<Begin Segment 5>

KL: Do you think your dad liked gardening or did he choose it because it was available?

RF: I think it was, for him, a necessity. He loved to sing Japanese classical songs, so he spent a lot of evenings at that really enjoying himself.

KL: Did he just sing at your home?

RF: No, he would perform at... I know he went to Los Angeles for that. The group that did... let's see, it's called nagauta, kind of singing which is a classical type of singing.

KL: How do you spell that?

RF: Nagauta, N-A-G-A-U-T-A. Uta means song, and not sure how to interpret, but it was a classical type of singing where the music comes from down here. And he loved that. He spent a lot of the evening hours doing that, to the point where it was late hours, so we were probably the last ones going out on his route to the nurseries picking up flowers for his gardening route. So for him it was not a love of flowers and gardening from what I recall.

KL: His singing group would perform in Los Angeles, you said?

RF: What?

KL: His singing group, the nagauta, would perform in Los Angeles?

RF: Yeah.

KL: Do you have any idea where, at what restaurants?

RF: No, I don't. They typically sing at picnics and performance, other occasions. I only heard him singing at picnics.

KL: What was his relationship with you like?

RF: Well, he was a very stern father. And I think I had a lot of his traits, so we didn't really mix too well. [Laughs] I guess I was pretty independent. And being the third son, third child, that was probably a lot of it perhaps, I'm not sure.

KL: Your older siblings would probably say so, yeah, they made it easier for you.

RF: Yeah, right, they did. They were under his thumb a lot more than I was.

KL: Did your mom have a job outside your home?

RF: She had to do some housekeeping. She'd go to people's homes to clean house, she'd take in laundry as well. In fact, in one of the pictures I showed you, a family called Hirano, one boy was one of my best friends, his mother and my mother used to get together on weekends, take in iron and launder things for customers. But mostly sheets and things like that.

KL: Were they sharing equipment or they liked the fellowship?

RF: Mrs. Hirano had the equipment to do all that. Had these, what they call mangles, which are roller type things, and you put big sheets of cloth through to iron them. So my mom worked very hard. That was before the evacuation. After the war, or after they relocated, she was doing work as a housekeeper. And my father, as I said earlier, was a cook. Then when they returned to California, my father was retired, and my mother continued to work in the garment district sewing, doing garment sewing.

KL: What was her personality like?

RF: Well, she was always smiling, a very happy personality. But she suffered an awful lot, because my father was not a very disciplined person, so she had to be the one to reign in the horns and watch the money and that sort of thing. So it was a very difficult life for her. She had to work very hard to make ends meet. She lived to be a hundred, though. I'd say reasonably well until about the last three years, yeah, very docile last three years.

KL: She saw a lot.

RF: Still, ninety-seven's pretty good.

KL: Yeah, yeah.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.