Born on Maui, Employed in San Fran, Living in Honolulu
I was born on Maui on a sugar plantation. My parents lived and worked for the company. I went to high school on Maui. During that time, not too many people were able to come to Hawai’i. Most of my family were able to go to business college, but my father was wondering why I wanted to go attend business college. I came to Oahu on my own. I couldn’t afford tuition, though. Tuition for business school was $15 a month. I paid $10 a month for half a day, so I would leave school at noon. My Chinese friend would go, and at 12:00 we would go to the library and dictate to each other. We learned shorthand writing as well. At that time we were typing shorthand and taking all the notes. I was a good typist; 80 WPM! I also did secretarial work at Hawaiian Electric.
We went through a lot of discrimination during the war. It was so embarrassing, not only embarrassing but also intimidating, to be told “there goes the Japs” back then. During the war, my boyfriend and I went to eat dinner at a hotel. I had made a reservation, but when we got there, they said, “Sorry, we are full for the night.” I told my boyfriend, “Phooey! We are not coming back anymore.” I told them, “Just because I am Japanese, you can choose to discriminate against me. I just called in a reservation and you said you had availability!” Most intimidating part during the war. I yelled at them and told my boyfriend, “Let’s get out of here.”
After getting married I moved to Kailua. Then we moved to San Francisco ’cause the jobs in Hawai’i were slowing down in 1955, 1956. I got a job in the Army and Air Force Motion Picture Service, as a secretary — supplying Hollywood entertainment films to various base theaters. In San Fran, we took care of all the theaters from Alaska all the way to Texas. In all the theaters, we would take care of the movies. We even took care of scheduling transportation to deliver films to the remote areas in the boondocks! Direct contact with Hollywood to get films, they are the ones who need the films more than people in downtown. We had all the connections to deliver the films. We used to supply the motion pictures for the theaters there, from Montana all the way to Arizona: all the Western region. The military is very important in order to deliver the entertainment film. Ben Hur and stuff like that…
At that time, Ben Hur cost $3–4; it only cost about 30 cents to watch the entertainment film in the theater at the time! I worked there many, many years, and retired from that company when I was 62. After I retired from the motion picture industry, I returned to Hawai’i. So I’m stuck here in this 85 degree weather! The weather in San Fran was very nice for me…
I am 95 years old. Since I moved out here, the sugar plantation closed up. Before the war, my parents opened a miso factory, the American-Hawaiian Miso Factory. The family moved over in 1942. We also made soy sauce. We made a living off of that because Japanese live on both miso and soy sauce. We used rice along with soybeans to make miso, and we were able to survive without going out to buy regular miso. The war came right after we opened it, and the Japanese people didn’t know where they could get miso and soy sauce, since nothing was coming in from Japan.
So we were very lucky, we were able to survive.
