<Begin Segment 7>

RP: What was your housing situation like? Did you actually live on the farm there?

YW: Yes. I don't know what happened, but my dad somehow found a wooden structure that used to be a home somewhere else on some other person's ranch. It was basically abandoned, and I guess the guy wanted to get rid of it. Dad says, "Don't get rid of it. I'll have it moved." So I guess he paid for it to get moved and I don't know what he paid the man for the structure, but it was a wooden structure and he converted that wooden structure into two parts. One part was a garage and a flower processing area where he can work at night, and the other part, we lived in the house. It was basically, amounted to about two bedrooms and a kitchen and a living room area, and that was, it was not the prettiest thing to look at. I can still remember it was, it was raw wood on the outside. It was brown. It had aged. But that's what farmers lived in. and the only thing I remember about that was that it was old, but it was livable, and the one thing I remember about sleeping in my bedroom was when I was young I used to be asthmatic, so I'd be locked in my bedroom, if you will, and I'd notice that the swallows would visit our home. They'd make their mud nests up in the eaves. That was my first exposure to Mother Nature. Oh my gosh, what are those things? My folks said, "Those are swallows. They make mud huts." So that much I remember, early on.

RP: Any other vivid memories of growing up on the farm?

YW: Only what I described. You know, helped Dad out with the watering. The other thing I did was, he used to buy scrap lumber for firewood, so I don't know how he contacted these people, but periodically, maybe once every six months, the guy would haul in a stake truck worth of lumber and just dump it there, and that was our firewood for the stove to heat us. Not for cooking, just heat us. Cooking was gas, regular gas. They had that piped in somehow.

RP: Did you have indoor plumbing?

YW: Indoor plumbing, but not indoor bathrooms. There was an outhouse. So I know what an outhouse is. It was a country outhouse. I think if I were to run that farm I'd convert it into a, at least a septic tank and a, some more modern amenities. But I remember, I told my wife, I said I remember outhouses. She said, "I do, too." [Laughs] But she remembers hers from her camp experience.

RP: When you mentioned the woodpile that you used to heat your home --

YW: What?

RP: The woodpile.

YW: Yes.

RP: Did you also have an outside bath, a furo?

YW: Yes, my dad built a separate building off to the side and part of that wood was used to fire up the bathtub. And the bathtub was typically, what, about six feet long, maybe three feet wide, maybe two and a half, three feet deep. It was metal. You had to hoist, it was hoisted on a stone platform, so he would just light a match and fire that up. And that's what part of that wood was for, not just for our heating, but also for heating the water. And the Japanese like to take hot baths, and I learned how to take hot baths in that thing, but it was very comforting for him because he needed to get the tiredness out of his body and he would just love to get soaked in that warm water. I remember that, and, but that was our bathtub. Still country living at its best, I guess, but at least we were clean.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.