Densho Digital Archive - Akiko Okuno Interview (denshovh-oakiko-01-0012)

<Begin Segment 12>

KL: What was your house in Gilroy like?

AO: It was a farmhouse. They had a big pantry, and a storage room. And if we were naughty, I remember once I was naughty, and my father put me in the storage room and made me stay there for a while.

KL: What had you done?

AO: Huh?

KL: What had you done?

AO: I kicked my sister.

KL: Did she deserve it?

AO: Yes.

KL: What happened to her?

AO: She was always teasing me, and she could hold me like this, she was taller than I, and I couldn't reach her, so I kicked her.

KL: Did she get in trouble, too?

AO: No, she told on me, so then my father grabbed me and stuffed me in the storage room. "You're not coming out." So I just stayed there pouting because I was not in the wrong.

KL: It's very unjust. How many bedrooms were in that house?

AO: There were two bedrooms and a sun porch, and they used that sun porch for a bedroom, too.

KL: Was Gilroy still very much known for garlic at that time, or was it more diverse?

AO: No, it was diverse.

KL: What did people grow?

AO: All kinds of... tomatoes, garlic, peas, squash, you name it, they were just garden farming.

KL: Where was the market?

AO: They would ship... because the train would come through, and I guess the buyers would come and pick up, and take it to the train and then it would go and be shipped around.

KL: How far away did it go?

AO: I don't know. But at first, let's see, we just had tomatoes.

KL: Your family?

AO: And then we got, Father put in peas. Oh, and then the year that he decided to do garlic, garlic was selling for a penny and a half a pound, so it wasn't worth even harvesting, so they just dug it up. And we used to have chickens, and the chickens go out in the field and they'd eat this garlic that had been plowed up. Oh, the eggs were awful. You could scramble them and it'd be okay, but the soft boiled eggs, soft boiled egg, it's, I mean, fresh garlic is fine, but this is digested garlic, you know. And soft boiled egg, the yolk would, you know, taste like garlic breath.

KL: How old were you that year?

AO: I must have been about twelve, eleven.

KL: What was your middle school?

AO: Well, we had a seventh and eighth grade middle school, that was... gee, that was Wheeler, that was... or was that Wheeler? Jordan, Severance school was the seventh and eighth grade school, but they... yeah, they took the... that Severance school was just seventh graders. And the A group from sixth grade went to, directly to... I think maybe that was Wheeler. I thought Wheeler was the other elementary school. But anyway, whatever that school's name was. And there was one seventh grade, Mrs. Fletcher's class, and then the eighth grade. And so Mrs. Fletcher was my seventh grade teacher, she was a gem. Mrs. Hunter was my eighth grade teacher.

KL: What made Mrs. Fletcher so great?

AO: I liked the way she taught, I guess. And she made learning interesting. And Mrs. Hunter, I guess it's the challenge that I enjoyed. And so like Mr. Ruth, too, was a strict and good teacher. But Mrs. Fletcher was an older woman, and she made everything interesting.

KL: How did your mom like being back in Gilroy?

AO: Probably better. She probably didn't have to work quite so hard, and it wasn't... because Cienega didn't even have electricity. So here in Gilroy we had electricity, flush toilet, not an outhouse.

KL: And you guys were older, so maybe, did she have her concerns still about safety?

AO: That's right. And we rode the bus in to school, we walked the lane up to the main road where the bus came.

KL: Why do you think that your parents did decide to stop having children when they did?

AO: Well, I think... well, my mother was older by then, thirty-five, thirty-four. Yeah, she probably was close to menopause, so Atsuko was her last. Plus, they must have realized that there weren't gonna be a boy, and if they did have a boy now, it'd be so spoiled. [Laughs]

KL: Did they ever hear, you said the letters from Japan would upset her mother because she missed her child. But what did they think of the political climate in Japan or what was going on in Japan?

AO: They did not discuss those things with us, or talk about it. And they just talked between themselves, I guess, and often they'd be sitting there, just the two of them, in the kitchen talking a lot, and we were doing our homework in the living room.

KL: Did you know what they were talking about?

AO: We didn't pay any attention to it.