<Begin Segment 7>

KL: You mentioned the movies at the Buddhist church, and of course just classes and recess and stuff in school, and then New Year's and mochi making. Are there other ways that you guys, or that you were part of kind of community life?

MM: Yes, every Sunday was a day off. My father took a day off, and he had a very good friend, the Fujimotos, and they liked to play cards, Hana, those, it's a Japanese card game. I'm sure you've heard of it. Oh, he loved to play cards --

KL: Nobody seems to know the rules, though, who was a kid from your generation. [Laughs]

MM: Right. We don't know how to play it. All we know is you put the cards that look alike together, and there's a half moon, there's flowers, there's trees, there's funny looking animal or something, and you could tell what goes together.

KL: He would go play it at, did you say it was Mr. Fujimoto?

MM: At Mr. Fujimoto's house, or they would come over to our house. It'd kind of alternate. And so they had kids, they had kids, so we played with each other while all this card playing was going on, and eating together and all that, so that was nice. And when New Year's came along, my mother would make all the foods, the fish and the sushi and the different kinds of foods. My mother learned how to make it, and so she was a good cook. My mother was a good cook. And then what we did was we'd go to every friend's house, and we'd eat a little bit of their stuff, and they would come to our place and eat a little bit of our stuff. We'd go house to house, and we don't eat too much because we have to go to all these other houses, so we'd just eat one or two things and gab a little bit and go on to the next house. It was fun. That was fun. Yeah, so that was another thing we did. It was, it was a nice growing up period in my life, in Salinas.

KL: What was your house like?

MM: It was very small, very small rooms. Very, let's see, it had the kitchen and the, in the kitchen was a stove and a sink and a table and chairs, and in my mother's bedroom was our crib and my mother and father's bed, and then the brothers, they slept in little cubbyholes here and there, or in the living room downstairs. So I see one, two, three, about four room house. And they had an outhouse and then they had a bathhouse, the Japanese bathhouse next to the house, and you have to light the fire and start heating up the bathwater.

KL: Who did that in your family?

MM: My mother, I guess, or sometimes my father did, until we learned how to do it. I never did it, though. I imagine maybe my brothers did that.

KL: Did you guys have work in the farm, or chores or tasks?

MM: I didn't, but my brothers, my three older brothers did. See, I took care of, my sister and I were too young to do anything, but when I turned eight my father said, "Now you have to cook." So learned how to cook rice, that was my first thing I learned how to cook, and then the next thing was biscuits, which came out hard as a rock, but my father said it was alright. Then I went to cookies.

KL: So were you back with them by that point, for most of the time? When you were eight, back with your parents?

MM: Yeah.

KL: So it was kind of a brief stay at your grandmother's.

MM: It was just maybe weekends or something like that.

KL: I see, so you always lived with your parents, pretty much, and your siblings.

MM: And then one summer my Aunt Gloria wanted me to come -- she had four boys, no girls, so she wanted me to come and be her little helper. And I had a sister below me, so my mother had May, but so she sent me to Los Angeles to be with Aunt Gloria, so I'm, I was close to Aunt Gloria growing up. She's like a second mother to me, and she was easier to talk to than my mother. My mother was kind of quiet, but Aunt Gloria, she and I were able to converse with each other, communicate a little bit better.

KL: And she was in Los Angeles?

MM: Uh-huh.

KL: What part of Los Angeles?

MM: Gardena. Gardena. Oh, Compton, excuse me. It was Compton. After the war, Gardena, because they grew flowers, so they needed to be out in the country to raise these beautiful mums, big flowers like that [shows size], and long stem.

KL: What's her last name?

MM: Mochidome, M-O-C-H-I-D-O-M-E, Gloria.

KL: That's an unusual name. That's neat, Mochidome.

MM: They're from Kagoshima, Japan.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.