<Begin Segment 6>

RP: Tell us what you remember... what was it like growing up on a farm?

JN: Well, even at ten, eleven years old you still had to work on the farm. You had to pull weeds, you had to irrigate and so working on the farm, I really hated the farm because I hated weekends, Saturdays or Sundays, you had to work or else you go to church. And you know, all your vacations you had to work and all the holidays you had to work and every summer we had to work. So that's my recollection of working on the farm.

RP: What did you do on the farm as far as chores go?

JN: Huh?

RP: What type of chores did you have on the farm?

JN: What kind of what?

RP: Chores.

JN: Stores?

RP: Chores, what did you do on the farm?

JN: Oh, well, we farm work you know, you irrigated, you pull weeds, you harvested all the fruits and vegetables and basically that's the farm work and you go tractor and you'd in the early days you had to drive the horse and that's the work we did on the farm. Hard work and it's not eight hours a day, it's like sun... early in the morning 'til dark at night. [Laughs] Hated the summers because the work was even longer.

RP: Did your father own, originally I imagine he leased land and then later on did he --

JN: When he moved to Azusa in 1931, that's when I was born, he bought ten acres, a ten acre orange grove in Azusa. And he started raising his fruits and vegetables between the orange trees and then after a while he cut all the orange trees down and had a regular farm. And so that's basically what happened then. And to me he bought a ten acre farm that had a house and the house had only two bedrooms and it wasn't big enough for the family, so he added on four bedrooms to that house. Now he had to have money to do that and he told me he was poor. [Laughs] Can you imagine that? When I go through this and hear all the history from my brother and sisters on what happened and he never bought things on payment, he bought things on cash. Can you imagine buying a ten acre farm with a house for cash? So he had to have a lot of money on the farm in Fruitland to come to Azusa and bought this... so my dad was rich, he had plenty of money. [Laughs] Even after having twelve kids he had plenty of money and he grew potatoes, that was the main thing that made him rich. And then after a while strawberries but his farming, he made a lot of money farming, he had to. [Laughs]

RP: You mentioned some of the activities that you recall were New Year's celebrations.

JN: What's that?

RP: New Year's celebrations, celebrating New Year's?

JN: Yeah.

RP: And then also the other memory that you had was the Okinawa picnics.

JN: Oh, every summer I remember we used to go to a picnic in Los Angeles where they had, they had an Okinawan club. So every summer they would have a picnic there and then they would have a separate picnic where the... well, let's see, they had a separate picnic for the small community of Kin where my father grew up. And so they had a separate picnic for that so every summer we went to two picnics. [Laughs]

RP: What do you remember most about attending those picnics?

JN: Well, what I remember is I knew some of the people because I had relatives and everything but especially the Kin one. I still remember that they were kind of a small village so they were just kind of really proud of that area and so it was kind of unusual to be that kind of group of people like going back to a home town, and so that's kind of the way it was and it was just kind of amazing. And I had a lot of relatives that I knew there at that Kin picnic, you know, so it was interesting, that's what I remember. And then the Okinawan picnic, that was huge 'cause they're a large, large people from Okinawa in the Los Angeles area and it was twice, three, four or five times bigger than the Kin picnic. So it was a large community there, that's what I kind of remember about the picnic.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.