Densho Digital Archive - George H. Morishita Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

<Begin Segment 22>

KL: This is tape number 3, we're continuing an interview with George Morishita, and we were talking about rivalries between provinces, Japan provinces between you and Eddie.

GM: Rather than the states here. Yeah, and then one day I think I must have been about thirteen. That's the last time we did that, and he just said, "George, you know we're Americans." And I said, "Yeah, I know," and that was it.

KL: Tell us what you were...

GM: Before that, he used to knock Hiroshima, you know, and I used to knock Osaka, "Oh, stupid Osaka," and this and this and that. And whatever I heard the older people say about... you know, like Okies and all that kind of stuff and then whatever word they used, I guess Osaka, I would throw it out, and he did the same thing until we were about fourteen or thirteen, I think, I was at least thirteen. He just one day said, "Hey, George, you know we're Americans." And I said, "Yeah, I know," and we stopped talking that way. [Laughs]

KL: Where was Eddie from, where did he grow up?

GM: Well, he was born in Idaho, but he grew up in Gardena, I understand. His family moved to Gardena. And he's the one that called me a liar earlier on when he said, "There's no horses in L.A."

KL: We were talking, too, off the tape about the block manager's apartment, and you were saying, would you describe -- and you can have this back -- but would you describe what the block manager's office space was like, how big it was?

GM: If I remember, it was the whole building. There might have been a partition in the back, and I thought that's where they kept storage things and all that. We never went... when I went in, it was just one door. This door at the front, and I know he had a desk in there where he sat, and I'm not sure if he had two desks for assistant or whatever. And they had two shovels, and also sports, basketballs and stuff like that.

KL: Was that in the back room?

GM: I'm not sure if that was in the front or in the back now. But when I saw this right here, it said Apartment 1, 2, 3, 4, like all the others, I got a little puzzled, and Block 5 wasn't like that, at least not to my memory.

KL: What else was in the block leader's offices? A desk and supplies?

GM: Yeah, I just went in there to pick up whatever.

KL: Did you say there was a ping pong table set up?

GM: I thought there was a... you know, I could be wrong, I could be wrong. He might not have tolerated it. They might have had that somewhere else.