Peggy Takahashi | Interview 1 | January 13, 2022

FARRELL: Okay, this is Shanna Farrell with Peggy Takahashi on Thursday, January 13, 2022. This is our first interview session for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project and we are speaking over Zoom. Peggy can you start by telling me where and when you were born and a little bit about your early life?

TAKAHASHI: I was born in San Fernando, California. It's an unincorporated city in Los Angeles County. I was born on March 16, 1959. I'm an only child. I grew up next to my grandparents' house in a tiny, tiny house; it must have been maybe thirty feet by twenty. I slept in 00:01:00my parents' bedroom because there wasn't any space; it was super tiny. We had a backyard and we had a humongous dog back there that was my best friend. My parents farmed, my uncles and grandparents farmed, it was a truck farming business, cabbages primarily. Some of my earliest memories of growing up was they started early in the morning and [my parents] would dress me in the dark, get me out of my pajamas, and I'd go into a little -- I think essentially it was an orange crate with a blanket, and they throw in a Tupperware with my breakfast in it. They'd strap the box with me in it on to a wagon that they we used, the tractor would pull this wagon, and they would cut cabbages, I literally woke up with cabbages flying 00:02:00over my head. Until I started school, I was just going to the fields every day with my parents and my uncles and my grandparents.

FARRELL: That's quite a visceral first memory with cabbages flying over your head.

TAKAHASHI: That and trying to feed the dog -- Jumbo was the dog's name -- mud pies, [laughter] which she was very patient about, so very tactful in rejecting.

FARRELL: Do you have memories of the neighborhood in San Fernando where you grew up?

[break in video]

FARRELL: Okay, we're back.

TAKAHASHI: So, the question about the neighborhood. I grew 00:03:00up in a -- primarily it was -- San Fernando which was and still, continues to be primarily a Mexican barrio and my dad grew up there. My dad was more comfortable speaking Spanish than Japanese. He preferred Mexican food to Japanese food. However, and to my great shame, my grandparents and my mom wouldn't let me play with the neighborhood kids; I mean I wish I could have. They said I would get lice because it was such a poor neighborhood. My dad grew up playing with these kids, right, and we had neighbors, and he was friendly with them, but I was pretty much isolated as a kid, as a small child until I started kindergarten, unfortunate. It really is unfortunate because I know that when I was walking to school and 00:04:00stuff, I felt eyes on me. I know that neighbors would watch to make sure I was okay, and I never felt unsafe, but for whatever reason, I wasn't allowed to play with the neighborhood kids. As I grew older, I became more embarrassed about how I was growing up. I slept in my parents' bedroom, the house was so tiny, so it wasn't like I could feel comfortable inviting my friends over. The Japanese tradition was that you can't go over to somebody's house because you can't reciprocate. I had a stilted childhood in that I wasn't able to play with other little kids.

FARRELL: Did you grow up learning Spanish at all since it was around you?

TAKAHASHI: No, I grew up where only Japanese was spoken at home, my first language is Japanese.

FARRELL: Okay, okay.

TAKAHASHI: My 00:05:00grandmother never learned to speak English except very rudimentary English, and she kind of forbade English being spoken in the home. Now I'm grateful for that because I can speak Japanese without an American accent, I can "pass." My vocabulary has gone downhill quite a bit, but if I am just speaking regular kitchen Japanese, people can't tell I'm American. It's because my mother who is first generation who is from Japan only spoke to me in Japanese until I started kindergarten. When I started kindergarten, I knew a few phrases -- "thank you," "please," "I don't feel well," and "I need to go to the bathroom," that's it.

FARRELL: Yeah, just the basic things to get by. Can you tell me a little bit about your mother, her name, and some of your early memories of 00:06:00 her?

TAKAHASHI: My mom was Itsu, her maiden name is Tomita, and she grew up in Osaka, Japan. She first grew up in the center of Osaka. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a coal merchant there, and from all accounts, they were a very prosperous family. She was the youngest of I think nine children, and all of her siblings went to college except for her. [Several of her sisters went to Doshisha University in Kyoto. My mom was born in 1917. [Her mother died when she was about twelve years old,] and when she came to be college age was when the Depression hit. They [her siblings] all went to Doshisha. They went to very good schools, but she never got to go to college. She went to a fairly prestigious all-girls high school and graduated from there and that's what got her jobs because she 00:07:00came from a good family. She got a job in a bank and calculating interests on an abacus. She was a whiz on the abacus, and that's what she did when she graduated from high school and helped support the family, [and] didn't go to college. [My grandfather had] a series of mistresses. Mom ended up living with that mistress for a while and had some hard times I think.

FARRELL: Do you have a sense of how the Depression impacted her family aside from her not being able to attend university?

TAKAHASHI: I don't know because as the youngest, everyone else had left. 00:08:00The next in line was her brother who was six or seven years older than her and so she was really the youngest. I think she was an "oops" kind of baby at the end after having eight kids, so I don't have any stories because I met my uncle when I was four years old and then he passed away. I'm close with his kids, my cousins, but that's about it. I know there were some hardships. The biggest hardship was during the war, I think.

FARRELL: At one point her family lived in the city until a typhoon flooded the family house and then they made it to the suburbs. Do you have any knowledge of that experience?

TAKAHASHI: They had to pull up stakes; everything was destroyed. I remember my mom saying that the water came up to the second-story window and 00:09:00they were up there, and pictures and all of whatever they had was just destroyed. They moved to a little town, which at that time was really the boonies, called Ikeda, and even when I went there in the '60s and in the '70s, Ikeda was kind of the end of the train line. Now it's a real suburb of Osaka because it's literally only a thirty-minute train ride on the express right into the center of the city, but then it was still considered the boonies. That's where they moved.

FARRELL: Do you know how old she was when that happened?

TAKAHASHI: No, my recollection is that she might have been in high school, so somewhere before the Depression but somewhere in that 00:10:00range. [This was the 1934 Muroto typhoon.] She's born in 1917, so maybe she was [seventeen] when that happened.

FARRELL: When we had talked previous to this interview, you had mentioned that she learned English. She took lessons and also had a fondness for American film. Can you tell me a little more about that?

TAKAHASHI: She loved American movies and she liked to learn, so after she graduated from high school, she'd be working. She said she worked at the bank and it was a fairly routine, 9:00-to-5:00 job for a woman, and so she would take lessons before the war -- English lessons -- and then cooking lessons. She made friends and did what young women do, but she always wanted to learn something. My cousin came 00:11:00along much closer -- it was after the war because before the war in the 1930s, anything American became kind of verboten, and it was just like you can't do that. Somewhere in there, she couldn't take English lessons anymore, no more American movies. But then after the war ended, she worked for the noncommissioned officers' club and American movies started coming back in. She'd take my cousin, who was like seven or eight, starting about that age, to movie houses at night because she didn't want to go alone. Because she didn't want to go alone and having a kid there with her, she felt kind of protected from creepy guys. It's weird. A woman going to a movie alone is just asking [for trouble] -- because I did that once not knowing and it was very weird in Japan. She would take 00:12:00him and that's where she really -- she liked musicals, all these old black-and-white movies, so she saw those and she must have been -- let's see it was in the late '40s after the war ended, so she would've been somewhere in her twenties? No, no, no, thirties -- she would've been in her thirties, right.

FARRELL: What was her job for the NCO club?

TAKAHASHI: She started working as their librarian, checking out books and then as she showed that she was fairly competent, she started working as their bookkeeper. They kept adding tasks to her portfolio and so she started ordering [liquor for the bar]. She'd take inventory for the liquor and she'd do the ordering and 00:13:00so this is networking in the best sense of the word. Getz Bros., who used to be an import exporter in San Francisco, the representative would come and she would place the orders. After, when US forces left and the NCO club closed, the Getz Bros. offered her a job after the war. Because the US forces paid good wages, right, and because she spoke English, she was able to secure that job, get good wages, and she was one of the few people who was gainfully employed making real money. Even after the NCO club closed, she was working for an American company paying good wages and was pretty happy. She could take trips, she 00:14:00was very independent, she didn't need a guy. And then she realized, ha, "Maybe I want a kid."

FARRELL: So she had immigrated to the US in 1957, is that right?

TAKAHASHI: '57.

FARRELL: '57, okay. This is a little bit of time after the war had ended, and the camps were closed, but she's moving to San Francisco in a time where there still is discrimination.

TAKAHASHI: She moved to Los Angeles.

FARRELL: Oh, to Los Angeles, okay.

TAKAHASHI: That's where I grew up.

