Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Shig Imai Interview
Narrator: Shig Imai
Interviewer: Linda Tamura
Location: Hood River, Oregon
Date: October 30, 2013
Densho ID: denshovh-ishig-01-0006

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LT: Well, let's go to your uncle Masaji Kusachi came to Japan, and you eagerly said you wanted to come back to the United States. What happened next?

SI: Well, coming back, he said, "I got to get you on a boat before you turn ten. So my birthday was January 16th, so we had to get on the boat first part of January. And the Pacific was really rough coming across, and we had, there was a little freighter that was the only boat that we could come on. And, gee, the ocean was so rough that the waves would come over, right over the front of the boat and clear over it. I thought we were gonna sink sometimes. [Laughs] It was a pretty rocky ride. Then when the back end, prop would get out of water and you hear all that vibration. It'd just rumble all over the boat. It was quite a ride.

LT: So when you returned to the United States, what was your adjustment like? Because you had been used to speaking Japanese, you had younger brothers and sisters who had not seen you for three years.

SI: The first thing I noticed was when you got off the boat and started coming home on the railroad, Uncle says, "Have a sandwich." So he gives me a cheese sandwich. Well, I never had eaten a cheese before. [Laughs] So I had to learn to like the cheese eventually.

LT: What did you think of the cheese sandwich?

SI: Yeah, it was, it was something that, it wasn't too appetizing to me, but then eventually I learned to use it, eat cheese.

LT: So what were your thoughts when you returned to the United States and saw the country of your birth for the first time in three years?

SI: Well, right away we had to go to school, American grade school. And here I was too old to be in first grade, but then they started pushing me and trying to get through the eighth grade in six years. So it was kind of rough on my English composition, and English was kind of a tough subject for me.

LT: I can imagine. Can you talk about what a school day was like in Dee?

SI: Well, Dee, we had to walk, there was no buses, I don't think, we had to walk. It was only about half a mile, I guess, but you walked to school. One thing I really enjoyed was they used to have, at noon they had a hot lunch, and wintertime, they used to, some women was cooking soup or something like that. Besides sandwiches we'd take or sometimes we'd take onigiri, but not when we were eating in the room, we didn't take onigiri, because hakujins didn't kind of like that. If we were eating outside, well, some of us took onigiri. When you have onigiri, they put that pickled plum, you know, that sour old plum in there. [Laughs] But then we used to, I used to walk about a mile to the store to buy a loaf of bread from the farm. I had to walk clear down there to Dee. That was over a mile, one way. And then the bread in those days was five cents a loaf. And we had a store down at Dee for the lumber mill, there was a lot of people living there, so they had one general store.

LT: So was school quite a challenge then after being gone from the United States for three years?

SI: Well, then not just going to grade school, but then we had to go after school and go to Japanese school. And all they taught you was reading anyway, but in all that time we had to walk between places. Before we got home, sometimes it was dark.

LT: So the multiplication tables that you learned in Japan served you well in school.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.