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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."
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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."
]]>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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Lisa Imamura: "Sunday dinner was Pagoda’s. Every Sunday, you know, it was like clockwork. "
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