Densho Digital Repository - Takashi Moriuchi Interview

Densho Digital Repository
JACL Philadelphia Oral History Collection
Title: Takashi Moriuchi Interview
Narrator: Takashi Moriuchi
Interviewer: Herbert J. Horikawa
Location: Medford, New Jersey
Date: October 23, 1994
Densho ID: ddr-phljacl-1-18

[Correct spelling of certain names, words and terms used in this interview have not been verified.]

<Begin Segment 1>

HH: Today is October 23rd, and we're recording this interview today from Medford Lees, New Jersey. May I have your full name?

TM: Takashi Moriuchi.

HH: And your wife's full name?

TM: Yuriko Moriuchi.

HH: Okay. And how many siblings do you have, brothers and sisters do you have?

TM: None.

HH: None, you're an only child?

TM: Yes.

HH: As we say in Japan, "hitoriko."

TM: Uh-huh. [Laughs]

HH: And where were you born?

TM: Livingston, California.

HH: And when were you born?

TM: 1919. August 31, 1919.

HH: And today that would make you how old?

TM: Seventy-five.

HH: Seventy-five years old?

TM: Uh-huh.

HH: In Livingston, New Jersey. Excuse me, Livingston, California. Was there something unique about Livingston in the area in which you grew up?

TM: Yeah. Livingston was created, a Japanese colony, created by the vernacular publisher Nichi Bei, man by the name of Abiko, and it was a Christian colony. Is that what you wanted?

HH: Yes. And what kind of farm was that in Livingston?

TM: Well, most of the people were involved with tree fruits or vines. But our particular family, we were in vegetables.

HH: Vegetables?

TM: Uh-huh.

HH: How many acres did you have there?

TM: Well, I guess we owned thirty-seven acres, but we farmed additional rented ground.

HH: I see. And with the family that you had, where you were the only child, that was a lot of... I mean, I suspect that you were put to work rather early in life.

TM: Oh, yeah, very early. I had to make ofuro, that's number one, and I had to make the rice, but also they gave me a little pail so I could go out and pick with them.

HH: Do you remember going to school in that...

TM: Yeah.

HH: In Livingston?

TM: Livingston, yes.

HH: What was that like?

TM: What do you mean?

HH: Want was going to school like in that community? Were you with a lot of Japanese Americans there, were you the only one?

TM: Oh, yes. Our high school graduating class out of, I guess, a hundred and twenty or thereabouts, twenty-eight of them were Nisei.

HH: Nisei. And most of these Niseis were also from farming families, is that correct?

TM: Yes, all of them.

HH: All of them.

<Begin Segment 2>

HH: When you finished high school, what did you do?

TM: Went to Berkeley. Graduated in '41.

HH: '41. And what did you study at Berkeley?

TM: Commerce.

HH: Commerce, but not agriculture.

TM: No. We knew how to grow the stuff. We always got screwed when we tried to sell the stuff. [Laughs]

HH: And so after you finished Berkeley, you went back and worked on the farm?

TM: Yes. I was farming when the evacuation happened.

HH: Okay. There were some, I think, circumstances that should be covered regarding evacuation and complications of closing the farm or moving on?

TM: Certainly it's not easy to shut down a farm. And we were told that unless we kept farming, we were committing sabotage. So we put our own money in, and were in the process of raising the crops. I evacuated June 13th. And cantaloupes, for instance, you start picking them July 4th, so we were pretty close to harvest. Not close to harvest, but at least we were getting towards that point when we evacuated. We also bought... do I want to talk a little bit about...

HH: Sure.

TM: We also bought all the eggplant plants from all of our neighboring Japanese farmers and planted 'em even to the day before I went to camp. And we had a Mexican that did the work of irrigating, cultivating and picking, packing. And my high school coach and Scoutmaster watched the Mexican. The eggplants were shipped to San Francisco, to LJ Hopkins company, with whom Father had had a long relationship. And then half the money Hopkins kept for us and half of it went to the Mexican family that was operating the farm. So we probably were the only, our eggplants probably were the only eggplants winding up in San Francisco market. So he got a good price for them. I actually have reports of what the eggplants sold for, I have it here in Medford Lees.

