<Begin Segment 4>

KP: So, you said your, your dad's farm was surrounded by Japanese American farmers? Or, Japanese farmers? His property?

MJ: The Japanese farmers?

KP: Right. They were around him. Do you remember...

MJ: Well, they were, let's see, it's Ishimaro, I believe it was, he had his farm right at the entrance of ours. You had to drive by his to get in. And I can remember when I was a kid, he raised onions. And it was just pungent onion smell everywhere. And he had a big warehouse there that he kept all the onions in. And I remember a lot of Japanese men and women in there working on the onions, and cleaning 'em and puttin' 'em in sacks and stuff. I just, just thought of that now. When we'd go by you could look in that shed and they would be in there cleaning 'em. So that's where he lived. He was very close. The, the house was right there. We drove right by his house when you went into our ranch.

KP: And you said there were other Japanese farmers there as well?

MJ: Excuse me?

KP: There were other Japanese farmers in that area as well?

MJ: There was. There was Hibino, which was the other one that he helped, was close. You could, you could drive your tractor to his land. But the other two were on the other side of the canal which he could not get to. And I've got their names here somewhere. Maybe I don't. No, I don't have it on this piece of paper.

KP: That's okay.

MJ: One of 'em was Miyanaga, Tommy Miyanaga, was the, was the grandson that I knew. And one was Miyanaga, and what was the other one do you remember?

Off Camera: Akiya.

MJ: Oh yeah, Akiya. Yeah. So there was four that I know of around that area.

KP: And you were born in '39?

MJ: I was born in '39.

KP: So you don't really have any personal memories up to, including...

MJ: No, the only thing I can remember was during the war, I think it was a navy plane crash landed on my dad's farm. They just had problems or somethin' and they landed on that big field. And I can remember my brother out there and my dad and, and the navy out there gettin' it on, gettin' it loaded onto a truck so they could get it out of there. But there was nobody hurt, but that's where they landed. Basically that's about all -- I can remember the blackouts. We had to turn the lights out in our house. I remember that. We had blackout lights on the cars where they just shined one the road, just down. Other than that, out there in the canyon we didn't have any air raid sirens or anything like that. And in Salinas they did. They had, they would turn out all the lights and stuff. So I really don't remember anything about the war.

KP: Did you have any awareness at all that your Japanese neighbors were being taken away at that age?

MJ: I didn't, uh-uh, no. My brother did. And my brother's still alive. He remembers them. In fact I called him on the phone to find out their names. And he remembers them. And he was, my brother was the one that told me that my dad probably would have helped the other ones if he could have got to the ranches but he couldn't get to 'em. But there was other people that did help them and save their farms also. My mother kept the books so that when they came back it was all on paper how much was spent and how much was made and who was paid and so they just walked in and took the place right back. There was no, no problem at all.

KP: What did your father do for these farms? I mean, how did he keep them going? I mean, did he have to contract labor and stuff like that?

MJ: He had contract labor for thinning. And he hired out also like a crew would come in and harvest the beets. They'd bring in a beet wheel and harvest it, put it in trucks. Also, the lettuce was the same way and that was mostly Mexican laborers that came in and did thinning, thinned the lettuce, and cultivated it. Well, the cultivation on the watering was up to the foreman. He did that. There was, there was one unhappy situation. Ted, I think it was, or Steve, Steve Asivito fell asleep one night and he ruined about half of, about forty-five acres of lettuce went under water. My dad wasn't too happy about that, but that's the only incident I can ever remember him talkin' about. So, they took care of that stuff and of course Steve and Ted, both of 'em of course spoke Spanish so they would, they would work with the, with the ranch hands.

KP: And, and that also worked with the Japanese farms that your... how did your dad kind of manage those?

MJ: You know I don't remember how they worked it.

KP: I mean when he, he took them over?

MJ: When he took them over? Oh yeah, he used whatever... he hired whatever he needed to do it, yeah. Their farms weren't that big. My dad was one of the biggest farmers. He had a hundred acres which was big then. Now it's nothin', but it was big then. They had like twenty-five, thirty acres maybe at the most. But the Hibinos, which my dad helped, when my dad finally gave up ranching because a freeway went through the ranch, and put the, put the high ground on one side and, and all the farmland on the other and he couldn't, couldn't get his equipment back and forth anymore. So he retired and he leased it to Hibino Farms, which was the same Hibino that he helped during the war.

KP: Well, the other question I have is what sort of burden do you think it put on your father to help out these other farmers?

MJ: Oh, I'm sure it put a pretty good size burden on him. Because, you know, I can remember when I was a kid he, he left at six in the morning and he didn't come back until dark before that, so you know, I'm sure it put a lot on him. It was a lot of extra work.

KP: You also mentioned that when you'd drive past the, the Japanese farms you remember seeing the, the Japanese workers there doing all that work. That means they would have been...

MJ: They were all gone, exactly. See I don't remember, I don't even remember if that was before... it was after the war that I saw the Japanese, yeah, that I saw them. Before the war I wouldn't have, wouldn't have recognized. But...

KP: So do you --

MJ: The, the property in, in Spreckles, was still in the Juhler name until 1980, '82 or '83, somewhere in there. It was still in the Juhler's name. It is in, kind of in the Juhler's name. It, it belongs to a lady named Margo and she was brought over by Etta, one of Dad's sisters. She was an invalid, she had cerebral palsy. And when Etta got to the point where she thought she wasn't... gettin' close to death, she had this German lady, Margo, come over from Germany. And learned the business of the store and she took the place over. And so she ran the store after that. My dad did go back after he retired. He ran the little service station in Spreckles, just for fun basically. And that's when East of Eden was filmed and James Dean used to get gas there and talk to my dad. And that was all shot right there on the Spreckles property, that whole thing. So that was kind of fun.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.