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Lisa Imamura: " I remember coming to Japantown because my grandmother always wanted to go to the fish market. I remember walking in there and just smelling the fish. It wasn't a bad smell or a disgusting smell. It's just fish."
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Lisa Imamura: I would always come with my dad on the weekends because Pee Wee's gas station was right here in the corner and in one of the bays because he had two, two or three, in one of the bays he actually had a poker table. The guys from the Rose Park neighborhood, including my dad, they would go into the bay and play poker and I was outside wiping down the car because my dad was like, “Oh, we're going to go wash the car today."
Trey Imamura: You’re going to wash the car today!
Lisa Imamura: I was little so I didn't know any better. He had one of those—it was a tin tub and it had this thing on top of it where you put the chamois through and you roll it and it squeezed out all the water in the chamois. Yep, I remember it, like it was yesterday. But I loved it. I got to be with my dad, right? So it was so fun.
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Lisa Imamura: "Sunday dinner was Pagoda’s. Every Sunday, you know, it was like clockwork. "
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"When my father—when they bought the house in Rose Park—he was always mad about this for his whole life—he had to go door to door with a clipboard and ask for permission to buy the house from, I don’t know, like a two square block area.Most people said yes, but there were a few who wouldn’t sign it and said no. And man, did he remember those people for the rest of his life."
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"One of the things that was funny was that, of course, we were running around all over the place all the time. But there was this Japanese thing that kids were not to be seen in the business. I don't know if that was because they were worried about getting accused of child labor or something. I don't know what the thing was, but I think it was mostly just a tradition. That a business—you can't have your kids running around inside the business. And so one of the things that would happen is we'd be playing around in there and then as soon as the door would open. we'd have to go running into the back room as fast as we could to stay out of sight. So that was one of the things.
And of course, we were all assigned jobs and so one of my main jobs that I remember—I must have been only like six or seven years old—was to take all of the—people would come in with the—all the soft drinks and beer and everything were in these bottles with deposits on them. So all these people would bring bottles in to get their, I don't know what they got, 10 cents or something. My job was to take those bottles and take them far into the back of the market. In the back, there was a big—you could drive down an alley over by Colonial Hotel and it wrapped around the back and there was a big open dirt parking lot. So all the businesses accessed—all the deliveries and stuff came through the back. So there were these long buildings, you know, long buildings going inward off the storefront. I had to take all those bottles back there into the back and put them in their respective crates so that when the, for instance, the Coca-Cola guy came, he would take off with all the bottles."
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Craig Nagasawa: " If you went to Aloha Cafe, I think, you'll have to ask Wade Doi about this, I believe his father was from Hawaii. So the inside of their restaurant, Aloha Cafe, had all of these potted plants that were Hawaiian. These, one of those big leaved things, these kind of iris type things with a big stem in the middle. They're very ornamental looking. Anyways. They had all of these sort of plants along the walls, potted. They were big though, they would grow up but they were really specific to Hawaii. And so again, I remember going in there and thinking, this is completely different than anything you would see in any other store."
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Craig Nagasawa: "There was this idea, especially for the young males, it was all sports, sports, sports, sports, endless sports. There were like The Dois, Wally Doi was the head of the Doi family. I believe he was from Hawaii, but he was also in the 442 and he had a wooden leg as a result of his combat over in Europe. But he already had practiced judo and all this stuff. I remember he had what's called cauliflower ear, one side anyway, it's all like curled up and it was from doing so much judo when he was a kid. So he was extremely, intensely into both football and baseball. He would coach little league teams and do all of this stuff with the kids.
So during the summers, every other day, we would go out into the back, the big open dirt lot that was behind all the stores down that alley. We could go through the stores, so Aloha Cafe, everybody came out to the back and there was a big dirt parking lot. And he would be a coach to us. He would get us out there and make us warm up. We'd have to run back and forth, run up and down the back parking lot to get in shape, and then we'd play catch and then he would–Oh! What was great was when you were playing catch, it was fierce. It wasn't just sort of lobbing the ball. You threw it as hard as you could. He would hold up his mitt and the ball had to go right in his mitt or otherwise he would just let it go by and he'd start yelling at you, “What's the matter with you? You got a crooked arm or something?” Plus he had his wooden leg so he wouldn't even try. He would just stand there and you had to go shag it. So we got to be very good aims with throwing the baseball. And then he would pitch to us. We would draw a square on the back of the building. It was the back of the judo club, actually—it was a cinder block building—on the wall in the back. We would draw a square that was the strike zone and he would pitch just like full-on fastball. I was always terrified. His kids weren't. Wade and Robin Doi, and Kimmy, that was the Doi family. They played baseball all the way through high school and they played football. They were like real team athletes, but it all started with Wally and little league back there. He would just throw these sort of sizzling pitches past us as little kids and I was just always terrified that I was going to get hit with one. And of course, we never got hit. He was good. But we didn't have helmets or all the gear that they had. We're just out there with our tennis shoes and our baseball bats.