HH: It sounds like, the way you describe it, that arrangement worked out very well.

TM: Yeah. That particular arrangement worked out very well for us. In fact, it lifted the mortgage on the farm. Except that the rest of the farm, which was... see, we had some rented ground, too, so probably another fifty acres, which was in cantaloupes, and I think we had some garlic that year. But my coach, he said he didn't make any money. The year before, we sold cantaloupes for forty cents a crate and we'd pick 'em. I know that he got over four dollars for the cantaloupes, and he still told me he didn't make any money. Anyhow, that part of it, gone. But the one part that worked was the eggplants.

HH: Did you have a reasonable amount of time close up the farm? Even though you had to plant eggplants with a day left, but did they give you a good chunk of time to close up?

TM: No, you had one week.

HH: One week.

TM: Yeah. But before that, why, we were making plans. In fact, I helped Livingston, the grapes and the people that belonged to the Livingston Co-op, Kumiai, I helped them set up their setup so that a California land bank person was hired to run all the Livingston farms.

<Begin Segment 3>

HH: From Livingston, where did you go as far as the relocation center was concerned?

TM: Went to Merced Assembly Center and then to Amache, the camp in Colorado.

HH: How long did you stay in Amache?

TM: Well, the total of my stay, I guess I was in Merced about three months, and six months in Amache, and once I saw people plowing in the valley down below, I couldn't stay still. I had to go do something someplace, so eventually I even went to San Luis Valley in Colorado. But that's seven thousand feet up in the air, I got a bloody nose. I said, "That's no good." Anyhow, I wound up, I went to several places, but eventually wound up doing sharecropping in Fort Collins, Colorado.

HH: Yes. And how many seasons did you do that?

TM: One year, because I figured I don't have to do this. We didn't lose any money. Lots of people that left camp lost money. Fortunately, we didn't lose any money, but you don't do it just for exercise. And I had some of my friends from the camp come out and help. So we grew all kinds of crops there. The man that owned the farms was the Drayer pickle company, so that he was interested in seeing cucumbers growing. Now we grew celery, tomatoes, onions. You grow onions and root crops and carrots because you have the possibility of a hailstorm pretty good in Colorado. And if you have stuff above the ground, you're liable to lose your crop. So we grew some of these root crops, we had cabbage. Anyhow, in Colorado, you still have to carload just like you do in California. So I thought, well, I don't have to do this. If I was making money, well, that's something. But I wasn't making any money... well, not a great amount of money anyhow. So I figured, heck with this. And I always had an idea that many I ought to get closer to the markets. And that's probably what prompted me to come to the East Coast in the first place.

<Begin Segment 4>

HH: Talking about your sharecropping around Fort Collins, you used the term "we." How many people were involved in --

TM: Oh, gee, I don't know, about ten.

HH: Ten?

TM: Uh-huh.

HH: I see. And were you all from Amache?

TM: No.

HH: Who made up this group of ten people?

TM: Some from Amache, some from... what's the one in Utah?

HH: And these were all Japanese Americans?

TM: Yeah.

HH: At that point, you were still single?

TM: Yeah. And my father and mother joined me. My mother did the cooking. In fact, we lived in a motel for a while, while we built our own house to live in. Colorado, yeah. And then we didn't have any, another little side comment would be that we didn't have any ration book, so we were eating chicken all the time. Boy, you get tired of chicken, if that's all you got to eat.

HH: But that's because you grew your own, I mean, you raised your...

TM: No, no, you could buy chickens without ration books.

HH: Oh, I see. That wasn't rationed?

TM: No.

HH: I see, I thought that was rationed, too.

TM: No, no. But anything else, rationed, we had plenty of gasoline ration books because we were farming. But nothing to buy beef with, pork.

HH: Just chicken?

TM: Just chicken. You got sick and tired of it. [Laughs]

HH: You did that for one season?

TM: No, no, we got ration books eventually. So we weren't eating chicken all our lives there.

HH: How many years --

TM: One year.

HH: One year at Fort Collins?

TM: Yeah.

HH: And then that's when you decided to move? You were able to move east?

