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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."
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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."
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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. "
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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."
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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."
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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."
]]>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: "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."
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