The Great Depression; Interview with Togo Tanaka. Part 3

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Marker.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, let's start off by, if you could tell me, where you were in 1937, what you were doing that year?

TOGO TANAKA:

I lived in Glendale, California. [coughs] I take it back I lived in Hollywood, Los Feliz and Vermont. I moved to Glendale the following year. I was working, full-time, as an English editor of a daily newspaper called the Rafu Shimpo, still being published here in Los Angeles after ninety years, but I had received a degree from UCLA in political science, and had gone to work, in my senior year, for the Rafu Shimpo .

INTERVIEWER:

So, one of the things that we're looking at in this film is the economic climate in, in the end of the decade there, '37 and '38, and there were a lot of reports that everything was getting better, and the Depression was over, I wonder if you could tell me what, what it was like for you at that point, were things getting better economically for you?

TOGO TANAKA:

I always thought that every new job that I had I improved my condition. While in school I worked twelve hours on Saturdays at the Hollymont Market for three dollars a Saturday, and the job at the Rafu Shimpo paid me I think sixty-five dollars a month, plus three meals in the commissary, you know of the newspaper. And, as I look back it never occurred to me that it was, you know, hard times. There was enough to eat, we had a roof over our head, paid our rent, and I took the street car down to the job everyday and I enjoyed it.

INTERVIEWER:

Did you see a lot of hardship around you still, or—?

TOGO TANAKA:

Yes, yes I did. I saw people on the street corner selling apples. I read about in the newspaper that we were in a deep depression, that there was unemployment. I think about that time they had talked about a bonus march to Washington D.C., and you couldn't work for a daily newspaper, reporting what was happening in the city, even though this was an ethnic newspaper, without being aware of the fact that there was a world-wide depression. Times were hard. The government in Washington D.C. had started out by declaring a bank holiday, and we knew that times were hard. I think while the wage scale was such a, I think I remember at that time that we quoted the fact that if you were a manager of a Safeway store, and earned enough to support a family of four, two children and a couple, and if you got $125 a month that was going scale. The dollar was worth a great deal more in those days, and so you didn't get as many of them. But we were in a depression, and what little economics I had studied at UCLA, I had learned that in the early days in the Nineteenth Century, we didn't call it a depression, we called it a panic. And then in the 1930s newspapers picked up the term depression and that's what we were suffering.

INTERVIEWER:

I wonder if you can help me understand a little bit what kind of opportunities there were for Japanese Americans? Would you mind telling a little bit about some of the obstacles that you talked about?

TOGO TANAKA:

Yes. Well it was a standing—it wasn't a joke, it was kind of ironic—but the most successful entrepreneur among Japanese Americans, I think one of the more successful in the Los Angeles area was a man named Susumu Hasuike, H-A-S-U-I-K-E, Japan born, but he had had the drive to not only own one fruit and vegetable store, but he had a chain of them. I don't remember how many he had at it's peak, but it ran into several dozen. And it was said that if you got an engineering degree at UC Berkley—they weren't handing out those degrees at UCLA—you could get a job polishing apples and stacking potatoes for Three Star Produce, but it wasn't unusual to go to a fruit stand and discover that ingredient. In my own case I was offered a scholarship to the University of Missouri, Journalism, but it was just for tuition, but it didn't cover the, the cost of living. So I chose to go where I could, you know, work and earn a salary. I think the jobs were relatively limited for people of Japanese descent in those days, as they were for other ethnic groups who belonged to so-called minorities.

INTERVIEWER:

So was California very receptive of a community for Japanese-Americans?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, we were born here, [laughs] most of us were. So, I think that California had a long history of anti-Oriental, political agitation, the organized labor, you know, first because when the Chinese were brought in to build the railroads, I think successive ways the Asian immigrants all ran into the same thing, the same thing that Southern Europeans ran into in New York and, and on the East Coast.

INTERVIEWER:

I'm going to have to interrupt you, and I want to pick up that story. We've run out on this roll.

TOGO TANAKA:

Oh sure.

INTERVIEWER:

-five minutes to warm up and then we'll, then we'll give you a full ten minute roll.