TM: Well, I went back into camp, because I wasn't quite sure what I was doing. And people were leaving camp at that time to investigate different farming possibilities and such. And I listened to everything that people had to say about the Midwest, and none of that sounded interesting to me. So I left there, went through Michigan, because Michigan has quite a viable vegetable industry. And then I came to Philadelphia and I went as far south as North Carolina to investigate the possibilities. But all the time I was doing that, I was always keeping my back to the wall because I didn't want somebody to slug me from behind. So even when I was doing that, I got picked up by the local police, the state police, and eventually Naval Intelligence. So I figured the heck with this, I'm gonna go back to the Philadelphia area where the Quakers are and see what's there. And that's how I got back up into this area.

<Begin Segment 5>

HH: As I understand, you did a variety of things when you first arrived in the Philadelphia area. What are some of the things that you did?

TM: I worked for Lou Barton and worked on a farm. Two seasons I worked for Lou Barton.

HH: I see. But you also started an insurance business, didn't you?

TM: A little bit, yeah. Well, that was serving as a life insurance agent to, life insurance agents have to go out at night, so it doesn't really work very well with farming. [Laughs]

HH: I see. So you worked in the New Jersey area on somebody else's farm?

TM: Lou Barton for two seasons. He's the man that started Medford Lees.

HH: I see.

TM: [Laughs] You know, he helped me. And then I worked for him for two years. You want me to rattle on? [Laughs]

HH: Yes, please.

TM: I worked for him for two seasons, and then he arranged an eight thousand dollar loan for me, and that's how I started farming. I bought a small farm on Church Road, that road right up here, and started farming. Joseph Haynes's company, right here in Medford, another Quaker tractor dealer, he was good enough to sell me a tractor that he could have sold to twenty-five other people, probably. But he sold me the tractor and that's how I got started. A little dinky tractor.

HH: How many acres did you have?

TM: We bought a hundred and, a little over a hundred acres that farm was probably 8 acres, and probably tillable. We grew tomatoes and strawberries, sweet corn.

<Begin Segment 6>

HH: At what point in your life did have, meet your wife and eventually get married?

TM: Well, that, I met her, even before we bought the farm, while I was still working for Lou... want to hear a funny story?

HH: Sure.

TM: [Laughs] I don't know if you remember in the Life magazine, where in the very center of the Life magazine there was a picture of a 442nd guy. One guy with no legs and another guy with no eyes, do you remember that one?

HH: Yes.

TM: Well, those two guys came to Philadelphia. And I don't know who arranged the reception, but the reception was held at the International House. At that time, it was on Walnut Street, I think. And they had a reception, really the reception was for those two guys. But I went, I showed up there, and when young people get together, you get a party going, right? And Yuri showed up there, and we were playing some kind of a game. And Yuri showed up there with a hat with a goofy feather on it, that's what did it.

HH: [Laughs] She was someone that you couldn't miss.

TM: Yeah, at that time. I don't know whether she still has that hat or not. And then she disappeared. She went as a babysitter, I guess, for the president of Drexel, up into the Poconos, and I didn't know where the heck she disappeared to. After a while, she came back, and then I got to know her a little better. Went, oh yeah. We were picking peaches on the Barton Farm. And VJ Day occurred. And so at that point, it was a vacation, everybody quit working. And that day I decided to go find Yuri, and I went all the way down to Essington. And you know, when you don't know how you're going to get there, I was following, I think, Woodland Avenue or something. That thing wound up with nothing but just a streetcar going down. So then I eventually got down to Essington, and the first time I ever went to see her, no restaurants were open. So I wound up down there, and her mother fed me. And she fed me... well, so she and watermelons, I don't know what I got that day, but she liked osushi, she liked watermelons. So I was sure that I was going to get osushi and watermelon. She was living there. It was one of those government housing projects.

HH: How long did you court before you eventually...

TM: Well, we got married in '46. And would be forty-eight years and twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Forty-eight years and four days now.

HH: Wow. You just celebrated your anniversary a couple days ago.

