Densho Digital Repository - Kay Yatabe Interview (Densho ID: ddr-ajah-1-9-3)

<Begin Segment 3>

PW: So by 1941, how old were both of your parents?

KY: My mother would have been, what, twenty-four? She was born in '15. So twenty-one.

PW: And what about your father?

KY: He would have been a little bit... oh no, I'm sorry. My mother would have been twenty-six, right? She was born in '15. And my father was twenty-four. And he had already started his gardening business. He did this interesting thing where the family, the Yatabes, I think, thought relatively well of themselves. Because Uncle Tom became a dentist, he was one of the founders of the JACL. Uncle Tak was in various jobs growing, and the flower market stuff. And Uncle Tak had gone to Berkeley and graduated. The women don't even, not considered to go to college. But my father started at Berkeley and then dropped out after two years. And he must have made that decision on his own, because everyone got mad at him after he did that. And I've heard later that he was felt to be the smartest person in the family, and that it was a disappointment that he didn't finish school. He said that there were several reasons. One was that high school was so easy for him that college was hard, and he was majoring in entomology, insects, because I think he had the idea he was going to be a gardener. I think at that time, he realized that there weren't a lot of employment opportunities, so that was one thing he was studying. And then the other was that I think he felt kind of isolated because he wasn't -- since they lived where they lived, there weren't a lot of Japanese Americans, and he wasn't real social. And I think he felt left out that he didn't have all the social connections that he could see other Japanese Americans had at Berkeley. And so those were the reasons he initially told me that he dropped out. And then he says, oh, by the way, when he would get home from school, he'd go and his father, who had the shoe repair shop, would be passed out drinking. So I think... I mean, that seems to me a bigger reason, but he really felt like he had to take care of the family. So he just went into gardening. I think he started working at a florist, and then he got set up with his own gardening business, which, of course, he had to sell everything.

PW: At the age, though, so he's finished high school at least, so he went all the way though at Berkeley?

KY: Two years of Berkeley.

PW: Okay. And what about your mother? I should have backed up and asked you a few more questions about growing up, going to school.

KY: She was, a lot of her things -- she's called Beatrice, that some teacher, I guess, early on, decided that her name was Beatrice. I mean, it doesn't even have a relationship to Mitsue. So a lot of things that are written to her through maybe even high school are to Bea-chu, or Beatrice, but Bea-chu. And at some point she became Mitsie, I'm not sure when. She was social, and I'm sure she did well in school, but she was made to feel that she was stupid. And she would tell me the story more than once about how maybe it was because when she was in the backyard at some point, she fell down and then a chicken pecked at her head. And she said she still has the scar where the chicken pecked at her head, and she actually would say, "Do you think that's why I'm this way?" And all the time I was growing up, she would say that she was stupid. Like she would never help with homework, she would always just say, "Wait 'til Daddy gets home." She never helped my brother or me with... she just didn't feel like she could do it, but she had the most incredible memory. She would remember, she'd run into people and say, "Oh, your daughter just had a birthday," and she would remember all these dates. Names, dates, I mean, she obviously was not stupid, but she was made to feel stupid. I'm sure it had an impact on me that she as a woman felt she was stupid, and that my father as a man was the smart one. So she graduated from Alameda High, and there was no talk of her going to college at all. When Auntie Yas graduated from high school, they wanted her to go to Berkeley, but she was not interested in going to college.

PW: So they're no longer teenagers, they're young adults by the time 1941 comes.

KY: My mother worked as a maid and did housework.

PW: In Alameda?

KY: You know, I'm not sure when she did this, but she actually did things like in Piedmont, maybe Oakland. I know that while my grandmother was doing laundry, housecleaning, ironing, and my mother was, she was a maid at some point, I mean, with the whole outfit. She'd work for a family and live there. But I'm not sure if that was before the war. No, it's got to have been before the war.