Densho Digital Archive - Alice Nishitani Interview (denshovh-nalice-01-0009)

<Begin Segment 9>

TR: You said the community center was built in 1938.

AN: Uh-huh.

TR: So you would have been fourteen, right?

AN: Was I? Thought I was older than that, maybe not.

TR: Well, I think you were probably born in, what year --

AN: 1918.

TR: 1918. So you were twenty years old when the community center was built.

AN: I guess, I don't know.

TR: Before that, have you had any kind kind of contact with Japanese, other Japanese American boys around the area?

AN: Oh, there, and then in Seattle and other areas back toward the coast because our group, we were part of the JACL. And because of that, we were, would go and visit some of the conventions and so on like that.

TR: What chapter of JACL?

AN: Well at that time, would it be, we had one in Caldwell, that area in Nampa. I guess we had one over here too in the Oregon side.

TR: It sounds like the cultural center where, what was the name of the building that was built in Ontario?

AN: The Hall.

TR: The Hall? Did it have an official name?

AN: Well, I don't know, Japanese American Hall.

TR: Okay. Sounds like everyone called it "The Hall"?

AN: Uh-huh.

TR: It sounds like, to me, that that may have been kind of the beginnings of a Japanese American community, a place where people to meet that may not have had a place to meet before; is that right?

AN: Uh-huh. Well, yes. And then during the war, you could not meet. Japanese couldn't meet like we did before. But then gradually, they got so they met and then, but they didn't have a place, so we had a great big lawn out on that ranch, and so we'd have dances there. And on the lawn, and then Sonny Tsukami, who had the sound system, he supplied, always supplied the music, Benny Goodman and all those dance records. And then I remember Miss Peet mentioned having a picnic out on our lawn too. Well, they, let's see what was it? That was after, this was after the people came from the camps, and they came to work out on the ranches and so on. So then, that's when they, I remember Miss Peet had written a letter. I still have the letter that she wrote to me. And Miss Peet was the, she was a missionary to Japan, and then she came out and lived with the people who came from Minidoka and the camps. So then she had, they had services every Sunday morning. In fact, she had it over here on the, in the tent camp. There was a tent camp out here, three miles south of Nyssa.

TR: This is Miss Azalea Peet?

AN: Yes. Did you know her?

TR: I've heard her name many, many times.

AN: Oh, have you? Oh.

TR: Well, before we get to wartime, it sounds like there was a good three years there where the hall was being used all the time.

AN: Uh-huh.

TR: So it became a cultural center and a meeting center for the Japanese Americans?

AN: Yes.

TR: Before that hall, had people had any kind of place where they could meet or how did they socialize?

AN: Oh, I think the JACL probably. At first, it wasn't JACL. It was JACC, Japanese American Citizen's Club. It wasn't official, see, like the JACL, but we had a gathering of the Japanese. We met wherever, any hall or any church wherever we could find a place.