<Begin Segment 8>

RP: Henry, let's move into the camp experience a little bit.

HN: Yeah.

RP: Last time we kind of left off talking about you and a group of other sort of nursery owners getting together and starting this nursery at Manzanar.

HN: Yeah.

RP: What... did the idea come from you or was it planted by the War Relocation Authority, that, you know, we've got this site here that's barren, doesn't have much plants growing and we have dust storms, hey, why don't you guys who have some landscape and nursery experience start a nursery.

HN: Well it was, it just so happened that, that a good friend of mine, well, two or three good friends of mine, their dads were in the nursery business. And primarily Joe Kishi, who was actually a person that started, wanted to start the nursery. It was his, his idea. And, and it was another friend of mine, that he was from Santa Monica, Sho Komai, his father had a nursery. And then there was another nursery, his son, the Fukuharas, Frank Fukuhara, then of course Joe, Joe Kishi says, "Why don't we start a nursery?" Well, he's the one that went to the office and said, "Can we start a nursery?" And he got permission to start.

RP: How did you guys start?

HN: We just, we got together and decided, well, if we gonna start a nursery we need a lath house. You can't do it out in the open because of the heat in the summertime. So, they gave us that permission.

RP: Did you have the... excuse me. Did you have the ability to decide where that lath house was or did they say, "We'd like you to build it here?"

HN: Oh, I think there... see there was this guayule farm, and so I guess it was just natural that it would be next to the guayule farm. And we all had, being in the nursery business, we knew how to build the shade, lath houses. So we requisitioned. We decided, we figured out how much lumber we need, what kind of lumber we need. And we requisitioned for it and we got, we got the lumber and we built, built the lath house. And of course we decided to, what could we grow? And there was this, well the locusts. There was so much of locust seeds available we, germinated... it was just really easy to germinate. We had thousands of locust seeds. And we sent for other things, too, seeds. But primarily... [pauses]

RP: Sorry, Henry. So, you had no shortage of locust seeds. What else did you, did you decide to propagate as some of your nursery stock?

HN: Once the... actually, none of us had too much experience. We were pretty all, all pretty young. But most of our, most of our dads were not around either because they were interned elsewhere. When we... of course, we had enough experience that... and then, and the locust of course was so easily propagated that we had thousands of plants and once they came up from seed, we were busy transplanting these to, from smaller pots to one-gallon cans. I don't know if we went any further than gallons 'cause I had left afterwards, but we had probably, maybe not in the hundreds but even in the thousands of, of plants of locust.

RP: Did you, you propagated them primarily from seed or did you try cuttings as well?

HN: Well, we got seed. But we also, in order to, to be active, we tried digging up locust trees. And it turned out that in the wintertime, when they were dormant, they were pretty easily, they were very easy to transplant, dig up almost bare root and plant and they would, they would take very easily. So we did dig up bigger, more mature locust plants. And whatever we had there were, anybody that needed 'em for, for the block or for their apartment, I guess, they came to the nursery to get... if they wanted to plant locust trees.

RP: Would you also plant them in a particular block or...

HN: No, no.

RP: People would come to the nursery, take what they needed, and they went and planted them.

HN: Yeah, yeah.

RP: So how large a container of a locust did you --

HN: I only remember up to a gallon can, a gallon container. And maybe later on, they transferred to fives. But, like I say, I wasn't around so... I was there just at the beginning.

RP: What did you use for cans?

HN: I think, at that time, they used, you know, used vegetable cans. That was, in the nursery business at that time that was the... of course, today we have plastic, but that was the, the metal tin gallon cans. Five gallons were, 5 gallon tin. And I think, yeah, there was a lot of cans that came to the, to the camp for food. Yeah, whatever, for tomatoes... they all came in gallons.

RP: And you...

HN: So they saved all those cans and that's what they used, yeah.

RP: How about your water for the nursery? Did you just tap off of...

HN: We just had a, they had...

RP: A line...

HN: ...a water system there, yeah.

RP: Was there any problem in, in not having enough water?

HN: No. No, there was, there was always plenty of water, always plenty of water.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.