Densho Digital Archive - Taeko Joanne Iritani Interview (denshovh-itaeko-01-0005)

<Begin Segment 5>

KP: You also mentioned Japanese language school.

TI: Yes, we went every Saturday, and it was generally our minister who was our teacher. One of the mothers had been a teacher in Japan, and she also was teacher of the younger children. I remember the book, they were books from Japan, the Japanese language books. But every time we'd get a new minister, I'd go back to the beginning of Book 4. So I didn't progress from second grade, basically, I think. But when I was at college, I could write to my mother. And she says, "It's better with your Japanese writing and its mistakes than it is to get a letter in English," 'cause then she'd have to have it read.

KP: So your, did your parents have much of an English command?

TI: My father, when he first came as a young man, he was in a class at the elementary school just about across the street. Right on that same Truxtun Avenue from where he was living in the dormitory. And my... I guess it was at my mother's, after my mother's funeral that a man came over to me and told me, "I knew Big George." See, my father had taken the name George. His name was George Yoneshiro Ono, Y-O-N-E-S-H-I-R-O. Anyway, he had attended Franklin elementary school or grammar school it would have been called at that time. And gone through the six grades in a year, I think. So he did pretty well with his English. My mother never was very good, although later on, after the war, when they had their nursery, she could get out there and knew all the names of all the plants, and tell people how to grow them.

KP: So did you speak Japanese at home, or English?

TI: We spoke Japanese together, although my Japanese didn't progress beyond a child's level. Even now, I can talk to some Issei, and it's not very good English, I mean, Japanese.

KP: Back to the Japanese school that you went to, how did you feel about going, taking your Saturdays and going there? We've heard a lot of...

TI: Well, for us, as children, we had other friends who were our age, so that was fun. And out there in the country, you were isolated from other neighbors anyway. No one lived closer than a quarter mile from us.

KP: So it was a social gathering for you as a child?

TI: And also from there we were able to walk downtown to get new shoes. I remember my new shoes when I, my feet were growing so fast. And we could go to the library and get books.

KP: What town was the school?

TI: In Bakersfield. And just walked from the church where we had our Japanese school class, just on Saturday. People who lived downtown, especially the Buddhist children, had Japanese school every day, every day after school. Ours was very limited. But no, we also had a place to play across the street from the church. My father had bought that land using a Nisei man's name, and he needed, he bought it so that we had a place to play. And later on, during the war while we were gone to Poston, then some of the Chinese people asked to purchase that land from him, and they did.

KP: Okay, let's see. So about how large was the Japanese community in Bakersfield?

TI: Bakersfield didn't have a large Japanese community. The stores that I remember, we had two... when evacuation time occurred, we had two fish markets, we had a couple of restaurants. There was one in particular called Asahi, A-S-A-H-I, where we usually, when my parents came into town to go to church, we also usually stopped in there, to the store, and picked up any Japanese foods. And we also picked up some tamales that she made. It was the most delicious... and she always had the non-spicy ones saved for us. They were beautiful, fat tamales, I'll never forget hers. I've never seen any quite like it since.