But here was the thing. There was a huge warehouse across on the other side of the back parking lot. I think it was like two and a half stories high. It was an inner warehouse. I don't know who it was run by. It might have been part of the Greyhound Bus Depot. But if you hit the ball onto the roof there, it was considered a home run and you got to stop practicing for the day. So we would always be trying to hit a home run. I think I probably never did., but Wade and Robin every once in a while would hit these home runs up on the top. And as a reward, we got to, first of all, it was always in the summer, so it was sizzling hot. So we wanted to hit that home run so we could go inside. But somebody would hit one. And we'd go straight through the back of Aloha Cafe. We'd go sit at the counter, Wally would make us any soft drinks we wanted, malts, shakes, whatever you wanted, and a piece of pie. That was our reward for practice. We got to do that even when we practiced, but we got to cut short when somebody hit a home run. So that was one of the things that would happen. And then after a while, the Colonial Hotel was quite high and there were windows along that alley. So the people who had apartments that looked out that way could watch us down in the back. So after a while, it became a thing where all of these old guys were up there two and three stories up and they'd be yelling things at us out their window. “That looked like a strike to me!” “What are you guys doing out there?” You know? There was just this whole thing where everybody knew each other and even the parents would be out there, or Wally would be out there, coaching us."
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Craig Nagasawa: "One of our daily routines was after we closed at the fish market, we would gather the family and we would walk down the street up that alley, cut through the alley all the way through to the Greyhound bus depot, and then kind of kitty corner across towards this Emeril Avenue where my grandparents' house was. Some of it was walkable, we'd walk back and forth. One thing I recall, I was quite small at the time when we first started walking back and forth. My dad's family, my dad was the oldest, but there were some younger brothers and sisters and one of my dad's brothers, Eddie, he was a sort of football player at West High School and he used to carry me on his back in the winter because I would always complain about getting my feet wet and cold because it would be covered with snow. Those back alleys would be all iced and slushed, full of big puddles and ice, frozen over puddles. So he would carry me back. He would carry me all the way over there to the house on his back. And then we would sit down and sometimes we'd bring our dinner from the sunrise, the ingredients for our dinner, and then we'd sit down over there and eat dinner and all of the brothers, my father's brothers and sisters, would gather there. So it was a big meeting point right there for our family."
]]>Craig Nagasawa: "At the fish market itself, the Sunrise, we had a number of things that were our own brand, and one of the things I remember is we had this rice called Sun Boy Rice. It came in 100 pound sacks. I guess it came in smaller ones too, but it was mostly 100 pound sacks and there were these cotton bags that were silkscreen. My dad made this—I have one somewhere over at my studio. Sun Boy Rice—there was a big insignia on the thing and the rice came from Arkansas. The rice came in a train car from Arkansas and it was loose. It wasn't packaged. So it came to us just in this big train car. And when it would arrive, they would assemble all of the older guys. It was like shovels. They'd go down with shovels and they would offload the whole train car into a warehouse still loose into these big bins and they’d put all the rice in there. Then once it was in there, it would slowly get strained and be put into the 100 pound bags and sewed shut. We supplied that rice all over Salt Lake. it was the early days where it was actually hard to get short grain rice that the Japanese use. That was that kind of interesting thing. There was always this rice thing going on.
At the market itself in the back, we had a special—we called it the rice bin room. It was a whole room that was raised off the ground and the bottom was made out of metal, like galvanized sheets of metal and the sides were made out of wire cages so no mice or any rodents or anything, nothing could get to it in there. And in there were these big stacks, at any given time there were like 20 stacks of 100 pound bags of rice. We were allowed to play in there if we took our shoes off because there were these cotton bags. We would go in there and we would build stuff out of the bags. We would build forts one on each side and then we’d throw stuff at each other and have games in there. It's a miracle we never got crushed in there, none of them fell on us. It took two of us, we could barely lift a hundred pound bag because we were so little. I remember when we finally got old enough to—by the time we were teenagers, we could actually put a whole hundred pound bag of rice on our shoulder and carry them. Because we used to deliver them too, sometimes they just get delivered down the street so they'd be like. “You need a workout? Take this hundred pound bag down” and they'd throw it on your shoulder and you'd carry it a half a block down to one of the restaurants or something. The older guys, like my uncles and Robin Doi—some of the older guys, could carry two.
There would oftentimes be a big shipment that would go out. So we'd have to load like a huge truck out of the back of the fish market with say about 20 bags. I don't know where they went to, Ogden or something. They’d just put the call out—rice loading day. And all of these young guys would show up and they used it as a workout. They thought they were all macho and strong, and the big thing was they could carry two so they'd hoist one up—they could pick them up too—so they'd hoist them from the ground and flip one on one shoulder and then reach down the other, flip one on the other. I remember the pose was like this. You had to have your arms out like this so the bag wouldn't slide off. They'd walk down the street like this with two bags of hundred pound rice sacks on their shoulders or they take it to the truck and offload them. The trucks were up high, right? So you'd walk up and they would flip them up onto the back of the truck when they would load them up. That was another part of—there was a lot of activity that nobody saw."
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Craig Nagasawa: "It says the Rojin Club or Don's Pool Hall. Don's Pool Hall was what it was. On the ground floor there was a big pool hall. It hardly seemed like anybody was ever in there and what was really going on was there was this I don't know what Rojin means, but there was this club and basically there was gambling going on. So in the back, the pool hall was sort of like the front and in the back—I guess it was legal, but they were probably secretly exchanging money. There was always some strange either mahjong or poker going on back there and you would never know unless you could enter from the back. So as kids, we used to go running through there and people would scream at us, “What are you doing in here?” And so on."
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