TM: Yeah. We went out to Hanover and we didn't know where we were going, but we wound up in Hanover and meal and family, they joined us for... we called and said, "Hey, how about having dinner with us?" We get there and then we had dinner, and they paid for it. We invited them and they paid for it, how about that? And Grace and Hiroshi were trying to get married at the same time, except, you know, Grace is much more, she gets are way a lot more than I do. So they got married one month ahead of us. And Isamu came back about that time, and Isamu started making some noises, and Mom said, "No, no. No more weddings this year." [Laughs]

<Begin Segment 7>

HH: One of the things that I think needs to be talked about would be the way in which you developed your farm into what it is today. The phenomenal growth over a short period of time, can you describe how that went?

TM: Well, I tried vegetable farming and I worked so doggone hard that I lost my health. And I thought, you know, you can't run a small vegetable farm here like you did in California, because you can't keep people year-round. So from the statistics, I knew that the apple tree population was going down, of course, human population was going up. And if economics means anything, why, those two lines ought to cross. So I bought a apple farm in Cherry Hill, and I was able to buy it from Charlie Collins, another Quaker, because Mrs. Collins wanted Charlie to slow down a little bit. And here I was, I was wanting to do more. So we were able to purchase that farm, hundred and forty-four acres, I think I paid twenty-seven thousand something for it. And we argued about the last four hundred bucks, and actually when we went to sign the papers, Jonathan Powell of the Burlington County Trust said, I guess I had negotiated four percent interest. And he said, "No, no, no, that's not gonna happen." We're gonna charge whatever it was that he thought I ought to pay, and he probably was right. But I said, "I got a deal. If you're not going to do it, I'm not going to do it," and I started to walk out. We got the deal. [Laughs]

HH: So this was a farm that really had an orchard...

TM: Yeah, it had seventy acres of orchards on it.

HH: Apples?

TM: Yeah.

HH: And then so you didn't keep that?

TM: Well, I had that from 1946... let's see, '44, '45, '46, '47, '48. I bought it in '48, and I kept that thing until about '66, something like that. Portions of it. So from... I had the base to work from, and then I rented lots of ground. And I think have to add that I have to thank Yuri for her willingness to continue to live on a rambleshack house where the wind even blew through the house. Cooking on a kerosene stove, heating with potbelly stoves, while Hiroshi and people like him, they were buying new homes, and here I was buying tractors. And I'd buy a tractor and then I'd get extra cultivating capacity, so I'd go rent a piece of ground. Then I wouldn't have enough, so I'd buy another tractor, this went on for a while. Anyhow, that's part of the story.

HH: But then during that time, although you may have lived in a house, your farm kept growing.

TM: Oh, yeah, yeah. We built cold storages on the farm.

HH: Which is a story of its own. That's the major cold storage area facility in this area, isn't it?

TM: No, no. At that time, there was a large cold storage in Moorestown, but Charlie Collins owned half of it. There's a lot more story than that. But I had to build a small storage shed on the farm, otherwise you can't haul the stuff from there into town and back and forth. So we built one cold storage, eventually built another cold storage, and built the third cold storage. I got the steel out of a shoe store that was being torn down on Route 70, where 70 and 38 come together, well, I bought a shoe store and used the steel to build that cold storage. Then when we moved to Moorestown, I tore that building down and moved that steel again to build cold storage in Moorestown.

HH: So you own now three cold storage units?

TM: Well, now, the cold storages there in Cherry Hill, they're gone, because that's an industrial park now. But yeah, we have three cold storages over in Moorestown, they're really modern cold storages.

HH: The food that's in the cold storage isn't just your food, you bring in food for the whole area.

TM: No, no. Well, things have changed since I was farming full tilt. The time we were farming full tilt, we, I guess we used to store fifty, sixty thousand boxes of apples besides all we sold before storage season. And we used to grow about that many boxes of peaches. So we were a major fruit grower when I finally quit. But the reason why we quit, one of the reasons why we quit is because the tax laws changed in '48. That was the last year that you could change, you could collapse a small corporation and pay one capital gains tax, so we decided to do that. That's '48, huh? No, it can't be. '68. '68? Well, anyhow, I'm getting my dates correct here. But we had to, we decided to collapse the corporation and actually deed all the lands to our kids. So we had a thousand acres at our maximum, but we collapsed the corporation. I owed two million bucks, and in the collapsing process, I was gonna have to pay a million and three quarters in income tax, so I needed four million. So we sold two hundred acres. [Laughs]

HH: It takes a certain amount of vision to do the things that you've done. Is there any way of describing how or what process you used to develop the kind of vision that you had to do the things that you've accomplished in business and farming?

