Densho Digital Archive - Mas Okabe Interview (denshovh-omas

<Begin Segment 7>

KL: So you were in Sacramento but then you eventually left. What happened after Sacramento?

MO: We went to Woodland to farm, and then Mr. Kakimi, he came to help us farm. And like I said, we were there a very short while.

KL: You said Mr. Kakimi, what was his position in Sherman Island?

MO: He was the foreman of this ranch.

KL: Do you know its name? I know you were a kid.

MO: Which name?

KL: The name of the ranch?

MO: No, I don't.

KL: Do you know how he was able to leave that job?

MO: I guess my father just asked him to come and help, so he just came. And he lived with us, and he helped us in the tomato.

KL: Did his wife come live with you, too?

MO: Yes, my second mother, she came.

Off camera: Did they have children of their own?

MO: They had a daughter, but she was in Japan at the time, all this time. And so there was just the two of them. And they moved in with us and they helped prune the grape vines and helped us plant the tomatoes, irrigate and stuff like that.

KL: Why did your dad want to leave Sacramento and run a farm?

MO: I guess he wanted to get the children out of the city environment. I don't know why. I guess he thought it was bad for us, bad influence. There were a lot of good people in the city.

KL: Did he say that to you?

MO: Kind of. He hinted that. But I enjoyed the country life. Of course, he had promised me a bicycle after they harvested the tomatoes and stuff like that, because we used to walk to grammar school from our house, and it was about a mile and a half away. My sister and I, we used to walk every day and walk back, and then with the promise of a bicycle coming, I was looking forward to that. But the war started and I never got my bicycle.

KL: Say the name of the school that you went to?

MO: Cacheville. Cacheville grammar school. C-A-C-H-E-V-I-L-L-E. There were a lot of Hispanic kids there because of the farming areas.

KL: What was the dynamic like in that school between the groups?

MO: Not bad until the war started.

KL: Then it changed?

MO: Yeah, it changed a little.

KL: How big was the farm?

MO: That I don't know. We had gone into, my dad had gone into sort of a partnership with this other guy, because he was an alien, he couldn't own land, so this other guy's name was Ping, P-I-N-G, Oda. And he went in partnership with him, because he was a second generation, so he could own the land.

KL: Was he younger than your dad?

MO: Oh, much younger, yeah. He was a little older than my brother.

KL: Do you know what the chef did, what Wing did when you left?

MO: They sold this restaurant to this Ping's brother-in-law. So they took over the restaurant and Wing stayed there with them. They got a good deal, they had that chef.

KL: Yeah, I bet you missed it, to not have his cooking.

MO: Whenever I go to a Chinese restaurant nowadays I try to find something like he used to cook, can't find it anymore. I guess I was used to the way he cooked.

KL: Did you keep in touch with him during the war?

MO: No.

KL: So the response to your family in Woodland was okay when you moved there?

MO: Yeah. We weren't there very long, maybe half a year, and the war started.