<Begin Segment 2>

KL: Do you know how your parents' marriage was arranged or how they decided to meet?

JW: Definitely it was arranged, uh-huh. Mr. Ishii, I think this was his third marriage, I guess he lost his wives.

KL: Oh, Mr. Ishii's third marriage, your stepfather?

JW: Uh-huh, I think so, yeah. So anyway, we lived on a farm, and that was a little different for me especially. We had, we moved at night, and all the frogs were croaking, it was really strange. And we had a reservoir right next to the house, and that kind of scared me, like it might be the ocean or something. (...) We lived there until the outbreak.

KL: How... you said it was very different than Venice. Would you give us just kind of a description of both Venice and Lawndale, and what kind of work did people do?

JW: Venice at that time was, you know, we lived on Washington Boulevard which was a very busy street. And then we'd go into this country where everything is dark, it was at night when we moved. And it was just different. It was dark, like a foreign country to me, it was... 'cause I'm used to all the lights and everything like that, and moving to the country. So thereon it was country life, 1930, I think it was, that we moved.

KL: What year were you born?

JW: '24. 1924, '30, '29, yeah, that's, my dad died when I was five.

KL: What can you tell me about the community in Lawndale? Who were your neighbors?

JW: Oh, I'll tell you what, Lawndale was just a little community. We had a dirt road, and on both sides of the (roads) were homes. And then on the back of the homes were the fields. Some had fifteen acres, some had twenty acres, I think my dad had fifteen acres. It was just country, you know, the road was just not paved or anything. Every time a truck went by or a car went by, then the dust followed, that type of thing. It was really different.

KL: Who was the market for the crops?

JW: We had... there were quite a number of truckers who came by, the Yamashitas and Aokis. Yeah, they came by and picked, every afternoon or every evening they'd come by, pick up our crops, load 'em on and take 'em to the market. This (was) our livelihood, it was nice.

KL: Did you help on --

JW: Yeah, oh gosh, yes. When we were little, we went to the Baptist church with our pennies, my folks would give us pennies, and the bus would come by and we'd go to the Gardena Baptist Church. Well, once we were able to work, then Sundays were no more. We worked on the farm on Sundays, and Saturdays were our day off. So we worked, yes.

KL: Pretty long hours?

JW: Pretty long hours, yeah.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.