TM: Well, in the beginning, when we didn't have the orchards, or rather small orchards, we were still farming all kinds of vegetables. And we'd start the reasons with rhubarb and wind up with fall apples. And I was selling the stuff to the chain stores as much as I could. And in the middle of the season, I'd have three different groups harvesting three different crops and selling three different crops to the chain stores, and that gets to be a real hassle, and I realized that my health was starting to fail. So I conferred with Yuri and said, "I think we better settle on certain crops." We settled on apples and peaches because people can't get into that business readily, because it takes ten years for the apples and five, six years for peaches to mature.

HH: The trees.

TM: Yeah. So that's one of the reasons why we got into those principal crops. And the returns on those crops, when they hit, they really hit. I guess when we first bought the farm in Cherry Hill, we grew a lot of strawberries, I think we ought to back up to there. I was probably the largest strawberry grower in the state of New Jersey, and I supplied American stores consistently, A&P and Penn Fruit occasionally. And I got a reputation on the Philadelphia market as the best strawberry grower around. They still talk about it, even now. Because you run into some of these guys on the market and they'll say, "Yeah, Andy Lombardo used to talk about you." And Andy's kid, son is on the market now, I guess Andy's told him, Andy's still alive, I think.

<Begin Segment 8>

HH: Some of the things that we didn't cover so far is the number of children you have. How many children do you have?

TM: Four.

HH: Four. And they, with respect to gender, are they all males, females?

TM: No. We had a boy and then we had a girl. I said, "Yuri, this is working pretty good." Said, "We need another boy," and so we had a girl, then we said, well, we can't have three girls in a row, and we did. Now that last one, she says, "I'm sure glad you didn't quit." [Laughs]

HH: Of your four children then, some of them were directly involved...

TM: Fred, we gave the business to Fred. And we gave him the major part of the real estate, and we gave one of the farms to the three girls. And our middle daughter, Kiyo, went to the University of California at Berkeley -- no, Davis, and got a master's in integrated pest management. So she's helping Fred to some extent. But, see, Fred also has an MBA. Kiyo has a master's, and Chiyo has an MBA from Columbia. That was a funny one, you know. She got a full scholarship to Columbia, and I've never been able to figure out why the heck she got a full scholarship to Columbia.

HH: Tak, you've lived a full life. Were there other things that you would want to have included in your life besides the things that you did include?

TM: Oh, yeah. I've had an interesting life. One of the changes we made in our harvesting process of apples, we shifted from field crates. At one time I had seventy thousand of those doggone, seventy thousand of those boxes. We bought 'em anywhere from seventy-five cents to a dollar and a half apiece, I guess. But we changed, the industry changed from field crate type harvesting and basket type harvesting to bulk bins. And when you got bulk bins, you can't pick those doggone things up, you got a thousand pounds of fruit in 'em. So then I went to the Ford dealership in Mount Holly. I knew they had a forklift there, so I went there to buy the thing, and the distributor was closing that place down. And he says, "How are you going to pay for this?" I said, "You deliver it, I'll give you a check." And then I said, "You're closing them down, how do I get parts now?" Said, "Well, tractor dealership's open." Eventually I owned a Ford tractor dealership.

HH: That's a way of solving the problem.

TM: Hmm?

HH: That's a way of...

TM: No. You know, that ran as a separate business altogether. And none of the kids seemed to be interested in it, so eventually I guess I was involved in that fifteen or twenty years, and I sold it. It's still operating down here on Route 70 at 73.

<Begin Segment 9>

HH: Oh, that reminds me. You started a bank, too?

