Interviews
Running Japanese store
There, there wasn’t a big Japanese community. But eventually, there, what the store depended on a lot was that they had a lot of, uh, war brides. Because there’s March Air Force Base, George Air Force Base, Norton Air Force Base, uh, there was a marine base out in Twentynine Palms. So they had all these military facilities and so these guys would bring their wives back from Japan.
And so our store became kind of a clearinghouse. They’d, they’d trade off Japanese magazines, you know, women’s magazines, and my mother would be the conduit for this flow. Um, so we’d have to pick up Japanese food every once in a while, especially Shogatsu time, you know, where we’d have to go into LA to pick up mochi and stuff like that, you know.
Date: September 8, 2011
Location: California, US
Interviewer: John Esaki, Kris Kuramitsu
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
