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MR: Portland's Old Town had a reputation for being pretty wild, I understand. Did the Hood River, younger men from Hood River go there and have a good time?

HY: [Laughs] Oh, boy. That's a leading question, but I'll answer it this way. I don't know my own personal knowledge. I've heard stories, and I read about it. But let me go back and tell you about Hood River in the beginning. In around 1904 in Hood River, there's, as I say, somewhere between 400 and 600 young bachelor men laboring on the farms, clearing the stumps. Well, and as I said, there was the Nigoma family had already started a grocery store, and there was supposed to be a type of a restaurant in Hood River too. So using an example, Mr. Tomita came to Hood River in 1904, and he was a single farmhand, and he worked on a farm in a place called Pine Grove which is about four miles from the town of Hood River. So after a days' working in the summertime, he walked into town, he walked into town four miles in town. He'd go to the Okawa Noodle Shop and have a bowl of noodles, and then he'd go to the bathhouse, sento. I don't know where that was, but he'd go to the bathhouse, you know Japanese tub and clean up and so he'd smell nice. And then he'd go play, shoot a game of pool, so they must have had a pool hall there too. And then he'd go to ogle the girls, never to buy, just to look at the girls because they had a whorehouse there in town. And according to... what was his... Chiho Tomita, he says that whorehouse was in the Nigoma store. Upstairs was the hotel, and he'd go up there. I don't know if that's true, and one of the Nigoma sisters says, no, it wasn't the Nigoma store. It was the Yasui store that had that whorehouse, but I don't know. Don't ask me because I don't know. But anyway, Chiho says he just went to look. Taylor says, "Well, that sounds like my father." [Laughs] So anyway, so they did have places where the men could dissipate their money and their wealth and their virtue, I guess, even in the Hood River. But in Portland, the question that you asked, yes. From what I read, they did have some rampant wide open gambling as far as, as early as 1906, the consul general of San Francisco sent one of his co-consul. It was Chitemi, Sutemi Chinda up here to investigate how the Japanese were living in places like Portland and Spokane and Tacoma and Seattle. And he, Chinda, the consul's agent, reported that things were terrible in Portland. Most of the men were ne'er do wells and gamblers and pimps and prostitutes. This is 1906, and he reported, gave terrible report and also in Tacoma and also in Seattle, so it sounds like they had nothing but bums and vagrants here and prostitutes. But later on, this is again reading, I don't know personally, I heard stories, they had a gambling house in Portland called the Koshin Club, and it was in downtown, in J-town, Japantown, the old town, what they call Old Town now, and it was a gambling joint. And one of these men was involved in a murder of a Japanese, of another Japanese. I don't know why or what, but there was supposed to be such a thing. And of course, they had the so-called pink houses, and I don't know if you're familiar with Kazuo Ito's book called Issei, but it's a very thick book, and he has drawn a map of Portland in there, and one of them was this pink house. Now I ask these people, "What is this pink house?" And of course it was a house of prostitution, a house of ill repute, but nobody wants to say it was, and they don't want to put a name to it, so they called it pink house. But it obviously existed, so you know, hey, Japanese are no more angels than anybody else, no more virtuous than anybody. They got the warts and moles and blemishes just like everybody else. They just do it differently. So yeah, they had such things.

MR: Did the Japanese government take steps to try to improve the reputation?

HY: Oh, well, the Japanese government did. in a way, and the way they did that was working through the Japanese consul. The Japanese consul was a very, very powerful organization in those days. It still is. But in those days, they were even more powerful because they represent the might of imperial Japan, and Japan was kind of a power to be reckoned with in those days. So the Japanese consul indirectly wielded his influence by working the Japanese Association. Those Japanese Associations were ubiquitous. They were all over. And the, one of the main functions of the Japanese government was through the Japanese consul, working with the Japanese Association. He could not give direct orders to the Japanese Association. But if the people, the Japanese people living in let's say Portland want to go to Japan, they had to work through the Japanese consul to get a passport or visa to go to Japan, so he had a lot of power. And if he said that an Issei citizen was a gambler or murderer or something, he could get these people sent back to Japan, so he was powerful in that sense. So he wielded a lot of not only moral authority but also political authority by working through the Japanese Association. So in that way, the Japanese government did exercise control over the Japanese people, but it was, without the Japanese Association, it would never work, I don't think. The Japanese Association were highly, highly important. So yeah, the Japanese government did control the people.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.