<Begin Segment 11>

VO: Tell us a little bit about starting the store. How was your father able to start that again?

YM: Well, my dad didn't have any money, because the money was confiscated. And he couldn't get any money from the bank. And I know that the man that used to own 7UP, he was a Greek fellow, I can't pronounce his name. He offered to help my dad because when he started the business, my dad used to buy from them when he just started his business. But I guess he decided to ask some of his friends, some in Hood River and some in Portland, and then he borrowed money.

VO: From his Japanese friends?

YM: Yeah. And he started his business, but starting a business is okay, but this is 1946 and nothing was being exported from Japan, so he couldn't get any soy sauce or miso or any canned goods from Japan. So the question was, what are they going to do? And I guess they came up with the idea of making care packages and sending them to Japan. People would buy things in the store and they would pack them up, and then we would send them by mail.

VO: What were the things that would be in the care packages?

YM: The care packages lot of times contained, like, coffee and sugar and cocoa, and we had canned butter and ladies hosiery, canned Spam, things like that. And a lot of times it was not just for eating, but a lot of times it was for selling on the black market in Japan. So they had a special rate, a care package rate, it was ten kilos or twenty-two pounds. So we used to go around the local grocery store and get wine boxes from Mautis and the other Greek guy that had a store. And we would, it was just right to make these packages, and they cut 'em down in weight, and would wrap 'em. At first, I used to put it on my bicycle and take it, but they got so many of 'em that we used to get help from Shig Wakabayashi and Frank Yasui to help carry the care packages to the post office, then we would ship 'em off from there.

VO: So that, before the war, the store was called Teikoku.

YM: Right.

VO: Which... what's the meaning?

YM: Then when we came back and my dad tried to use the name and they wouldn't allow him to use it because the name meant "Imperial." So he decided, he asked his friend in Japan if he could borrow his name, and it was Anzen. They had an automotive distributorship and parts company in Japan, so we used the name Anzen thereon.

VO: And what does that mean?

YM: "Safety." [Laughs] Just like Safeway. An interesting part of this is that my dad was very skeptical of the government. He didn't want them to take the business again, so Haru Ninomiya volunteered to sign as the owner of the store.

VO: Because she's American-born.

YM: Yeah, American-born and everything. And so she did that ten years for them. It's hard to believe that she volunteered to do that so long.

VO: So what did she do for the business? What did she do for the business?

YM: Nothing, just signed checks.

VO: That's something.

YM: I don't know if my dad paid her, but I don't think he did. But we were... well, we were getting rice from California by truck, not truck, train, and then by barge. The soy sauce came from California, and the rice crackers at that time came from Denver, Colorado. Since then they've moved to Los Angeles, but the miso came from Salt Lake City. So you can imagine that everything we sold was made in the USA.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright (c) 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.