<Begin Segment 5>

RP: What were some of the other activities that you got involved with growing up? What did you do for fun?

JN: Where, in Seattle?

RP: In Seattle, yeah.

JN: Well, I... oh, we had a cherry tree and two pear trees and an apple tree in the backyard. And I remember we would have ropes and we were like monkeys, we could swing from tree to tree. Crazy things like that I can recall. I remember playing marbles and we would play keeps and how these kids would keep us playing because we were winning, you know. And the older kids, non-Japanese, incidentally. Yeah, life, life was pretty fun in Seattle. But it was disciplined, my mother was, somehow she kept us in line.

RP: Have any experiences going fishing or swimming?

JN: Oh yeah, I remember Ray Taniguchi and I, there was a place called Smith Cove, I think that's, all the sewage in Seattle ran into Smith Cove in the Puget Sound and the fish abound. You could go down there and you could fish for shiners, we called them. And you could virtually almost hook 'em without bait and you just pull them up. We used to bring a box, I like to call it an apple box but apple boxes were made of wood, but this was cardboard. And we would fill that damn near, almost half with fish that we'd catch. We would just peer over the piers. Well, anyway, and then we would take it to the fish market and sell it. And they would give us maybe a quarter for a half box of fish. Ray and I would go to a place called Coney Island, it was a chili parlor. It was watered-down chili, but it was delicious. [Laughs] We would spend our ten cents, and it was ten cents for a bowl of chili. I remember doing things like that. We used to play baseball using the sewer caps. There was an intersection, and at the intersection there was four sewer caps. We would use that as first, second, and third base. And I remember, in Seattle, we lived on East Fir Street, which is a series of hills. And during the winter, we would be able to, I don't know how, God was with us, that we would slide on a sled from the top of Eighteenth Street all the way down to Fifteenth Street crossing the cross streets with no traffic. I mean, without any cars, nobody to stop traffic if there was traffic. [Laughs] We used to do things like that. And I remember once we put my kid brother -- I shouldn't say this -- in a wheel, in an old tire and rolled him down the hill. [Laughs] He didn't get far, fortunately. But we did some bad things too, I guess.

RP: A few of the gentlemen we interviewed yesterday and today talked about a sports league called the Courier League. Maybe you were a little too young for that.

JN: No, I was way, way too young. No, I don't recall any of that.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.