<Begin Segment 6>
RP: So did you also on the farm have a vegetable garden area?
KN: Oh yeah. We never bought vegetable. We had it in the backyard, all the vegetable we need.
RP: And where, where did the water come to irrigate your strawberries?
KN: Well, we had a well.
RP: How about other staples like rice and those kind of items, where did you go to shop for those?
KN: Yeah, you had to buy rice.
RP: Where did you go?
KN: Oh, there's a grocery store in Florin. Yeah, ate a lot of rice when you got six, seven kids. Rice is a staple you know for Japanese. We had rice every day.
RP: Did you eat it at every meal too?
KN: No, just at night or sometime noon and at night. Not in the morning.
RP: So what was your diet like? You ate a lot of vegetables and rice?
KN: Yeah, a lot of vegetables that we grow in the backyard and a little bit of meat to flavor it. But then mostly vegetables.
RP: Did you ever, were you able to get fish at all?
KN: Yeah, store had fish and beef and pork so they had no problem there.
RP: So Florin had a, had a store.
KN: Yeah, they had a grocery store, about three of them. They all had whatever we'd need so.
RP: So what was a breakfast like?
KN: Rice and tea and vegetable. Mostly all vegetable from, from the garden.
RP: For breakfast?
KN: Yeah. Greens and whatever, daikon.
RP: Oh. Did you grow, did you grow other Japanese vegetables besides daikon?
KN: Yeah, uh-huh, whatever... green beans, peas, tomato, whatever you need. I don't think we ever bought vegetables. We raised it.
RP: Did you ever raise gobo?
KN: Yeah. Gobo. Yeah, our, when you buy gobo it's like this. When you plant it only like this. It doesn't grow too long 'cause the ground's hardpan.
RP: How did your mom prepare that?
KN: Oh, cook it with meat or sometimes you season with vinegar. There's a lot of ways to eat gobo. I love gobo. They're expensive now aren't they? They still have it in the store but they're pretty expensive.
RP: Mostly Japanese stores or Asian stores.
KN: Yeah. Yeah, they have, it's like this.
RP: Right.
KN: But what we had in the kitchen like this. It doesn't grow that much in our ground, hardpan.
RP: So you had a hardpan underneath your...
KN: Yeah, hardpan so it doesn't grow too long. But then it's edible so. How did you get interested in all this?
RP: Oh, I don't know. I just started doing it. Another question and another part of life on the farm was the, was the furo, ofuro?
KN: Yeah. We all had furo.
RP: And do you remember bathing every night?
KN: Oh yeah. That's Japanese, bathe every night.
RP: And was the ofuro, was it away from the main house?
KN: Yeah, bath, bath house. See because the smokes goes up a lot so we had a bath house and you burned underneath to heat the thing, bath.
RP: So who had the, who had the job of getting the fire going, do you remember?
KN: I think my father, mostly my father. And we kept on puttin' the wood in it but the start my father did. I didn't know how to start. You put paper and kindling... it takes a lot of talent to start the fire going underneath the bath.
RP: How large a bath was it?
KN: Oh, plenty of room so that two or three can get in comfortably in the bath.
RP: Pretty hot?
KN: Oh, yeah. And you had a hose in there if it gets too hot you just turn the hose on but then you keep taking the log underneath 'til it gets hot. And then when it gets hot, when you want to take a bath if it's too hot you just put water in there. Yeah, the Japanese take a bath every night.
RP: It relaxes you from all that strawberry picking.
KN: Yeah. Yeah.
RP: So did any of the girls in your family, did you have opportunity to take any music lessons or art lessons?
KN: No money.
RP: No money.
KN: But I played the church organ since I was a kid. I never had music lessons but I played. I ad-libbed the whole thing.
RP: You just had an ear for it?
KN: Yeah.
RP: So you'd play the organ every Sunday at church?
KN: Uh-huh.
RP: This was, was this a Buddhist church or Methodist church?
KN: Yeah, Buddhist church.
RP: I didn't know they had organs in Buddhist churches.
KN: I'm not very good at it but I played.
RP: You had natural talent.
KN: Oh thank you. I like to hear that. [Laughs]
<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.