TM: Yeah. [Laughs] No, I didn't start it all by myself, but I had a ten percent interest in it. And I was organizing director for Moorestown First National Bank. And then I eventually went on as a dealer for, or rather as a board member of the First National Bank of South Jersey, which was a larger bank. That eventually sold to Fidelity. And by then, I was on the bank, the Farm Credit Bank board, Springfield Bank. And so they said, "You can't be on a commercial bank board." And I said, "If you had told me that, I wouldn't have taken the position in the first place." But anyhow, that's one of the things I've done. I've been involved in a lot of different things, and it's been...

HH: And you're meeting, too.

TM: Huh?

HH: You were on the board of your school.

TM: I'm still. I'm a board member emeritus. Fred is actually the clerk of the trustees.

HH: I see.

TM: And I think he took on more than he should. [Laughs]

HH: Did you learn from somebody else?

TM: No. I didn't take on a longtime thing, almost all the buildings that are built around Moorestown from the time our kids started to go to school, all those buildings, I was chairman of Building [inaudible]. So we built a lot of buildings around Moorestown, then we built this thing here. Medford Lees, I was involved in building this thing. So at the time we were building Medford Lees in 1970, '71, I guess when we started, I had a lousy apple crop. So I was able to start to undertake this thing. And then as I turned out, I spent more time here than I did farming for about three or four years. Really, this thing here took a lot of work.

HH: Did you know at that time that you were going to become a resident here?

TM: I probably did, yeah. In fact, the reason why this Bridlington exists here is because there was a railroad track right over here. In fact, we got pictures of the train running down that railroad track when we first started here. And we figured that that was pretty good buffer for this particular ground right here. And as the single family homes, as they are being built over there, we thought that you can't buy the whole world. We thought it'd be okay, then we found out someplace along the line, about six years ago, now seven years ago, we found out that they were gonna build two hundred and fifty condominiums here. And I thought to myself, five hundred kids? Old people don't want kids. It's a funny thing, the old people just say, "We've done our share with kids, leave them the heck out of our hair." So anyhow, I could imagine kids wandering over. We became aware, I think Sam Decue indicated that we could buy this ground, so we bought it. And you know, I'm kind of in the real estate business if you own farms and buying 'em and selling 'em. So we paid a million dollars for just under a hundred acres here. And then after we bought it, says, "Now what do we do with it?" That's when we built Bridlington. Said, well, we can do this and still not overload our medical facilities. And then one year later, I sold the other half for a million bucks. So this land here was free almost. We've done a few things like that. [Laughs] In our personal lives, we've done a few things like that. This one here, all to the advantage of Medford Lees. I've got to make a pitch for Medford Lees, okay?

HH: Go ahead.

TM: Medford Lees, our budget is about fourteen million. We don't have any debt, and we got about twelve million bucks in the kitty to help people as help is needed. And we have not gone out to try to raise these funds, but people keep leaving us money. Either leaving us money or even while they're alive, they give us money. And almost every board meeting, almost every board meeting, somebody's giving us money. And we've got to accept it. You do have to sign a piece of paper saying we'll take it.

HH: I see. Well, thank you very much. This was, your life story and things that you've done have really...

TM: Well, I've been, the other thing is that I've been involved in a lot of things, agricultural circles in the state. So I've gotten lots of recognition for doing that kind of thing. I've got all kinds of plaques. Well, the other thing, you know I got a kunsho, you know that, don't you?

HH: Yes. Would you describe that?

TM: Kunsho is a decoration from the emperor of Japan. And I've been very fortunate to be awarded that, which I certainly expect, but kind of nice to have a...

HH: Was this very specific or was it kind of a generation citation that went with it? Was it your accomplishment at the agriculture?

TM: No, I don't think... well, I don't know. We get Japanese people coming here to study Medford Lees.

HH: I see.

TM: And that may be part of it. And of course I've been involved in the public life around, not just Nisei, but the general state of New Jersey, some of that, I guess was involved.

HH: You've done a lot since...

TM: Yeah, I've had an interesting life. If I died now, I wouldn't care. [Laughs]

HH: Since Livingston and California, a lot has changed.

TM: Yeah, not very many people have developed and owned a fruit farm in one generation. It's usually more than a one-generation business. Anyhow, it's been a lot of fun.

HH: Thank you very much.

TM: Okay.