FARRELL: Okay. Do you know where in Los Angeles she moved to?

TAKAHASHI: Well, she moved to San Fernando.

FARRELL: Okay, she moved immediately there. okay.

TAKAHASHI: Her friend was my dad's cousin and word got out that he needed a wife. My mom was talking to her and said, "Well maybe I 00:15:00should push -- I'm in my thirties, I maybe want to have a kid," and there isn't anybody left after the war. You have to understand that Japan after World War II consisted of small boys, old men, and crippled people. There were slim pickings and so she decided, okay. She told her friend, maybe put those feelers out, "We'll see what happens." And then my grandmother and my dad went out to meet her and meet the family, make sure she was fine, good family, blah, blah, blah, and then she took the plunge.

FARRELL: Yeah, and before we get into your parents, I'd love to hear a little bit about your dad and some of your early memories of him.

TAKAHASHI: Dad was your 00:16:00typical Japanese man in that he left all child-rearing responsibilities to my mom. He didn't say much, he's fairly taciturn, he didn't participate much in parenting in that he was present, he was around. But there wasn't a whole lot of interaction when I was a little kid. He would take us on rides. My mom didn't drive so on some days, when we weren't busy, I'd get to go to the park or he'd drive us to a duck pond or something like that. But on a day-to-day basis, he was the benign kind of guy 00:17:00that was nice to me. I interacted with him, but there were certainly no hugs. I probably would've liked that but that wasn't part of his makeup to do things like that.

FARRELL: What's his name?

TAKAHASHI: Takeshi, T-A-K-E-S-H-I. My mom's name was Itsu, I-T-S-U. But my main source, my partner, was my grandfather who lived next door. I doted on him and I was the apple of his eye, so we'd go on adventures.

FARRELL: That's your paternal grandfather, right?

TAKAHASHI: Yes, that's right.

FARRELL: Okay. What are your memories of your paternal grandfather and also what was his name?

TAKAHASHI: Oh, his name was Kaoru, K-A-O-R-U, 00:18:00and earliest memories. You know, I'd have these vignettes of -- well, one really funny one was he broke his leg. He was climbing on a tree somewhere and I must have been three or four. He broke his leg falling off a ladder and he had crutches for a while, and I coveted those crutches like you wouldn't believe. I was like this big, and the crutches were this high, but they just fascinated me, the crutches, and so he would say "Okay." He'd put me up on a chair and say, "Okay, so this is how it feels like." I thought that was kind of neat. The other one was Halloween came along and he thought it would be fun to dress me up with an old coat of his and just put a hat and I would be a headless kind of ghoul. Everybody thought that was a riot and that was his idea, so things like that. He died when I was seven, so I don't remember too 00:19:00much, but all I know is I really, really miss him.

FARRELL: It sounds like he had a pretty good sense of humor then?

TAKAHASHI: Yes, he was pretty fun.

FARRELL: Yeah. I know that your father was the oldest of a number of siblings, I think it's seven or eight?

TAKAHASHI: Something like that.

FARRELL: Okay. Did you have a lot of aunts and uncles who also lived in San Fernando?

TAKAHASHI: When I was born, I think there was only one uncle that was still unmarried left. When my mom came from Japan, I think there might have been another uncle who's unmarried. Somewhere when I was really little or before I was born, that uncle got married. The two aunts had gotten married and were not living in the home anymore. There were three uncles and two 00:20:00aunts. One uncle lived in Seattle working for Boeing, and the two uncles remained local and the two aunts -- by local I mean they lived nearby -- and the two aunts also lived in the LA area. There was one child that was born who died before he was one year old.

FARRELL: Were there cousins around that you remember?

TAKAHASHI: Yes. There were cousins.

FARRELL: Did you see them a lot, or not really?

TAKAHASHI: Not really. Why didn't I? Oh well, let's see now. My aunt had gotten married and had two sons, but they were quite a bit older than me, they might have been seven or eight years older than me. They were in middle school or high school when I was like eight or 00:21:00nine. They lived in North Hollywood. Another aunt had a daughter who's pretty much my age and a son who's a little bit younger, but she lived in LA, which at that time was quite far away because the highways hadn't been built yet. It was quite a trip, so I didn't see them [except on holidays]. The other uncle who lived closer and gotten married, they had kids who were younger than me by about seven or eight years. So between the age difference and the distance, I didn't hang out too much with my cousins.

FARRELL: Okay, okay. Your dad grew up in a farming family and your grandfather was also part of that, can you tell me more about that? I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your father's family 00:22:00history and your grandfather. Your grandfather was first generation, is that right?

TAKAHASHI: Yes.

FARRELL: Okay.

TAKAHASHI: Yes.

FARRELL: Can you tell me if you know when he came to the US or how he came here?

TAKAHASHI: I don't know exactly when he came to the US. I know he was born in the 1800s sometime and that he came when he was young. Since my dad was born in 1918, I think my grandfather must have come somewhere in the 1910s? and then had my grandmother shipped over from Hiroshima and my grandfather came from Hiroshima. He started out as a houseboy, I was told that, and then realized as more and more Japanese started coming in the early 1900s that he could help 00:23:00them find jobs, and that's when he became a labor contractor for a while. The farming didn't come about until I think somewhere around war time, after war. It's not clear to me when the farming actually happened because him, my grandfather by himself without the sons would be very difficult to farm. For whatever reason, it wasn't until my parents -- when they started farming on their own, when they started hiring people. There was some weird family block that said "No, we can't hire people." I think a lot of Japanese farmers were like that they had sons, and the sons all participated in the farming business, whatever was grown, it could 00:24:00be chickens, it could be whatever. But there was a hesitation, and I'm not sure why that was. It could've been because of the racial issue that maybe people didn't want to work for [Japanese people] certainly that. There weren't as many -- I don't think -- Mexican, the kind of the laborers that would come across the border, I don't know.

I think he did the labor contracting for a while, for quite a while. The house, my grandparents' house which is fairly large was a boarding house for some time. There were rooms upstairs, there might have been enough room for like ten people, and my grandmother did a lot of the cooking. By the time my mom came along, that contracting business had ended because there was the war, there weren't Japanese people coming to this country at 00:25:00all. I think somewhere in there it's like shortly before the war is when they started doing the farming business because Japanese weren't coming to this country.

FARRELL: When they started the farming business before the war, was it truck farming and were they growing cabbages then as well?

TAKAHASHI: I think so, I think so. It was truck farming, and it was right near the Van Norman reservoir. It's all carpeted with houses now; it used to be orange groves and there was some acreage. The truck farming was something that for them was fairly stable. They were quite independent. I remember there would be always questions about rain. Rain was not good in the winter because it would 00:26:00split the cabbages. but I don't remember them growing [anything else]. At one point they used to also grow turnips, and I'm not sure where that was. I remember pulling, bunching turnips. My grandmother would be in the back, I would go in front. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, I pulled turnips and then put them in a little pile and she'd come and then she'd bunch them up.

FARRELL: Okay. [laughter]

TAKAHASHI: As a little kid, they never forced me to do anything. I'd get tired after a little while and wander off and do something else. [laughs]

FARRELL: Yeah. I can imagine. I mean, there's a lot to discover and to interact with when you're growing up on a farm.

TAKAHASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Prior to the war, I understand that your father's family leased land in Granada Hills?

TAKAHASHI: Yes.

FARRELL: When the war started, that area was sold. Is that 00:27:00 right?

TAKAHASHI: No, they continued farming after the war. The I-5 cuts across. Originally, they farmed west of the Van Norman reservoir in Granada Hills. It used to be orange orchards and there were some fields there. After, somewhere in the '50s, I think, that all became developed. That's when things started getting plowed under and houses started being built. There was another plot of land and I think it's still there, that was east of the Van Norman reservoir and east of I-5 just north of the Bendix. Bendix used to have a big factory there and there was a plot, it must have been ten acres or so, and they grew cabbages and they grew stuff 00:28:00there for a while. They moved in the '60s I think, maybe late '60s, to West Hills, which was then Canoga Park.

FARRELL: After the war, they came back to the same area, and your father went on to grow strawberries, is that right?

TAKAHASHI: Yes.

FARRELL: Okay.

TAKAHASHI: Primarily strawberries. Originally, they started growing them in that little plot near in Granada Hills, north of the Bendix factory. They had a stand -- I'm not sure how they did this -- they had a little stand because there was nothing out there by the Bendix factory. There weren't any homes. But we managed to get a little stand way out in Canoga Park and that's where there was housing, there was still land out 00:29:00there. The owner of the land was an old silent movie actor named Francis Lederer who, in order to keep the agricultural tax basis, he needed to have someone actually farm the land. He leased the land to my parents for very little money because he wanted to keep them there and I think he was very generous. He bought hundreds of acres in that area when he was popular, but when sound pictures started because he was a Czech actor, he had a very significant accent, and that finished his 00:30:00 career.

