(Spanish) In Argentina, in a city, when people think of Japanese, when an Argentine thinks of a Japanese person, he thinks of a dry cleaner’s. Because in the city…generally in the cities, for the last 50 years, the Japanese worked as dry cleaners. Usually those from Okinawa. And then those that lived further outside the capital, outside of Buenos Aires, or outside other cities, were florists. And that was my father’s case as well. My dad initially lived in a town called Darin, which is where my grandfather lived. And after that we moved about 20 kilometers away to a city called Escobar. There there’s a big…there are more than 200 Japanese families living there, and the majority are florists. And, well, Escobar is now known as the flower capital of the country. And the first founders of that…festival were actually the Japanese.
Date: October 7, 2005
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Ann Kaneko
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum