Densho Digital Archive - Minoru Yamaguchi Interview (denshovh-yminoru

<Begin Segment 5>

KL: How did they prepare for the trip?

MY: Well, after he hit the big market with lettuce crop he bought himself a brand new automobile. It was a 1940 Ford, and I used to have a picture of it. My mom got a brand new refrigerator and a Singer sewing machine, the foot operated Singer sewing machine. That sewing machine ended up in Japan. My mom decided to take that with her. But my dad always talked about, "Doggonit, I couldn't bring that brand new Ford with us," 'cause how could he?

KL: Are you guys in the picture that you had of it? Is your family in the picture? Just the car?

MY: Yeah.

KL: Sewing machines were something that mothers brought to camps too. It must've been really important, I think.

MY: Yeah. So as a kid, I used to see the Singer sewing machine sittin' in the corner of the room, and then my mom did all the sewing, so the school uniforms to pretty much everything, using that Singer sewing machine.

KL: Did she -- oh, go ahead.

MY: And, of course those days, in Japan nobody had anything like that. Lot of 'em even had never seen a sewing machine like that before, so that was kind of a rare thing.

KL: Yeah. Did your neighbors come use it ever?

MY: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, all the young ladies used to want to use it. Yeah, that was something that we were all proud of, something that no one had. Then another thing was... well anyway, going back to the time... I have, still have the visa that my father took out on me, with a small picture and my name. And then the name of the ship was called Tatsuta Maru, and the departure date was October 2, 1941. Of course, Pearl Harbor was December, so that's only two months before that. So you can imagine, maybe that ship that sailed across the Pacific was probably the last one. And we, as soon as we got to Yokohama and then got to my mom's village, that was Pearl Harbor. That was --

KL: Your first news on getting there.

MY: Yeah, the start of the war.

KL: Do you know if neighbors from Spreckels came on the ship, or other people that your folks knew, decided to leave?

MY: No. I don't know who else came with them, or he just decided to go back alone. I don't know.

KL: Did you go to your mom's village?

MY: Yes.

KL: I knew you lived in your grandparents' home. Those were your mother's parents?

MY: Yes, right. That was an old, small house with, I don't know if you've ever seen a thatched house, not the roof, the roof was made, covered with the rice straw. On the southern tip of Kyushu island, it's subtropical weather area, and then it rains all the time. And the typhoon areas, every summer, like in June to October, every year we had nasty typhoons came through and take the whole roof, and then it's got to do over again. But when I, of course I was only eighteen months old, so I don't remember anything, but my mom was telling me that they had a lot of problems. Not only the weather problem, but coming from here to go there and then different zones, the different area, the water is different, the food that we ate was different, and then we used to have all kinds of medical problems, diarrhea to, summertime we'd get mosquito bites, flea bites and that kind of, because of the high moisture, it kind of got out of hand. And the boils, here and here [touches arms] and all over the body. And I still have scars from those days, so it was pretty tough.