FARRELL: That's funny.

TAKAHASHI: I never met the man. He must have passed away somewhere in there. His wife also never raised [the rent] -- I mean honest to God, they charged us $500 a year to farm that land. It never went up.

FARRELL: Wow. So your parents had support after the war -- they weren't met with a lot of resistance in terms of resuming the business?

TAKAHASHI: No, I don't think so. I mean truck farming, you're not interfacing so much with the public. A lot of the guys who picked up the cabbages were also Asian in the produce business themselves, 00:31:00so it was reasonably safe I think.

FARRELL: Okay. If you're okay with it, want to hear a little bit about your father's side, their experience during the war with incarceration. Your father and his family were incarcerated at Manzanar when your father was a teenager. Can you tell me a little bit about his experience as you've heard about it or as far as you know?

TAKAHASHI: Because my grandfather had been a labor organizer, he disappeared for a few days after the war started. He was taken [in for questioning]. He was seen as a community person. First he disappeared for three or four days and then came back. There wasn't anything [the family would talk about]. All I know is that he 00:32:00disappeared and he was questioned. Then they had to go to Santa Anita Racetrack, that was where everybody was gathered, and they had bags. I still have one of the canvas bags. They could only take what they could put in these bags, canvas bags and suitcases. At that point, my dad would've been somewhere -- 1918, 1942 -- in his early twenties, right, early twenties, and the siblings would've been younger. He helped with getting everybody set and packed, go to Santa Anita. I have no idea how, my grandfather must have arranged somebody to watch the house, someone in the neighborhood to watch the house, and they didn't sell 00:33:00anything. I don't think there was anything to sell per se in terms of farm equipment so that's why I think they hadn't quite started the truck farming business. I'm not sure about that, but they didn't have to sell the house at least and then they went to Santa Anita and then they went to Manzanar.

Dad said that it was -- you know, the guy didn't talk very much, so it's really hard to -- but he didn't say bad things. He said it was kind of like going to summer camp, like going camping. As a young person, I don't think he understood what all there was to lose because he didn't have anything to lose. He was more like a kid, he didn't have a business, he didn't have anything to lose, he just said the kids hung out with each other, and I believe 00:34:00that as this dissolution of the family. It's unclear to me. He was on the baseball team. I have a picture of him somewhere, I still have it, next time, I'll bring it up. He was on the baseball team and he really liked playing baseball. This is super politically incorrect, I know, but I don't think he felt himself at Manzanar anyway that there was deprivation. He said the food wasn't very good; they tried to serve rice with peaches the first day they were there, like rice pudding. But he said it was windy. My daughter is like that, anyway. You know, you could be at Middlebury seventeen-below degrees, she doesn't really notice the conditions; it's not something to complain about. He never complained about it so much. I'm 00:35:00reading all the descriptions about the sandstorms, I've experienced the sandstorms, so I'm sure it must have been miserable, but he never complained about it per se. But then he didn't talk about it either. Tule Lake was a different thing.

FARRELL: Yeah, so he answered "no, no" the loyalty questionnaire and was subsequently sent to Tule Lake.

TAKAHASHI: Yes.

FARRELL: Can you tell me a little bit more about what you know about that experience for him?

TAKAHASHI: The loyalty question was administered to individuals and because family wanted to stay together, they would answer en masse [as a family]. For my grandparents, if they had answered yes to those questions, potentially they would be country -- less because they could not gain US citizenship, and if they 00:36:00forsake their Japanese citizenship, they potentially wouldn't have a country, so they had to answer "no, no." The kids, because they didn't want to be separated and at that point, some of the kids were minors, as a family, they answered "no, no" and that got them to Tule Lake. Tule Lake from what I've read was a place potentially for hostage exchange -- that these are people who would potentially be sent back to Japan in exchange for American POWs to be returned.

Conditions there were pretty bad. He wouldn't talk about it at all. Manzanar, he didn't seem that he was perturbed too much, but Tule Lake he just clammed 00:37:00up, he wouldn't talk. When I went to see the exhibition [Exclusion] over at the Presidio a few years ago, I saw how it looked much more like a prison than anything. One of these days I want to go up there, I haven't gone there, but he wouldn't talk about it, he just wouldn't.

FARRELL: Yeah, and I wonder -- not to speculate too much, but it's interesting having the experience of Manzanar compared to Tule Lake. Maybe that's why there wasn't a whole lot of complaining about Manzanar because Tule Lake was worse and so that's what stands out in your mind.

TAKAHASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Just to clarify, did his younger siblings also answer "no, no" and they were all sent to Tule Lake?

TAKAHASHI: Yeah, because they were minors and who knows the younger siblings? Most of them might have been minors at some point, some of them were not, but I'm sure they all answered "no, no." One of the interesting 00:38:00things that when I was in high school and I was asking about it and finally pried out of him [Dad] that, oh -- I said, "Wasn't there a group?" I didn't even know they'd been sent to Tule Lake until I started asking. He said, "Don't tell people about that, don't tell people that." I said, "Well, why not?" He said, "Oh, they'll, treat you differently." They, meaning other members of the Japanese American community, would think less of you because your family answered "no, no" to those questions.

FARRELL: So he felt that stigma associated with being sent to Tule Lake?

TAKAHASHI: Yeah, right. He ended up not serving [as the oldest son, he had to take care of his parents] but my uncles did. After the war, they went and served in the military, one in the army, one in the air force, and the other uncle, I don't know, I think 00:39:00he served briefly. I don't know if he did or not, but he might have been, I'm not sure.

FARRELL: Did anyone ever talk to you about their motivations for joining the service?

TAKAHASHI: No, but I speculate. You know, it was speculation in my head, the story in my head is that they had to kind of make up and be seen as loyal.

FARRELL: Okay, yeah. Do you know how long they were at either the Santa Anita Racetrack or Manzanar or Tule Lake for?

TAKAHASHI: No, I don't know how long. I mean, all of that is a blur. I know that it was kind of like the standard. You gather there at Santa Anita by such and such a date and then they all got shipped off to Manzanar, right? I mean if I'm looked in the books I could probably tell you the dates of when all of these 00:40:00things happened and when those loyalty tests were administered but I don't know.

FARRELL: Okay, got it, okay. Do you know if he was at or if he and his family were at Tule Lake until the camps closed?

TAKAHASHI: Yes, I believe so. I was speaking with a friend of mine who said that they were in Poston I think at Arizona, Poston in Arizona, and they were able to leave early because they went and lived in Chicago for a while. If you wanted to leave early, you'd have to go east.

FARRELL: Some camps you could leave and move east, I think not all the camps, like I don't think they let Tule Lake people leave.

TAKAHASHI: Oh, no, no, Tule Lake, people were there, yeah. Gordon was telling me that they were able to leave about a year and a half or so early because they decided to go to 00:41:00 Chicago.

FARRELL: Yeah. It might be hard for you to tell, but what are your thoughts on the impact that that experience had on your father?

TAKAHASHI: The Tule Lake or the whole experience?

FARRELL: The whole camp experience and being uprooted.

TAKAHASHI: It's taken me a long time to figure out what motivated him to not buy a house. He would not buy a house. We lived in my grandparents' house that little teeny-weeny place long after we really needed to, and my mom wanted to move out. "Real estate prices are going to go down," he said. Finally, it dawned on me that he didn't want to buy any property because he thought 00:42:00it potentially could be taken away because he's heard so many people got their property taken away, people in Santa Monica. These are really prime real estate that had flower, nurseries, agriculture, they sold, they sold their land. I mean that was part of the motivation for interning people because they wanted that. They wanted access to that land and the land was in the name of the children, right, so I think he never wanted to buy. They didn't buy a house until they moved up here and they retired in 1989 and that was because my mom said, "You know what, you stay in San Fernando, I'm taking my half and moving up and be near my daughter, so your choice." He relented and they bought a house.

FARRELL: I mean, yeah, that's over forty years, it's a long 00:43:00time. That's interesting.

TAKAHASHI: I think it impacted him in ways that were kind of invisible, right? The visible parts of it came up when I asked him questions and he'd say, "I don't want to talk about it" or "What's past is past, can't be helped." All of these Japanese platitudes would come out and he would deflect. Sometimes he would say, "Well, it wasn't so bad at Manzanar, I got to play baseball, and it was like camp," and you asked about Tule Lake, he'd just clam up.

