used to paint store banners in the window.

JK: And during the resettlement, was there much contact with non-Japanese Americans? It sounds like your parents and your family had Caucasian friends, white friends. Do you feel that Japantown was a fairly, was it a fairly self-sustaining enclave, or was there quite a bit of outside influence?

PD: This community was quite active and pretty big at one time, but I think as, as the community spread out and kids were born and people moved out to the suburbs, so you have a bigger population spread, so, and then you have different types of stores in the out area, so it changed, changed the type of business you did.

JK: How do you think it changed?

PD: Well, I think as your population spreads out and your grandkids and whatever, you don't have the time to spend traveling to the whole Japantown community, whereas it takes, it takes a lot of time to travel, even from, depending on the traffic, from one town, one end of town to the other, just to get to the area. So you have to make a special effort, and that effort is maybe not worth it to make that big effort to come to this, to this area, unless you have a special, two or three things to do. There used to be, all your doctors here or whatever, and all your activities here, but now it's not so.

JK: And what was the competition like here in that resettlement era?

PD: It was just... not, just among maybe not too many stores at that time catering to the Asian population. So there wasn't that much competition, but, other than going out of town or whatever.

JK: What were some of the most difficult challenges your family had to overcome to keep the business going?

PD: Well, now it seems that, I guess being a family store, I guess it's hard to change things and hire the help that's needed to change your, change your ways. So I guess kind of... I don't know if we lost our way, or... also the, the slow-down in the Silicon Valley and the opening of competition from a store in the West Valley side, a bigger store.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2004 Densho and The Japanese American Museum of San Jose. All Rights Reserved.