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RP: What experiences do you remember most about growing up in a Japanese household? Is it the food, or the holidays...

KO: It was a little of both. The holidays were mostly American holidays except that they emphasized the New Year's holiday.

RP: What do you remember about your, your family's celebration of New Year's?

KO: We would have a New Year's feast. And all our family friends would be visiting each other. That was the old tradition at that time. And so we would visit their family feast and they would visit our family feast. We would, I guess, over the period of around the New Year's Day, several days, we'd visit quite a few friends that way. Sometimes one or two hours, sometimes longer. Couple of our better friends, we'd visit a whole evening or something like that. And all the men in the family tended to drink a lot of sake. [Laughs] Fortunately, you might say, there wasn't that much in the way of traffic control in those days. [Laughs] And my father didn't drink all that much, just enough to get tipsy, but not enough so he couldn't drive. I think he would probably get a ticket these days. It was the same sort of deal. We'd drink and sit around for a while until they sobered up, and then we'd drive home. My mother would, you might say... my mother would chat with the wives and the women of the family, and my father would drink with the men in the family. We'd all have all this thing like sushi and New Year's feast and stuff like that, gorge yourselves. And everybody had pretty much the same sort of thing, different variations, the family variations. It wasn't exactly the same sort of, the sushi wasn't exactly the same in every household, so that was sort of convenient. Get to taste and find our favorite stuff.

RP: Another, another icon of New Year's was the mochi.

KO: Oh, yeah. I loved that stuff.

RP: Did you ever pound mochi?

KO: Oh, yeah. When I got old enough, I got, that's part of the pounding process. I'd get a few whacks in. But the men, they did the, most of the pounding. They had the old, classic old big hammer type thing, to pound it. It was too big for me as a little kid to manipulate, but I got to take in a few licks. They would sell the, I guess, spend the afternoon pounding mochi in the days prior to the New Year. And I had my favorite recipe that I tried to get a hold of the mochi and eat. [Laughs] That was sort of the -- that was, I guess, the pre-New Year's Day entertainment, the different families would get together and pound mochi. I think what was it was at that time was that every year, we would go to different places, different families and we'd do the mochi. It's sort of like a rotating picnic, you might call it. And the interesting thing about it was that they had the traditional way of cooking the rice and stuff like that, pounding it. And so it was an outdoor affair, usually. And the women would be making the stuff, the sushi and that kind of stuff in the house and the men would be out pounding the mochi. And the kids would be playing around, getting into trouble. [Laughs]

RP: No supervision.

KO: Yeah.

RP: All the parents were busy doing something else.

KO: Yeah, we'd be out playing games, and every now and then, we'd go and poke our nose in to see what was going on with the mochi and stuff. A few of us would get a chance to whack it a few times, get a nibble and go play again. So it was sort of like a picnic. And then in the spring, the Japanese community was sort of the informal community, not formal or anything like that. But we would have a picnic, find a farm or a place that, in those days, there were lots of open, all you had to drive was about half a mile, you're out in the country. So we'd have a nice picnic around, find somebody's, somebody's farm or something, and have a picnic. And the usual picnic games and races and stuff like that.

RP: This would be strictly Japanese families?

KO: Yeah, yeah.

RP: From the community?

KO: Few other people every now and then come to it and see what was going on.

RP: Now, these weren't prefectural picnics, were they? You know, where a whole group of folks from Yamaguchi-ken come together?

KO: No. It was the whole community, everybody around there. 'Cause there wasn't enough of any one group to make a big party.

RP: What kind of games and races did you participate in?

KO: Oh, the usual stuff. Any kid's stuff.

RP: Sack races...

KO: Play tag and hide and seek and stuff like that. And the elder kids would play baseball. Baseball, of course, what else, Japanese baseball?

RP: Yeah, did you take up baseball at an early age?

KO: I played some baseball. I'm not much of a baseball player. I did have one, I did have one big old leather football, the old fashioned kind. Big, fat, almost round, spherical football. I had that, and so when we played in the streets and around my home, we'd play with that thing. In fact, I think I was about the only one with a football. So we played with that thing. And then that, I had... I'm not sure, I think I had a baseball bat, I'm not quite sure. And my father collected some of these things, I think, left over from the time when he had the store. So some of these things were left over from that time. And I was able to take advantage of the fact that we had that in storage someplace. The football, and the baseball bat. I guess eventually, my father bought me a baseball, it was a softball. So I wound up with a baseball bat and a ball. And the kids in the street would play with my ball and bat and stuff like that. That made me, allowed me to congregate, you might say, communicate with a lot of kids in the neighborhood. But it's one of those typical ancient town type of thing. Only the kids in a few blocks or so would be the ones... other kids in another block, they were different groups, so we never really associated with them.

Although in Menlo Park, we had one big, it was a big vacant lot about a block away. All the kids wound up in that vacant lot and would be climbing trees and digging tunnels in the dirt. The elder, the older kids dug tunnels and caves and stuff, and that was sort of... it was essentially a trench-type cave covered over, so it would be a cave. We didn't have any hills or anything to dig in to. It wasn't dangerous in the sense that if we had a cave-in, all we had to do was, the roof would fall in. That was about it. And then there was a bunch of California oaks that we climbed in. A couple of kids got injured falling out of a tree, and my memory of falling out of a tree is I fell from, I guess, twenty or thirty feet up and bounced down to a lower limb, caught on a lower limb and I didn't get injured. It just bruised a little bit, but essentially I was lucky in the sense that there were a bunch of trees, California oak, and if you fall off of one limb, you fall into another limb. So I think I hit two limbs before I stopped. [Laughs] But even then, in my typical scheming approach, I was sure, made sure that I had some way out, you might say, a backdoor out if I fell off. So I always made sure that there was a limb underneath me. [Laughs] So if I fell off one limb, or broke, a limb broke, I would wind up being able to catch myself on the next limb.

RP: You had a safety net.

KO: Yeah, a safety net, yeah.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.