FARRELL: I would love to hear more about growing up when you started to learn about this history, about your family's history, and how much it was talked about, when you started to feel comfortable asking about it, what the conversation 00:44:00was like about this when you were growing up.

TAKAHASHI: I don't think there was conversation about this. It wasn't talked about at all. It was only in high school when my US history teacher, Allen Hogle, Dr. Hogle. In our US history books back in the 1970s, there was one -- literally one paragraph -- about the incarceration. Literally one paragraph. He, to his credit, he expounded on that. This is something of great interest to him historically and he just said this is an abomination of what America stands for. He was very, very vehement about it. In April there used to be a pilgrimage every year and he said, "Well, I'm curious, I want to go out there." He said, "Anybody 00:45:00interested?" Me and another couple of other students were, so he took us there. But that was the only reason and then I started asking questions.

There was also talk about redress in the community back then. It started bubbling up somewhere in the '70s the talk about redress. But high school kids, you don't really pay attention to stuff like that. It was only in that high school when I was a junior in high school when Doc Hogle introduced us more fully because I didn't know. I remember going home and saying, "Dad? Dad, were you put in camps?" That's when it happened because they didn't talk about it. It was something you didn't bring up.

FARRELL: When you first asked him that, he was honest and said, "Yes I was"?

TAKAHASHI: Yes. He was honest but then he said, "But that happened in the past. You don't need 00:46:00to dwell."

FARRELL: Yeah, yeah. Going back, I am curious to know if your mom ever talked to you about it, if your parents ever discussed it, if your mom would ever talk to you about it, considering she immigrated after in the '50s. It's after all this ended but also probably dealing with some trauma in Japan during the war as well. I'm just curious if that was ever discussed.

TAKAHASHI: My mom experienced the war in a very different way. In her head, there was no comparison in terms of being put in a camp versus being 00:47:00firebombed. She talked about living through it, being not too far outside of Osaka and seeing the airplanes go by and seeing the red glow in Osaka and not having anything to eat because they were in the city. As a result, I don't think she thought it was wrong what happened to American citizens. She thought the United States shouldn't have taken innocent people and incarcerated them, but in terms of the experiences, I think she felt that being in Japan was far worse an experience than being incarcerated during the war.

FARRELL: Is that something that you would talk about with her or would ask her 00:48:00 about?

TAKAHASHI: She would bring it up if I complained about food. [laughs] "Back in the day, you would be happy to have something like this to eat, so don't complain, you eat it, and you eat all of it." It was that kind of mentality of deprivation so, "Don't you complain to me about this kind of stuff." That's when it would come up, but on a day-to-day basis, no. My mom didn't dwell on things either. I mean when I would whine or complain about the way in which I was growing up, like I didn't have my room, I could see other kids having other things, and family life wasn't like I expected. You see The Donna Reed Show or you see Father Knows Best and you see this idealized family life, right? My family wasn't anything like 00:49:00that. I'd say, "What the heck, how come dad is like this and my dad is like that?" She'd say, "You knows what, this is what you have. Now you can the decide." She had this conversation [with me and], I had this conversation with my daughter to, it's at ten years old or eleven years old. You can decide to be a happy person or you can decide you're going to complain all the time. If you decide to be a happy person, you take what you have and make the most of it, you're grateful for what you have because there's always going to be things above you and there's always going to be things below you and you have to make do with what you have and be happy and don't complain.

FARRELL: Do you remember how old you were when she had that conversation with you?

TAKAHASHI: I was ten or eleven.

FARRELL: You were ten, okay.

TAKAHASHI: Somewhere in the ten or eleven phase when that's when you start dawning on things. Little 00:50:00kids they think everybody is the same when you're growing up, your experience is their experience and then when you're watching television and it starts dawning on you like, wait, wait a minute here.

FARRELL: Yeah. After she had that conversation with you, did you take that to heart or is that something that was a slow burn for you? How did that impact you?

TAKAHASHI: I took it to heart when she said it. It was like the lightbulb going off in my head, like I can't change any of this stuff. She just said, "You could decide to be a happy person or you could decide to be a grumpy, sad person, so you figure it out, but things aren't going to change. People are going to like you a lot better if you're a happy person."

FARRELL: I think that's really interesting and also such a great lesson to teach a kid, 00:51:00too, about you're responsible for your personal happiness, which is interesting perspective to have after having experienced all of this.

TAKAHASHI: Yeah, and she was always like that except what's really interesting is that growing up, she was super hard on me. Part of that was living next to my grandmother who was very critical. I had to be on my best behavior because if I wasn't, then it would be my mom's fault. My mom evidently turned into a very different person after she came to this country as a result of living next door to my grandmother and being under my grandmother's thumb for a long time. Because we went to Japan when I was four years old for a month or so, and my mom was really honest when I was later on in college, she said, "You know, I was at a crossroads 00:52:00then. My brother had said" -- my brother being my uncle -- "had said, 'If you want to stay here, you can, we have room for you.'" Being in Japan as a single mom would make life for me as her daughter very difficult because there were very few single moms or divorced moms. She decided after a month to go back to the US. She said, "I think your father was very relieved" because I think my dad knew that my mom was very unhappy.

When I went back again when I was eleven, her friends told me, took me aside and said, "This isn't your mom, your mom isn't like this. Your mom has gotten really harsh, so don't think this is your 00:53:00mom. America has changed her." As she got older and as my grandmother got older and weaker and my parents' business became very successful and they did very well -- and I'd like to talk about that -- is she started mellowing out. Somewhere in high school, college, and my grandmother died when I was in grad school, somewhere in '82 or something like that, she'd been gradually mellowing out. I'd come back from college and my mom would say something [kind] and I was like, oh, this is different. She started reverting back and even then she's pretty harsh, I mean [my husband] Alan was saying, "Well, I kind of get why you are the way you are." I 00:54:00said, " Alan, you don't understand, this is my mom mellowed out" [laughs] because she was just like, yeah, everything had to be just so.

FARRELL: That's really interesting. We kind of paused talking about your parents' marriage when we started talking about your dad's family background, but your mom moved here in 1957 and then did your parents meet pretty much immediately after that?

TAKAHASHI: No, no, they met in Japan.

FARRELL: They met in Japan? Okay, okay.

TAKAHASHI: It was a one-meeting deal.

FARRELL: I see, okay.

TAKAHASHI: Yeah, it was they went specifically, Grandmother and my dad went to Japan in 1956 specifically to meet my mom and her family and then the deal was struck then.

FARRELL: I see, okay. This probably would have been prior to 00:55:00 1957?

TAKAHASHI: Yes, 1956.

FARRELL: Okay, okay. When she moved here, that's when they got married pretty much immediately? Okay.

TAKAHASHI: They got married at the US Embassy in Tokyo.

FARRELL: Okay.

TAKAHASHI: They got married at the US Embassy in Tokyo, honeymooned in Hakone, I still have a black-and-white picture of their honeymoon picture and then they came here.

FARRELL: Okay, got it, okay.

TAKAHASHI: [I think my dad only went there once with my grandma. They met my mom's family in Osaka, got approval on both sides, and then my parents got married in Tokyo at the American Embassy.]

FARRELL: Okay. And then your mom had you when she was about forty-one?

TAKAHASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Okay. We were talking about your family's business and things like that. Let's see, after they came back [from Tule Lake], your father's family came back to the Los Angeles area, resumed farming, your parents got married sometime later. I would love to hear a little bit more 00:56:00about your family's business. We talked a little bit right at the beginning about how your early memories with the cabbages flying over your head. Your parents' business became successful and I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

TAKAHASHI: At that point, one uncle split off on his own to do his own kind of farming business, and eventually they started going to farmers' markets because farmers' markets were just taking off then. One uncle decided to split off and go into gardening -- like cleaning people's yards -- because farming is a hard, hard life. My dad and my mom on their own decided to continue this little stand, a little strawberry stand. They had already had the strawberry stand for a while but given the family taboo on hiring 00:57:00others, you couldn't grow very much.

