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LT: You have six brothers and sisters?

GT: At that time... see, I get them mixed up with my present family. No, there were seven of us. Yeah, there were seven of us kids.

LT: Okay. And where were you in the family mix?

GT: I was one, two... a third one. Yeah, the third one.

LT: Were there special family times that you remember with your six brothers and sisters and your mother and your father as you were growing up?

GT: I do remember one thing. There is one thing that entertained Dad. He liked... it was my sister, my older sister Toshiko, she was a little younger than I, I mean, she was older than I. I was about a year younger, but at that time, seemed like the girls matured faster, they got bigger quicker. My dad's entertainment at night, when there wasn't anything else going, he wanted us to wrestle. That's it, he would call that wrestling. And my sister and I would always be the ones in the main entertainment. And my sister, just a year older than I was, much bigger at that time, and I ended up, it seemed like I always ended up crying. [Laughs] And she didn't want to do that, but he insisted that we do that for entertainment, so he'd have a little entertainment. That's what he called entertainment. So you can kind of figure where his mind was going, kind of military style again.

LT: So you had a large family, two parents and seven children. Where did you live? What do you remember about your home?

GT: The first thing that I can remember is that he built this market for retail, and he added on, just, there was no planning, just added on a shed here or a shed there as the kids, you know, as they kept getting born, he'd add another. But there was no, there was no system, so he'd just add a shed here and shed here to the back of that market, and that's where we lived. And somehow there was enough room for all of us, but I do know there was not much planning in there because I knew the roof leaked, every rain that house would leak all over. Very poor planning, but in those days there was no architect or anything like that. He just added on. And there was no building code at the time, so you could build it as you wish. There was no system at all, it was just a shack out there. One just added on to another just to make room for the kids. I do know that as he added on, I don't know what kind of wood he used, but floors, some of that stuff rotted out. And just in no time that all those floors were so bad of material that they would rot out, and we could never replace them because we didn't have enough money to replace those wood floors, so a lot of times we had dirt floors that were part of the house. And I can't even remember putting enough money together to make regular floors out of them because he didn't have the money to do it. So we had, the house had wood floor, dirt floor, that was about the way it was.

LT: Did you share a bedroom with your brothers?

GT: Oh, I think we were all shoved into one bedroom, one or two. It seemed like there was beds everywhere. I'm sure we shared a room, but I don't know what order it was, but we were really jammed together.

LT: What about bathrooms?

GT: The bathroom, okay, we had the old fashioned Nihonburo, they call it, I believe. Either would be made out of the tin on the sides, but we had the wood flooring because there was heat under, wood heat underneath the stove, I mean, under the bathtub to keep it warm. And you had to have something wood to sit on, otherwise you'd sit right on metal and it was too hot, so you'd have wood floors in the bathtub, you sit on that. Yeah, that's the way it went because they heated the water with wood stove underneath, and it seemed like they really did believe in baths. I know they used to have baths every night, but that was a chore to keep that water hot. It isn't like today's day, turn the tap on, hot water. But those days you had to earn that water. You had to have the wood, it's the wood underneath there every night to keep that water hot. But you also had to have that plank underneath there, so that's all you sat on.

LT: What about toilets?

GT: Well, that was really something. We had a... well, I guess we had a twin, we had a two-seater out in the back, but that was, these were all outdoor toilets. We'd dig a hole out there, and put, usually the families ended up with one, but we were elaborate, we had two toilets out there side by side. And that was bad, too, because at nighttime, you try to find your way out there and it was a bad deal. But worse yet, I can remember to this day that it was infested with rats, and that was a miserable sight to see those big rats running in and around those toilets, especially at night. You didn't know if you're going to step on one or what. But as I can remember, nobody was ever bitten. Boy, we sure did put up with the rats. We had that for amusement, too, we used to shoot 'em from the house there. It must have been like, oh, maybe thirty, forty feet away, maybe fifty feet. We used to shoot the rats with a .22 gun, and we called that our sport. It's amazing we didn't kill each other because it was crazy. [Laughs]

LT: And your house was connected to your market?

GT: Yes, that's right. You could open the door and you're in the market, and you'd close the door and you're back in your home there, so that's the way it was. But it was a pretty rough go at that time.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.