Transcript: "Growing up, I didn't realize how grateful I am that I can go to the temple where my grandparents got married. It was somewhere where they felt safe to practice their religion when it didn't feel super safe 20 years before when they were in camp. But it’s also cool that they did have like a temple in Topaz and then they came here and they had their temple here. I think all of those connections and being able to be involved with the Topaz incarceration site and practice my religion—it just means a lot. I tie that to J-Town as well."
]]>Transcript:
Lisa Imamura: "Matter of fact, in Rose Park, there used to be this place called Earl's Pharmacy. They had a soda jerk there as well, but they had copious amounts of candy. So when they would come into town, especially Uncle Ben, all of us kids would be like, “Oh, Uncle Ben’s in town! Oh my gosh!” and he would take us and he'd hand us like a dollar, right? Dollar nowadays isn't going to buy you much, but back then—if you got a dollar of penny candy! Are you kidding me? And sometimes when he was really, really, really overly generous, $5."
]]>Transcript:
"They ran the bar or the cafe, whatever you want to call it, inside Pal-D-Mar and my parents would bring me every Friday night with them when they’d go to practice. As soon as we would walk in, Bill would come and pick me up and say, “Okay, she's coming with me.” He'd take me into the bar and he'd give me all the maraschino cherries that I wanted and he'd make me as many Shirley Temples as I wanted. Him and his wife Shirley would just sit there and play with me until they were finished bowling and I loved every second of it. And their boys, Steve and Stan—Steve’s really a nice guy, he's pretty even-keeled. Stan, he would always go, “What a brat.” But, I told them, I’d go, “That's okay, you still love me.”
]]>Transcript:
Craig Nagasawa: "Once, Robin Doi, who was slightly older, he's probably like three, four, five years older than me and Wade. Wade Doi and I were the same age. When you're 15, you want to drive really badly. Everybody wanted to drive. I think it was a kind of feeling of the ticket to freedom or something. Being cooped up in Salt Lake or being cooped up down there on First South, so we were always begging to try driving back there in the parking lot—in the dirt parking lot where nobody could hassle you for being a kid driving. We'd always beg, “can we move the car?” Because we'd have to move the cars around to practice baseball and stuff.
Wally Doi had this huge white Cadillac. All the business owners eventually accumulated Cadillacs. That was their goal. That means that as an entrepreneur, you made it, I guess. And of course, they all had big vans and pickups in the back that were used for deliveries and bringing stuff in. But there was this big white Cadillac, probably around ‘62 or so, had these big white fins on the back and all that. Well, behind the Aloha Cafe building there was a series of garages that were made out of cinder blocks and the Dois had two of them. One had a boat in it, a boat on a trailer and then one is where they kept the Cadillac. Robin Doi, after a practice one day, kept saying, “Come on, come on, Dad, let me pull the car back into the garage!” And so one day his dad finally relented and said, “Okay, here's the keys. Just pull it in nice and smooth, put it in there and close the door, we'll go have a shake at the counter.” So we're all standing—he was so excited because he finally got to try driving it. So he gets in the thing and he starts pulling into the cinder block garage and all of a sudden he hits the gas full on instead of the brake and there was this big screeching sound and the Cadillac went right into the back cinder block wall of the garage and just demolished the whole front of the car plus the back of a garage. [laughs] I just remember staying there in complete silence because Wally Doi was one fierce guy and I just thought, oh my God, Robin Doi is gonna like be tortured. He's gonna kill him right now. He was so upset. He just didn't say a word. He just like turned around and walked away and went inside. Which made it even worse because we're all standing out there shaking, wondering what to do. Do we still get our shake? Can we still go in and have our shake? Which we did and we were afraid to go inside. I'm sure whatever happened after, he caught an earful for whatever happened and eventually it all got fixed back up and so on."
]]>Transcript:
Craig Nagasawa: "Mihoya was a manju shop run by my grandmother. It was just down the street from the fish market. They would daily make a whole new batch of manju and there were these glass cases in the front that they would all go in and these little lacquer boxes. People would come in and either buy a whole bunch at one time in a big box or you could buy even just one manju if you wanted. There was all kinds, there was the steamed kind, there was the sort of soft, chewy kind. At New Year's, there was the pounded rice mochi, and then there was all this Japanese confectionery stuff in packages that came from Japan—candy, kids’ candy, and senbei, all of those kinds of Japanese goods were all in there.
My grandmother was mostly—at first, she was always at the fish market, but once things—when I grew up, my mother started working there as well. So then my grandmother moved down and opened Mihoya. So again, we would just run back and forth between them. I used to play them off against each other. I'd be like, “Can you give me a dime so I can go get some candy at Mihoya?” and then give me a dime at Sunrise, I'd run down to and buy something for a dime. then I’d asked my grandmother, “Can you give me a dime so I can buy something back at Sunrise?” And of course, it was all the same family, so they could care less. They'd give me a dime and I'd run back up to the fish market and I'd buy like an orange soda pop or something.There was always this going on. We were always bargaining with the adults to try to get some candy or something."