When all the uncles left, they thought my parents were going to just collapse. But instead because my dad knew people in the farming business. He asked one of the guys, Mr. Felix Tapia, could he get some of his workers? Could he get introductions to people who came from Mexico. These are people who would come seasonally, cross the border, they would come in the early spring, and they'd go home again in the fall. My dad asked Mr. Tapia and they got into some business agreement when I was in middle school saying my dad would give him a share of the profits for helping him secure laborers. It was a good 00:58:00deal for Felix and when he wanted to do it another year, my dad -- mom said, "No, I'm not going to do that again, we already know who these guys are, they're going to come back and work for us, it's fine, we have the foot in the door." After a year or two maybe, they just hired three or four guys in the beginning to pick strawberries and help out with strawberries and then zucchini and then tomatoes, corn, melons, all sold at a little, literally twelve-by-twelve foot stand in the San Fernando Valley. That's what we did from the spring all the way through until the pumpkins, Halloween pumpkins were sold.

What my mom did was 00:59:00establish standards of excellence. Every single strawberry, she sorted like by size, by condition, by likeness, and she got this reputation for just selling the best, and she could command any price. Back in the '70s when you could buy strawberries for sixty-nine cents a basket, she was getting a $1.25. Oh yeah, because these were really good strawberries. My dad was in charge of production and my dad was not a businessman. He did not think about how much expense per acre or produced, right? He just wanted to grow the best. He fumigated the land, put chicken manure in the soil, worked it in, got drip 01:00:00irrigation going, lots of fertilizer. They were really good strawberries -- I haven't had anything as good since -- and so people would line up.

So eleven o'clock we opened, we started work early. We got up at 3:30 in the morning during the season. 3:30 in the morning, my mom insisted on having a hot breakfast. We'd leave the house at 4:30, we'd pick up the laborers at 5:00, and we'd start work at 5:30 because that's when light was just starting. In the San Fernando Valley, it gets pretty hot and so we'd have to do most of the picking by around noon or so. As we got more and more customers, Dad went out to Oxnard. I don't know how he meets these people, but he had a Japanese farmer, and they also had a little stand. Their 01:01:00strawberries were pretty good because even though they were in the truck farming business for strawberries, they had a little plots set aside for own their own little stand and picked ripe, and that made all the difference in the world if they picked the berries ripe. The ones that they shipped off, they were picked kind of firm. That's why you get the strawberries in the store they're crap because they're picked way [early]. First you've got the variety. These are varieties for shipping, and second, they picked underripe because they need to ship. I don't even buy strawberries [not even at Berkeley Bowl]; I go to down to Davis and get strawberries there [during the season].

He would grow these really good strawberries, found another source for getting really good strawberries, and then even those strawberries he would bring back from Oxnard or Camarillo. We would have our guys sort through them, so there wouldn't be any bad 01:02:00ones, there wouldn't be any underripe ones. All of those we sorted out and then Mom sold them. She did the same with tomatoes, same with zucchini, same with green beans. If she didn't like it, it wasn't going to get sold.

FARRELL: Yeah, I was going to ask because I know strawberry season is a little bit shorter, it's definitely not year-round; it's seasonal. The other types of things you were farming -- you mentioned early spring to about October, around pumpkin season -- but, yeah, if there are other things. Zucchinis, tomatoes, green beans you said, so that's kind of fall harvest.

TAKAHASHI: Tomatoes, green beans, yeah. Bush bean started in the spring but I remember picking hundreds of pounds of zucchini, and my dad was insistent. One day when I was little kid -- I must have been twelve or thirteen -- I didn't want to do anything there. He looked at me and he said, "What? You think you're better than they 01:03:00are?" "They" being the Mexican workers. "You get out there." Both my mom and I worked, and he did, too. It was not anything that we were too above to do the hard, menial work. Corn, we didn't have enough acreage to grow corn, so he would get that from Mr. Tapia. Felix Tapia had big corn fields, so he would get corn in Saugus and bring it back [in a trailer pulled by our pick-up truck]. Even the corn, we had the guys check and make sure there was no bugs and sorted out. Some people liked young corn, some people liked older corn, and that all gets sorted out. While he went to get corn, I would pick up a couple of the guys in my little Volkswagen bug, pick them up, and we 'd get started working. One guy would be picking tomatoes, I would be cutting 01:04:00zucchini, and then it was like that.

FARRELL: Given that there was such great quality control and started with your mother being a person of one, the quality assurance team. [laughter] What would you do with the produce that wouldn't make it to the market? Would you eat that at home or what would happen to it?

TAKAHASHI: Well, she would sell it as like seconds and so there were people who would buy it. If we had a whole bunch of them or -- Dad would plant too much zucchini for example. At that point in time there were still chicken farmers, there were still other farmers around, and we would take them, these number two zucchinis that we had way too much of, and we would do bartering. They'd give us some eggs and the chickens would eat the zucchini. It was doable then, that kind of 01:05:00 bartering.

FARRELL: Do you remember who the people were, what the demographics were of the customers that would be lining up for those strawberries or that zucchini?

TAKAHASHI: They were all white. This is in the west end of the San Fernando Valley and we were also across the street from medical center, so there was people who went to the medical center and the hospital. Doctors, nurses, people who were going to the medical offices, they came. Ninety-nine percent were white customers and every once in a while, my mom would get this comment of, "Well, how come you're charging $1.25 at this a basket and there's sixty-nine cents at the store?" She'd say, "Go to the store. You don't have [to buy them here.]" She was like the soup Nazi in 01:06:00Seinfeld. [laughs] She really was, "You don't like it, go. No one's making you be here." People would look at these customers and say, "You don't talk to Mary that way." [laughter] Her name, her American name was Mary, not Itsu; nobody could pronounce Itsu.

FARRELL: Okay that's interesting. She was known by Mary at the stand?

TAKAHASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Wow, yeah. Also, she can afford to say that to people because there's a line of others who will pay that much and understand the value of what you were producing.

TAKAHASHI: Yeah. The other flip side of that is that one summer, my dad grew melons and they looked good, they even smelled good. Usually when a melon smells good and looks good, they're sweet, but for whatever reason, you cut it open and it was not sweet. It was just not good at all, cut another one open, not good. We must have cut a 01:07:00dozen of these things and none of them tasted good. My mom and dad had a row. She said, "I'm not selling these." "What am I going to do? I just grew them, they're all there. " "I don't care, I'm not selling." Guess who won?

FARRELL: Your mom.

TAKAHASHI: He had to plow them all under. He said, "What am I going to do with them?" "I don't care what you do with them, I'm not selling them period."

FARRELL: Wow, that's so interesting. Do you remember what types of melons they were?

TAKAHASHI: They were just the regular muskmelons, they were just the regular muskmelons. He'd grown really good ones in the past so that was why we were like in disbelief why they didn't taste good, we have no idea. Maybe he said he overwatered, whatever, it didn't work so, yeah, it wasn't. He dry farmed tomatoes so that the tomatoes were super intense sweet. We had one customer who literally cried and said, "You know what? I haven't tasted tomatoes like this since we grew ours in the 01:08:00Midwest." He knew what he was doing.

FARRELL: Yeah, and I do feel like tomatoes and strawberries are two crops that have a very passionate following. When they're in season, I do the same thing. Do you have a sense of if your family was using their own seeds or if they were buying seed? How did that work?

TAKAHASHI: No, he bought seeds. He'd get the strawberry plants from Shasta. They were on dry ice. Before, the land would typically get fumigated in October and then this is all the bad things we're talking about here -- methyl bromide, all those carcinogens get pumped into the soil. It was tiny -- it was an only an acre of strawberries, just an acre, so it wasn't enough. Now, I don't think he could do what he was doing then 01:09:00with all the chemicals he was using to make really good strawberries. What was your question?

FARRELL: Oh, just about where he was getting his seeds from.

TAKAHASHI: Commercial. Oh yeah, and then the seeds he just bought commercial, zucchini seeds and cucumber seeds, they're nothing special.

FARRELL: Okay, and were you practicing crop rotation or anything like that, or just letting the fields be dormant between October and early spring?

TAKAHASHI: Well, there was some crop rotation. It was dormant in the wintertime for sure, but he would rotate between green beans and tomatoes because green beans fix nitrogen and tomatoes take up a lot of nitrogen, so he did that kind of stuff. But all the other stuff like in terms of weed control and in terms of pesticides, all the bad things, he did. All of the bad things, he did.

FARRELL: I mean also it's a different time, standards are different are different then too, 01:10:00 so.

TAKAHASHI: I know, I know, but I don't know what he would be doing right now if he were farming.

FARRELL: Considering he came from a family where he didn't grow up farming -- he's not like a fourth-generation farmer or anything like that -- do you have a sense of how he learned how to farm?

TAKAHASHI: That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know how he learned.

FARRELL: It's also possible using those methods because he's not a fourth-generation farmer that that's just how you did things -- not learning these traditional methods or things like that.

