Densho Digital Archive - Aya Fujii - Taka Mizote Interview (denshovh-faya

<Begin Segment 18>

RP: Aya, so you were in the CCC camp with the rest of the family and then shortly thereafter you made another move and settled on a farmer's land that arranged a sharecropping situation. Can you talk a little bit about that?

AF: Yes, we sharecropped with a family called the Fishers I think. And there was another Japanese family that also sharecropped I think with them, the Kidos. And we lived next door to each other and they raised onions and sugar beets and we went out to work on their farm. And I don't know what the money end of it was but I remember one day we went out and there was a truck that came in, the farmer brought in a truck, and there was all these German POWs on there to help harvest the crops. And I thought, oh my gosh, isn't that ironic, they were all sitting on this big open truck and I'm sure that there was a guard there, but they were all young and blond, good looking men, young men. We found out they were POWs. Isn't that amazing?

TM: They were eating watermelons down to the, almost to the skin. I remember they were treated to the watermelon.

AF: Let's see, I can't remember the year that we went to sharecropping but we must have been there a good...

TM: I don't know I was at school but then we came home.

AF: ...good year. But we lived in this house that I remember this bed that we had, it was just made out of slats and with a mattress thrown on it and there was nothing but bedbugs on that I remember. And my dad used to pour kerosene into those slats to kill those bedbugs.

TM: Couldn't imagine bedbugs.

RP: This farm that you stayed at, was it outside of Ontario?

AF: It was between Ontario and Nyssa, it was called Cairo Junction was the name of the little area.

RP: As far as you know, was that, your situation, other people's situations as well where other families would sort of hire out to private farmers in the area? Were there other Japanese families that did that?

AF: Yes, because when we start talking about remember back when, we said, you mean you were out there then, you know, people came from camp, from the relocation camps and helped harvest and then they went back. That's how they... 'cause we were so surprised that some of our friends were in Ontario and harvested peaches and things like that. And it's kind of astonishing that we never met there. But later on you know... yes. It was quite an experience and then when we came back home in, let's see, 1945.

TM: '45.

AF: I remember coming home for Thanksgiving, that was my first time back and I couldn't remember getting back to the house, it's been three years you know, things had changed. And my boyfriend at the time, who's my husband now, picked me up at the Greyhound depot and brought me home and we came down this Canyon Road which is just a two lane highway and we passed the marker and we went into the city of Hillsboro and we didn't live that far in yet but we backtracked and finally found the house. It was Thanksgiving.

RP: Well, that's appropriate.