Interviews

1. Education in a Buddhist temple and a country school

2. Learning to do farm labor at a sugar beet farm

3. Blue-eyed doll

Sumida,Alice

(1914-2018) Founder of the largest gladiolus bulb farm in the United States.

Education in a Buddhist temple and a country school

When I was 6 years old, my parents placed me in a Buddhist temple in Guadalupe, California, in a dormitory there so I could study the Japanese language, learn how to read and write and customs and the culture of Japan. After 6 years of shugyo -- shugyo is meditation, I guess you’d call it – we finally…all the children, 6 years old, you know, had to part with their parents. Very hard for them. They were crying every day, they wanted to go home. And finally after 6 years, they decided…parents decided to close the dormitory and all the children were able to go home.

So when I got back to my home, I was 12 years old and started to go to the country school not far from…we had to walk about a mile to go to this school and so mother would fix us a sandwich, you know. We’d eat the sandwich on the way and run, run, run to get there on time. The teacher there taught from the first grade through the eighth grade. He had just hailed in from New York City. He was a big tall man, you know, and every holiday he says…it was a potluck. All the parents would bring food like Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas. And after we ate, he says, “Everybody dance, even the 6-year-old.” That’s how I got started dancing. I enjoyed it so much. And his wife played the piano.

Buddhism education religions religious architecture religious institutions temples

Date: December 6, 2005

Location: Oregon, US

Interviewer: Akemi Kikumura Yano

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum.

Interviewee Bio

Alice Sumida (b.1914) Alice’s parents immigrated to California from Kumamoto, Japan, and were farming in the Central Coast area when she was born. When she was six years old, Alice’s parents placed her in a dormitory at a Buddhist Temple in nearby Guadalupe, where, until the age of twelve, she learned Japanese reading, writing, customs and culture. She then attended a country school where she first developed a love of dance when the teacher encouraged everyone to dance at Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas celebrations. Later, while in San Francisco taking voice lessons, she met her future husband, Mark, a Portland resident ten years her senior. At his insistence, they were engaged after three days and married in two weeks. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the United States entry into World War II, Alice and Mark were ordered to an “Assembly Center” in Portland that was built over the foul-smelling stockyards. After two weeks, they were recruited to the sugar beet fields of Eastern Oregon—where Alice was the only woman doing the “backbreaking work” of harvesting. When the war ended, they took up farming a barren piece of land that, after much hard work and sacrifice, they eventually transformed into the country’s largest gladiola bulb farm. Following Mark’s passing in 1981, Alice revived her earlier love of dance, and, in her 90s, she continued to compete in ballroom dance events around the world. She passed away on August 16, 2018 at age 104. (October 2018)