]]>Transcript:
Craig Nagasawa: "Once I went—I was in the Mihoya and I got a manju. Well, first I went into the Mihoya. and my grandmother was working there. So I went in there. And I had gotten all dirty because I was out in the back playing baseball. So I was all covered—my face was all dirty and stuff and she was just aghast that I was so dirty. And so she takes me to the sink. We have these huge restaurant style sinks in the back that are about three feet deep, those big stainless steel things. There was a bank of those that had like three or four things. They were almost like a bathtub. Anyway, she takes me over there and she holds me up over the thing off of a small ladder and douses my head with water and then pours [emphasis] Tide. That was the only soap she had, I guess. She reaches under there and she pulls Tide clothes detergent out and she pours it on my head and she washes my hair with it and my face and it stung like crazy! I was screaming! But I was clean [laughs]. Then she rinsed me off and for suffering through that—she was afraid I was going to run back to the other end where my mom was and my mom would come down and they'd get in a big argument because she washed me.
So she gave me a manju that I could eat. So I went out in front and I sat on the curb and I ate my manju. I got up and started walking back, but I was so preoccupied with eating this manju that I ran smack into a parking meter pole. There used to be these things, you know? I looked up— I'll never forget that—I looked up and it was just like there! It hit me square in the head and it knocked me out. I just fell backwards and I was laying on the ground. It was the first time I ever hit my head that hard. You used to watch cartoons where Donald Duck would get hit and stars would come out. It was just like that. I was like, “Oh my God, that's true.” You see like little spots and stuff. And so, of course, there was all of these other people and businesses so people came running out, and instantly I was completely taken care of. They came with ice packs and all this stuff and walked me back home. That's the kind of thing where. if this happened today, you'd probably lay there for an hour before anybody even stopped to check you out. "
]]>Transcript:
Craig Nagasawa: "Often I would I would wait and stop about three quarters of the way was Nisei Watch Shop. So there was this guy, I don't know his last name [Roy Omura] but, he worked on watches and it was the old days and he had these glasses with like about 10 different things that flip down on one eye, so he could magnify so he could see the watches. I always remember going in there. and being fascinated with him sitting there over this thing. He would look up and his one eye would be, huge because he had this magnifying thing on his eye. But it was a kind of cool place, there were clocks and cuckoo clocks and all different kinds of watches and clocks all over the walls and they would like have alarms and they'd be going off. I always liked hanging out there. I would just sit there and my mom would do her banking and come back and then pick me up on the way back and we would go back.
So all of those little things like that just were so much like an extended family community that it was just a wonderful feeling of always—you always felt safe. You always felt—you were never hungry. You always felt like somebody would take care of you if something happened."
]]>Transcript:
Craig Nagasawa: "My Mother, for instance, used to say, "Oh, the FBI would come to the house once a week." And go through their house, just walk in like a search warrant, look around and open drawers, go through all their stuff. "
]]>Craig Nagasawa: "One thing I thought of is why don't they make some core drillings? Just make these like 8-inch diameter core drilling in various places all over there. You probably could still do it without hurting hardly anything. Just drill down through there. Go as deep as you can. Go like 20 feet or something, pull these cores out, see if there's any like timelines and ideas about what existed there—the actual dirt. So see things like that, if you had an exhibition or place where that could be displayed, even if it was a case, say in some sports complex you had a whole big glass case with a changing—can you imagine having those cores in there? With stratas and maybe nothing's in them anymore, but with the stories. Here's what existed right here under us in this dirt! Those kinds of ideas go further than a plaque because I think a plaque's valuable, but, you know, people look at them, read them, and then they leave and go off somewhere and that's it."
]]>Craig Nagasawa:"If there's going to be more development and ideas, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me to, for instance, why not have a community center? Put into one of these places where people could meet or both a community center and since I'm an artist, a kind of museum exhibition space whose work was to recreate some of what happened there, the stories on the block, right in the community there, somewhere. I know it will never be the same, but at least it commemorates the idea that it was there. I'd like to see the commitment in terms of whatever is going to get developed, or if it gets developed, which I would assume it probably will because of the monies involved. It seems to me the commitment could be bigger than what's already being proposed. To like push even further into what are ways to have the history right there.
So say you went to a sports center, but in the lobby of the sports center, there was a big thousand square foot space that was all about the stories, with video, with paintings, with, I don’t know, written stories. That could change. It could be, it could change, it could be curated, it could be a changing kind of idea. And at least artists could reconstruct the businesses, make a storefront, stick it in there for a while. Those are the kind of, I know they're more grandiose ideas and they're hard to politically make happen. But I think there can be much richer ways to reconstruct some of this."
]]>