They would take off from Terminal Island, help each other find the schools of sardine, share nets and radio equipment - competing and cooperating at the same time. In typical Japanese fashion, they all wanted to be independent commercial fisherman, yet they almost always fished together.
A lot of fishermen around San Pedro Harbor had similar contracts with the canneries. He didn’t much like working for someone else if he could help it. Through one of the big canneries he had made a deal to pay for The Nereid with percentages of each catch, and he was anxious to get it paid off. He liked to hear himself called “Skipper.” He wore knee-high rubber boots, a rust-colored turtleneck Mama had knitted him, and a black skipper’s hat. It was worth about $25,000 before the war, and the way he stood in the cabin steering toward open water you would think the whole fleet was under his command. He had another smaller boat, called The Waka (a short version of our name), which he kept in Santa Monica, where we lived.
Papa’s boat was called The Nereid - long, white low-slung, with a foredeck wheel cabin. They would have to check the nets again, and check the fuel tanks again, and run back to the grocery store for some more cigarettes, and then somehow everything had been done, and they were easing away from the wharf, joining the line of boats heading out past the lighthouse, into the harbor. My oldest brothers, Bill and Woody, were his crew. He had attended military school in Japan until the age of seventeen, and part of him never got over that. The water was clean, the sky a sharp Sunday blue, with all the engines of that white sardine fleet puttering up into it, and a lot of yelling, especially around Papa’s boat. In those days - 1941 - there was no smog around Long Beach. I remember it was Sunday because I was out of school, which meant I could go down to the wharf and watch. On that first weekend in December there must have been twenty or twenty-five boats getting ready to leave.
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