TAKAHASHI: But the other possibility is that some of the laborer, the guys that came from Japan did know how to farm, and they might have passed on. They might have started out with those guys, who knows?

FARRELL: Okay, that makes sense.

TAKAHASHI: This was back in the 1930s.

FARRELL: Yeah, 01:11:00and thank you for indulging me in all those agricultural questions. I think I mentioned I do a lot of food and environmental stuff, so I get very curious about that.

TAKAHASHI: Oh yeah.

FARRELL: In terms of your role, you were quite involved growing up. Would you be working while you were in school, or was it reserved for weekends and summers? How did you balance your time working on the farm as you were growing up?

TAKAHASHI: The farm, you might have gotten the impression that we lived on the farm. We did not live on the farm, we lived in San Fernando, and the farm was seventeen miles away in Canoga Park, so there was some boundary there. My parents would leave early in the morning and I was a latchkey kid. They wouldn't get back until 6:00, 6:30 pm. I had piano, I took piano lessons, and this is an Asian curse. I pretty 01:12:00much was a solo kid from about ten or eleven on. My grandmother lived next door, but I didn't go there. She didn't cook for us, she didn't offer me any snacks, I was pretty much on my own all the way from about middle school, from about ten or eleven on, and I realized why my mom didn't want [me around my grandmother], it took a while. I have a scar above my lip and it comes from my grandmother when I was a little kid. I must have been a year and a half, two, barely toddling, my mom had let me play at my grandmother's house next door. My grandma came to get my mom and that I had hurt myself and I had cut myself. My grandmother had let me play with the lid to a 01:13:00can, like you open the can. Who does that? My mom was livid. She said, "What if it had been her eye? It's bad enough it's on her face, but it could've been her eye, it could've been anything." I still have that scar and after that, my mom was like, "You do not go to your grandmother's house, you just don't. I don't trust her, don't go there." So that's the reason why.

I was pretty much a latchkey kid growing up. Weekends, every weekend, I went out to help, help whatever help was when I was a little kid. In high school, help meant that I would do what I was told, nothing more, it was really bad. I would hide underneath and read all the time and then what changed was one of my high school friends Laurie 01:14:00Thompson came out and man, oh man, she was right on. She was helping customers, "Hi, how are you, what can I do?" I watched her and my mom watched her and marveled, and my mom looked at me, looked at her, and said, "Okay, she's your age. [laughs] We know what she can do, you can do this too." So I started helping customers and that's where I really got being into sales and all the addition. Adding up, how many ears of corn, how many zucchini or tomatoes or whatever, all of the addition went on in my head. My mom would use the abacus.

FARRELL: Oh yeah, from her experience with that. Okay, so when you got older in high school, you were working at the farm stand. When were you helping full time during the summer when you weren't in 01:15:00school? Okay.

TAKAHASHI: Yeah, when I wasn't in school, even between [when I was in college]. It was really this one. I was at Cal getting my MBA and in between that first and second year. Back then internships, they weren't really talked about that much, but I came home between my first and second year of business school and my mom told one of the customers, "Oh, she's at Berkeley getting her MBA." The woman looked at her, looked at me and said, "What are you doing HERE? What are you doing here?" My mom heard that and she said, "What do you mean? She's learning important skills here."

FARRELL: And it's business.

TAKAHASHI: It's business, right? My mom bristled at that. [laughs] That's really funny.

FARRELL: I'm sure, yeah, yeah. [laughs] Well I guess before we get there, I'm interested in some of your sensory memories of the farm, the farm stand, the produce that you were 01:16:00growing. What are some of the smells or the sights that you remember from helping out on the family farm?

TAKAHASHI: The smells, the strawberries smells. Do you know that if you can't smell strawberries, they're not good? People would say they would drive by our stand and smell the strawberries, the fragrance and that they drive in. Well, that's one of the sensory things that you could smell ripe strawberries. The other thing is when you're out there early in the morning picking strawberries, you'd hear a bird song, robins and mockingbirds, and bird song all over, just wonderful to hear that. It's sunny outside, and, yeah, your back is achy and all that, but it was really nice to hear all the bird song. You don't hear that too much anymore, although yesterday at Livermore, at the Livermore Costco, first time in a long time I saw red-winged 01:17:00blackbirds. They used to be all over; now you don't see them as much.

The other sensory thing that you're going to laugh at is I remember once looking, catching a fleeting glimpse of my back, and there was this brown stripe right across my back, lower back. How, where did I get this brown stripe? That's the weirdest thing and I showed it to my dad. I said, "What do you think that is?" He started laughing. He said, "You know when you're picking strawberries, you're picking stuff, your T-shirt is riding up, and you're getting this weird [tans.]" [laughs] He said, "You earned your stripes." [laughs]

FARRELL: So you had a back farmer's tan.

TAKAHASHI: Yes, I got a back farmer's tan. I had one here [pointing to her arm] but they were kind of -- you know. Well that, you can explain that and I couldn't figure out what was going on with [the stripe on my back].

FARRELL: That's funny. [laughter]

TAKAHASHI: Isn't that 01:18:00 hilarious?

FARRELL: That's funny. [laughs] How long did your parents own the farm for and worked the land, ran the stand?

TAKAHASHI: To be honest, if my dad hadn't gone blind, they'd be still doing it. It was fun, it was. For them, it was fun. People loved them, we had repeat customers over many years. I still exchange Christmas cards with some of the customers. They were making money, people loved them. One of our customers was a film school professor at UCLA, and he sent a couple of his students over. They said, "Can we do a documentary?" My mom said, "No." We had LA Times reporters come and say, "We've heard about this little place, can we do a story?" "No." My mom was like, "We have plenty of customers, we want to stay small, we don't need any more extra publicity, we don't want any of that." She was pretty 01:19:00firm. But they loved doing what they were doing. They retired in their early seventies.

My mom had breast cancer diagnosed when she was sixty-nine in December. She found it herself, went straight to the doctor, she had the surgery on the twenty-sixth of December, had a full-on mastectomy, had her lymph nodes removed and biopsied didn't need radiation. She was back in early March farming; she was selling strawberries. She wasn't supposed to lift heavy things with that side, but then her arm got a little swollen as a result. But they didn't retire until they were seventy-one. My dad's eyesight started going because he had diabetes, so he had diabetic retinopathy. By the time, he was diagnosed with diabetes shortly after they were 01:20:00married, and the long-term ravages of diabetes. He didn't lose a limb because he exercised a lot, but it did a tremendous amount of vascular damage over the years.

FARRELL: Did he have to take insulin?

TAKAHASHI: He did early on and then he took an oral form of some sort of synthetic, but early on, my mom had to learn to give him injections.

FARRELL: Okay, wow, okay. It was after they had retired that they moved to San Francisco?

TAKAHASHI: They moved to Oakland, actually.

FARRELL: They moved to Oakland -- okay, okay. Continuing with the theme of food especially, I'm also noticing your shirt with all the carrots and the turnips and things. [laughter]

TAKAHASHI: I chose this purposefully. [laughter]

FARRELL: Did you grow up eating Japanese food? I mean you mentioned you were latchkey kid when you were in middle school, so I'm wondering about the role of 01:21:00food, Japanese food, or cooking in your family, if that's something that you did?

TAKAHASHI: Big time. My mom appreciated good food, was I thought a pretty good cook. She had gone to cooking school in Japan and so she learned western techniques. She knew what good food tasted like, so I grew up tasting good Japanese food. Food plays a very central role in my life, and you can ask Alan. When I was growing up, she cooked Japanese food, my dad liked more western food, so she cooked that. She learned how to cook Mexican food from a lady nearby, carne mechada [a Venezuelan term for spiced shredded beef that Alan used], and Alan says it's probably the best carne mechada he's ever had. I grew up eating Japanese food, western like beef stews and things like that, Japanese 01:22:00curry, sukiyaki, oden, which is a Japanese one-pot stew thing. My mom made dashi the old-fashioned way, big hunk of dried bonito. I still have the shaving box, there's a razor blade across, and you'd shave the dried bonito -- that was one of my jobs is to shave the thing and make enough. Relatives from Japan would send her dried kelp, the kombu, and she would make dashi. I still have that. Kombu doesn't spoil, I keep it downstairs, and now I am using that kombu.

Now that I'm on sabbatical, I've been going back and cooking real Japanese food. I have a good recipe book that my mom -- it's in English -- she picked out. We went to Kinokuniya in the city, and she was looking, perusing Japanese cookbooks, and she said this is a good one. I've been using that and it is a good one. It does reproduce a lot of the 01:23:00flavors that my mom had made. She really appreciated good food, and yet she liked Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is a mystery to me. During the time when they were busy working, during the season from about March until the end of October, all we ate was takeout, that's all. We had come home and there'd be Chinese takeout, there would be pizza. We rotated between hamburgers, pizza, Chinese food, and maybe Mexican food. Mexican food, the takeout wasn't all that great -- Pollo Loco came in saround the '70s, and that was great, but that was our fare.

My dad would -- for the workers, what we did, so these guys, the same 01:24:00guys came to us every year. They leave at the end of the season. Some of them would leave earlier, Dad would always give them a bonus for a few of them that stayed later because they'd have fewer and fewer hours. My dad was very cognizant about making sure the guys had enough money to send home. I am very proud of what they did and how they treated our workers, and that's why they would come back to us. One guy started working for us when he was sixteen or seventeen, he came to us ten years, twelve years, saved up enough money, and opened his own bakery in Michoacan for his family. You know, just he'd come back and he was married, he had a little baby.

But Mom every morning, we'd get there at 5:30 and somewhere around 6:30 or 6:15, she would make instant coffee. She'd bring a big urn of hot water, instant coffee, sugar, creamer, and we'd get 01:25:00cookies. When I was in middle school, I started working in the cafeteria and I would get a meal allowance for nutrition and for lunch because I worked both times. I didn't eat that much, right, so I'd always have a couple of dollars left over. I'd get these little packages of cookies, four cookies in a package, and whatever balance I had from whatever I ate, I'd bring those cookies home and save them up. When the season started, they would get the cookies and a cup of coffee loaded up with sugar and creamer. Because these guys at 5:30 in the morning, they just got up and came out the door. Early on, they would bring their lunches, but as things got better and better for us and we got busier and busier, my dad would say, 01:26:00"Straight time, we'll get you lunch." He would go to Wendy's or whoever and bring them burgers and a drink and fries, and they would eat and work. He didn't deduct any lunch time, and in the morning they got coffee.

It was really funny, one time we got a new guy and he refused the coffee and cookies. We said, "How come he's not eating?" The guys said, "He thinks you're going to charge him." So my dad had to explain that no, we're not going deduct this from his paycheck. These guys had been treated not very nicely. Same with the check cashing, my mom was just furious when she found out that some of these guys, some of these other farmers would charge the workers to cash their checks. My mom always put the cash in the envelope, had them sign the check, and then there was always cash in the envelope. It wouldn't even have occurred to 01:27:00her, occur to them to charge to cash the checks. They got lunch and so they came back every year. They'd go home -- and that was when things were better. I don't think border control was nearly as crazy as it is now and these guys would come after the end of February, early March, stay with us through most of the season. One or two would leave because there wasn't enough hours and then they would go back home to their families, spend the winter there, and then they came back, and it was reasonably safe for them to do so. They had a place, they all knew each other, and it was kind of like a family. Even though I was picking up these guys in my Volkswagen bug and taking them and we would be doing our work, I never felt like I was in 01:28:00personal safety, they were very gentlemanly, and they would go home at the end of the season. This is sort of the rhythm that we had. Every once in a while, they would bring a new guy. My dad would say, "Maybe next year we're going to get more busy, maybe you know somebody else" or someone was going to leave and they would talk amongst themselves, and they would bring the new guy.

FARRELL: It says a lot too about the way that your parents are running things that people would come back year after year. It's not so typical that that would happen, so I think that illustrates a lot about how your parents were doing things, too, that they had such a loyal group of workers. You had also mentioned that you'd get up at 3:30 in the morning, you'd leave at 4:30, and your mom insisted on hot breakfast. What were the things that you were 01:29:00eating for breakfast?

TAKAHASHI: Very western things, ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, that kind of stuff.

FARRELL: Okay, okay, yeah. So a lot of the home cooking would happen not during the busy season?

TAKAHASHI: Yes, during the winter, that's when all the home cooking and then she tried to put aside stuff in the freezer.

FARRELL: Yeah, that makes sense. In San Fernando, you mentioned it's a big Mexican community. Were there any other Japanese or Japanese American families that lived nearby? Okay. How involved were your parents in the Japanese community, Japanese American community?

TAKAHASHI: They weren't; my grandmother was through the temple. We belonged to the San Fernando Valley Buddhist temple which was in Pacoima about five or six miles away and there were a whole bunch of little old 01:30:00ladies that knew each other. I mean there was a number of little old Japanese ladies [all widows] that lived in San Fernando and few in Pacoima. The Sakamotos for example, they lived in Pacoima, they grew carrots, and they bunched carrots. And, honest to God, Mrs. Sakamoto I remember her, her back was like this [bent like an upside down and inverted "L"]. I mean she literally could not stand up because she was just always bent over bunching carrots. So, yeah, there was a Japanese community of, I think, mostly women who had emigrated from Japan early on. [By the time I came along, they were mostly widows.] My mom was too busy to be part of any of that, but my grandmother 01:31:00knew in her little bitty part of the Buddhist group were very engaged. There must have been about ten, anywhere between eight to ten Japanese families, but I had one uncle that lived a block away and then there were other Japanese families within about a couple-mile radius.

FARRELL: Did religion play a role in your upbringing? Were your parents religious at all?

TAKAHASHI: No, they weren't. They weren't except when somebody died or somebody got married. Somewhere in there -- oh how old was I? I don't remember, I must have been about tern or eleven, twelve, somewhere in there. They decided I needed to go to temple. I don't know who made this decision -- I wasn't involved -- but they said, "You need to go to Sunday school and go to the Buddhist 01:32:00temple." They arranged for a neighbor, Mrs. Kobayashi, to pick me up and take me too because she drove[my grandmother didn't drive] and my parents were busy. On Sundays, instead of going to the field, I would go get shuttled off to temple and Sunday school. There was also J school, Japanese school, language school on Saturdays. For a while there, especially because I didn't drive or my mom didn't drive, various people would be assigned to shuttle me to the Japanese language school on Saturday. Later on, when I got a little older, to the Buddhist temple to get some sort of religious training and that lasted for a year.

FARRELL: When you were going to J 01:33:00school, did you feel -- since Japanese was your first language -- do you feel like you needed it? How did that work for you?

TAKAHASHI: Well, I didn't know how to read or write, so it was just an oral language for me. So first grade, second grade, you know, we started. I think in terms of the Japanese community, I think it was a way for the kids to get together. Yeah, we learned some Japanese, but none of it stuck with the kids that went. I know none of it stuck because it's once a week, right, yeah, and your parents didn't speak it in the home. There's a whole generation of Japanese people probably my age and a little younger whose parents made a conscious decision not to make the Japanese culture 01:34:00prominent in their lives because of what happened during the war. People my age or a little younger, they don't speak Japanese. Parents made a decision, we're not going to speak Japanese in the home. I'm an anomaly because my mom, she spoke to me in Japanese, but I know a lot of my contemporaries don't speak any. They don't understand the traditions either; they don't have a connection with Japan, which I think is a shame but it's an aftermath of what happened during the war.

FARRELL: I know that's common in other cultures, people with other backgrounds as well. Maybe they're second generation and their parents say, "We're not going to teach you Spanish," for 01:35:00example, "You're just going to learn English." As adults, they felt like they're missing a big part of who they are, yeah, but just for assimilation purposes and things like that.

TAKAHASHI: Right. [I get a sense that a number of Japanese traditions that had been followed before WWII but that after what happened, the passing down of many traditions were no longer followed. Jas born after the war missed out on that.]

FARRELL: Yeah, and did you growing up have any rituals or holidays that you observed that were big in your family?

TAKAHASHI: Well, we did assimilate the western holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. I remember in Sundays in the Buddhist church, one little kid said, "Is Buddha going to get mad if we have a Christmas tree?" [laughs] The bonze [O-bosan or Buddhist priest] is saying, "You know what? I think Buddha would be cool with that," or words to that effect. "He's all right with that." There's a big relief; you could hear the sigh. We'd have that.

