Densho Digital Repository - Kay Yatabe Interview (Densho ID: ddr-ajah-1-9-10)

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PW: So your family is now settled in Berkeley, in West Berkeley. Were they involved with the JA community at that point, whether it's with the churches or the...

KY: No, that's interesting. Because my mother was so involved in Alameda. My father, as I said, his family never lived in... they didn't want to be close to Japantown, so they were not involved. My grandmother after the war, I think, was involved with the Nichiren church in (San Francisco), so I don't know how early that was, but I know that she would go to San Francisco sometimes for that. And then the archbishop Nitten-san would come with Mr. Takayanagi, and they would come and do the memorial services for my grandfather who died right before I was born. My mother, we went to, like, the bazaars at Alameda, and Obon, but we didn't, my mother, I don't think, ever went to a Sunday service. She tried, some family friends of hers, I guess, had offered to take me to the Channing Way church. So I was four, and it's not like she asked me if I wanted to do this, I don't remember being asked. But they took me to the Sunday school, I guess it was Sunday school. I'm not sure, but I remember being confused because everything was in Japanese. You would think Sunday school was probably in English, but my memory is that I didn't know what was going on, because it was all in Japanese.

[Interruption]

KY: What happened was, I don't know how many times I went, but I remember standing on Channing Way after a service crying because that family forgot to take me home. And I remember crying, I didn't know anybody. So my father came in his, had to come in his Studebaker pickup truck, which was the only car they had at the time. Is that right? Yeah, he had to pick me up. My mother later said that that made her mad. She said it pretty mildly, and I never went back again, which is too bad. I guess she tried. I myself was sort of, really wanted to find some kind of spiritual connection, and I remember I learned the Lord's Prayer. I mean, not the Lord's Prayer, no, the, "Now I lay me down to sleep," right? And I would do that at night, and I would read things in the Life Magazine or Saturday Evening Post, and about how it was important to accept Jesus into your heart, and I would read this stuff. I was probably seven or eight, and I really wanted something, but I was just a kid. So when we moved to El Cerrito, when I found one of my neighborhood friends or friends from school, went to the local Methodist church, so I got myself to the Methodist church when I was nine or ten. I was really into it, it really upset the family routine because I wasn't there for Sunday breakfast. My mother would have Sunday breakfast waiting for me when I got home. You know, she made me the dress for Easter and all that stuff, but somehow it didn't feel right. And I had the feeling that my father was okay with it, because he was Christian.

PW: And you were the only family member that would regularly go to this church?

KY: Hmm?

PW: You were the only family member that regularly went to church in El Cerrito?

KY: Oh, yeah, no one else had.

PW: What year was it that you moved?

KY: We moved in '57, so I was nine.

PW: And why did your family move?

KY: That was clear. University and Sixth Street, there was a Union 76 station on Seventh and University, but they wanted to put a Texaco station right next to it. It's right before the overpass to the freeway. So the land got bought, so we had to move. And I think my parents were okay with this because I would have had to go to Burbank junior high school, which at the time, it's on University and about Acton, little bit on the other side of San Pablo, and had a reputation for being a rough school. So my parents, they weren't looking forward to having me and Paul go there, so they found this house in El Cerrito where there weren't any Japanese. I mean, not that it mattered to them because they didn't do things with Japanese people. So we moved to, right close to the El Cerrito Library, right by the train tracks. So the train, and then later BART, half a block away, every seven minutes or so there'd be a train.