And mochitsuki was a big one, New Year's was a big one. Mochitsuki, and unfortunately, I don't have a 01:36:00picture. Mochi is pounded sweet rice, and you may be familiar with it, but we have the mochi stone in our backyard. I brought it up from San Fernando. You steam this sweet rice and then you mush it together and then you pound it until it has a bread-like consistency, only very firm. Then you make little balls of it and you freeze it. Back in the day, people used to store it in barrels of water, and it would be food that you could take. It would be portable and you could put it in your pocket, and you can go out in the fields and work all day because one of these little things is like a bowl of rice. Now we toast it. So mochi was what we did somewhere around December 28th, 01:37:0029th. All the uncles and the aunts would get together, get up really early. The night before, we would wash out the stone, put hot water in it to get it ready, and then start early with steaming the rice. We would assemble a great, big, wooden ersatz stove with gas running along it, and put these great, big steamers where we would steam like seven or eight pounds at a time, stick it in the -- dump it in the prepared bowl. My uncles would mush it together with cherry mallets -- cherry wooden mallets. I have the mallets too, they've since been replaced. But mush it and then you start pounding and start pounding and pounding until it gets that right consistency, and you have to 01:38:00know the right consistency and the steaming how the rice should be steamed and then the consistency of how much pounding it needs. It will vary depending on the rice. Some years, the rice has more moisture content, other years not, all of that. We would do that and we'd pound like seventy or eighty pounds because of all the uncles and aunts. They would take it home, they would bring their washed rice. We would be done around 11:00, somewhere around 11:00, noon. That was a family gathering that was a tradition until my grandmother passed away.

FARRELL: What kind of rice were you using?

TAKAHASHI: Sweet rice.

FARRELL: Sweet rice, okay, and were you getting that locally?

TAKAHASHI: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you could buy it at the store because it's the same -- I think it's the same brand that I buy at Berkeley Bowl now. Now we have machine, my mom bought a 01:39:00machine and so [my daughter] Sami and I did -- how many pounds did we do? Seven pounds. Seven pounds this year, a few weeks ago.

FARRELL: So you're carrying on that tradition still?

TAKAHASHI: Right. What's really nice is that some of her friends was curious about it and it seems to be Sami's generation is much more interested in learning about their cultural traditions. Sami said, "Are you interested in doing this mochitsuki?" I said, "Well, yeah, sure, I just need some bodies. I need some young bodies with strong backs to do it. I know where the mallets are, the stone was already turned around, it's become kind of an ersatz bird water holder, but we could just chlorinate it and clean it out really well and we could do this thing next year." She said, "Oh okay." Well, she said she might. I said, "It doesn't have to be boys -- I did it, I've done it 01:40:00myself. It can be girls but just have good, strong backs." Maybe next year or this year in December we would do this.

FARRELL: How old was Sami when she started to ask about making that or doing some of those traditional dishes?

TAKAHASHI: Well, she's been doing the mochi thing with my mom ever since she was really little but not doing it the old-fashioned way. Last year was the first year she started to ask about doing that, and I said, "Okay, yeah, we can make this happen." She said, "Because Mom, I don't know how things [work.]" This year with the mochi machine, I lifted up the rice because it buzzes when it's supposedly done. I said, "Well, let's feel this." I said, "No, it needs a little longer. The rice needs to cook a little long, it's still a little too hard." She asked all these good questions. "What happens if it's too hard?" I said, 01:41:00"Well, you know, it won't pound up as well, so you don't what to over steam it, you don't want to under steam it, but I know from feel what it should feel like."

FARRELL: Yeah.

TAKAHASHI: And then we'd sprinkle a little bit more water on it and steam it some more. Even in the pouncing, you press a button, it starts doing this weird dance inside the machine, and you have to feel it to make sure it's done.

FARRELL: Yeah, that's great. That's great that you're able to pass that tradition on to your daughter and that she's interested.

TAKAHASHI: Yeah, that she's interested. She lived in Japan for two years and was part of the JET [Japanese Exchange and Teaching] program so she's interested in Japanese cooking and all of that, so I'm really happy. I keep telling her, "Oh, your Gran Gran," which is my mom, "Gran Gran would be so happy."

FARRELL: Yeah, and then for you growing 01:42:00up, were there any other significant holidays or times of year?

TAKAHASHI: There was little Girls' Day, March third. March third is little Girls' Day, and that is when you put these traditional Japanese five-tiered dolls my uncle had sent my mom when I was four. There must be four or five boxes of this, and my dad built a redwood tiered thing. My mom, March third before this, they went independent with the strawberry stuff. Every year, she would take the whole shebang out, make my dad set up the tiered thing in our tiny, little house, make some space, and she would display it. Now, my quandary right now is what to do those with those dolls. [laughs] I don't know. So yeah, that was 01:43:00a big deal, and she would make some Japanese food for that. Other than that, there weren't really any Japanese holidays. New Year's was a big deal, some of the American holidays were celebrated.

FARRELL: Yeah, which American holidays did you celebrate?

TAKAHASHI: Mother's Day. We did Mother's Day, Father's Day, we did Christmas, we did Thanksgiving. Fourth of July we were always, always busy with work with corn selling day. Labor Day also we're busy. I don't have any recollection of our celebrating any of those things the way in which normal families would celebrate.

FARRELL: I relate to that; I was always working on Fourth of July and Labor Day as well.

TAKAHASHI: Oh, what were you doing?

FARRELL: I grew up driving horse-drawn carriages. That was my first 01:44:00job and then I've always worked in restaurants and bars, so around food. It's the same thing, when people are off, that's when you're busy so you have to work.

TAKAHASHI: Horse-drawn carriages?

FARRELL: Yeah, yeah.

TAKAHASHI: Wow.

FARRELL: Yeah, I grew up riding horses so when it was time for me to get a job in middle school, my mom was like, "Well, your only skills are horses so we'll work with that."

TAKAHASHI: We have a horse; Sami grew up riding horses.

FARRELL: Oh, you did?

TAKAHASHI: Mm-hmm.

FARRELL: Oh wow, okay.

TAKAHASHI: Not me but Sami did.

FARRELL: Oh, Sami

TAKAHASHI: Not me.

FARRELL: Oh, got it, okay.

TAKAHASHI: I walk him and I muck his stall.

FARRELL: So now, you have a horse?

TAKAHASHI: Now we have a horse.

FARRELL: Okay. Where do you stable your horse?

TAKAHASHI: Over there, Anthony Chabot.

FARRELL: Oh, in Chabot, okay.

TAKAHASHI: Yeah, yeah, just two miles from where we live.

FARRELL: Yeah, oh, that's great, yeah. Well, yeah, I want to talk more about Sami and things like that in our next session and also 01:45:00too your education, your career, your time that you spent in Japan. But I think this might be a good stopping point for this session.

TAKAHASHI: Okay.

FARRELL: Is there anything else that you want to add to the childhood, the family side, the childhood, the upbringing part of the session that we didn't talk about today?

TAKAHASHI: No. I don't want to give you the impression that my dad was cold or anything, he was nice, but he just wasn't like Father Knows Best kind of dad.

FARRELL: I didn't get the sense, I didn't get that sense. I do have a couple of reflective questions as we're wrapping up today. Given the time that you spent on the farm, the family business side, what were the big lessons that you learned from that period of 01:46:00time that you took with you for the rest of your life or that had an impact on you?

TAKAHASHI: Humility, about treating everybody the same. Going to restaurants, I see people being very dismissive of wait staff. I don't like that because I was on the end, right on the same end of -- anybody who's worked in the service industry knows what it's like to be poorly treated, and I learned that. The other thing I learned was that just because you're a doctor doesn't mean you can't be a jerk, that education has nothing to do with the 01:47:00quality of individual person you are; I learned that early on. Status and wealth and education have nothing to do with the quality of the individual. Those are two really good lessons.

FARRELL: What are you most proud of from your time working on the farm?

TAKAHASHI: That I did it. That I can cut hundreds of pounds of zucchini in 100-degree heat or go out there and pick lugs of tomatoes and just being able to do it, right, and be proud of doing it. I think that is one of the things that's a good takeaway is never being ashamed [of physical labor]. Right now, after this, I'm going to go out there and -- we have two big planter boxes put 01:48:00in and in anticipation of my retiring. The guys who put it in filled it up with dirt and I expected some settling, but it didn't really settle, they compacted it down. I want to put chicken manure in, so I got bags of chicken manure from Home Depot, but I have to make room so I got some grow bags. The day before yesterday, I took out two grow bags' worth of dirt out of them and put in three bags of chicken manure and worked that in. I have one more planter box I have to do, so I'll be doing that this afternoon.

FARRELL: And you know you can do it.

TAKAHASHI: And I know I can do it.

FARRELL: Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this with me, sharing your stories of your family and your upbringing. It's been a real pleasure to hear about it. You're a great storyteller, so I appreciate your time today, and I'm looking forward to our next 01:49:00 session.

TAKAHASHI: Well, thank you, thank you very much, Shanna.

FARRELL: Absolutely. I'm going to pause the recording.

TAKAHASHI: Okay.