<Begin Segment 1>

PW: Today is Saturday, October 29, 2022. We are at the home of Dr. Kay Yatabe in El Cerrito, California. My name is Patricia Wakida for Densho, and on camera we have Brad Shirakawa. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. Let's start with your immediate family and parents' background. First, to start, tell me where and when were you born?

KY: I was born in April of 1948 at Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley.

PW: And what was the full name given to you when you were born?

KY: That's it, Kay Yatabe.

PW: And tell me what your father's name was.

KY: His name is Motoki Yatabe. He was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley.

PW: Did he have siblings?

KY: Yes. He was the youngest of seven children, but two of his older sisters were sent to Japan as infants, so there were only five here.

PW: Do you remember all of their names?

KY: Yeah. The first one is Tamotsu, that was Uncle Tom. He was one of the founders of the JACL. Then there was Moyo and Aya. Moyo and Aya, I think. And then there was Chiyo, and then Tak. Tak was the manager of the California, the San Francisco Flower Market for a long time. And then my auntie Toshi and then my father was the baby, and he was born in 1917. Do you want to know the dates? Because Tom was born in 1898, so there was a twenty year span.

PW: Sure, tell me the dates.

KY: So Uncle Tom was born in 1898, Chiyo in 1905, Tak in 1907, Toshi 1913, and Dad in 1917. Grandma was approximately, looks like she might have been fifteen when she came here and seventeen when the first son was born.

PW: Tell me your dad's parents' names?

KY: Father's name was Kozo Yatabe and he came to San Francisco in 1892. And my grandmother Rui was born in 1896, and she came in 1881. Apparently they were in the same area, and they were apparently betrothed before she actually came. He came as a, Kozo came as a shoemaker, shoe repairman, with his brother and his uncle. They'd been trained in shoemaking and shoe repair by a Dutch, some Dutchman that the lord had hired because that samurai period had ended.

PW: What prefecture was this?

KY: This is all in Chiba.

PW: Your grandmother, it sounds like she was also from Chiba?

KY: Right, in a smaller town. Yeah, the Yatabes were from, I guess it was Sakura, and then Grandma was a Kato family that was a few miles away.

PW: And when your grandparents came to California, they came to the San Francisco area or did they move around a lot?

KY: San Francisco. They moved around within San Francisco and never in a JA community. They seemed to like being on, apart from the JA community. So my father was actually born on Union Street, Union and Laguna.

PW: And he grew up there?

KY: No. When he was about eight, the family moved to Berkeley, University and Sixth Street.

PW: And what was your father's profession?

KY: My father was a gardener.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

PW: Let's talk about your mother. Tell me your mother's name and where was she born?

KY: Mitsue Ozeki, and she was born in Alameda. She was born in (1915), and she was the second born to my grandmother. There was an older sister and then there was a stillborn a couple years later, and then my mother and then a younger sister.

PW: And what was her... did you tell me her maiden name?

KY: Ozeki.

PW: Ozeki. Can you tell me anything about her family? What were her parents' names?

KY: I think both her parents came from, like, inland Hiroshima, probably Shobara where a lot of the Alameda people came. Because there were a lot of the Alameda people in that area, and so Mataichi, the grandfather, my mother's father, he came in... he first went to Honolulu in 1895, and then he went to Alameda in 1906. Apparently he worked as a chef or a cook. His wife Akino came in 1906. They got married in 1906 here. And then my Auntie Ne-san was born in 1907, and then a second daughter was apparently a stillborn in 1909. My mother was born in '15, and my auntie Yas was born in '20. And the significant thing is that when my Auntie Ne-san was -- funny that we call her Auntie Ne-san, but that's what my mother referred to her, as Ne-san, so she was Auntie Ne-san. When she was five, her paternal grandmother had died, and I guess they thought that the paternal grandfather would like to have a girl around the house. And I guess maybe for education, too, but I'm not sure that was the main reason. So she was sent to Japan, and there's photos of her as a five-year-old all dressed up. And she went with two kids from another family, and I don't think they were staying, but somebody, family friend took them. And you look at this picture of my aunt, and it was just heartbreaking. She's five and she does not look happy at all. There's lovely photos all dressed up right on the ship. And then, of course, a couple years later, there's a stillbirth. And I always had the impression that my mother, who always was this cheerful, she appeared happy-go-lucky, some would say she was the clown, but I think she would even say that her purpose in life was to keep, to make her mother happy. Because I can imagine how her mother felt. So it was always a prime concern of my mother's that her mother would be happy.

PW: Tell me the names of the siblings again. Because we know about Auntie Ne-san, but what was her given name?

KY: Oh, Hatsuyo.

PW: Hatsuyo.

KY: Hatsuyo. The next one, I don't know if she had a name, Brad found something. He found, what the urn? I don't remember if there was a name. My mother was Mitsue and my aunt, the youngest aunt was Yasue.

PW: Very traditional.

KY: Is it?

PW: They're numbers, I think, right?

KY: Oh, really?

PW: Eight. Do you know where your grandparents lived in Alameda? Like which neighborhood or...

KY: Well, I gathered they all lived sort of around the same area, but I think initially, I think it was all around Buena Vista and Park. And close to the Buddhist temple, and I don't know all the streets. They moved around in that area, Clement.

PW: Tell me anything you know about your mother's parents. You said that you think they came from Hiroshima Prefecture. Do you know anything about their family, her family?

KY: In Japan?

PW: Yeah.

KY: No. I've got names written down someplace, but no, my mother didn't talk about her father. He sounds like he was quite a character based on the photographs and all these things. She didn't talk about... I even checked with my cousins in Detroit, and so my auntie Yas didn't talk about him either. I think he was quite a character. And in the interview I did, the oral history I did with my mother many years ago, she said that he was, she used the word "doraku," which I'm not sure what it means, but maybe manic, maybe fun-loving, there was a bunch of things. But it sounded like he was not consistently employed and that they were poor a lot. But he was apparently a friendly, outgoing guy, and that it didn't bother him to ask friends for money.

PW: Were they part of the Alameda Japanese community, like did they belong to the church or temple?

KY: Yeah. They were associated with the Buddhist Temple. I think my grandmother and Nellie Takeda's mother were friends. And my mother grew up as good friends with Nellie. So there's all these pictures, the same group of women.

PW: And they were close with other families that you're still connected to in Alameda?

KY: I'm not connected to anyone except for the Takedas. My mother passed away in 2001, and I wasn't, I didn't have relationships with the other families, really. So except for the Takedas, and there was a number of them, so that I really appreciate them.

PW: So let's move forward to 1941. Your father was in San Francisco at the time?

KY: No.

PW: Where was he at the time?

KY: Berkeley.

PW: He was in Berkeley.

KY: Yeah.

PW: And your mother was in Alameda?

KY: Yes. Can I go back and say that my grandfather died in 1939, and in 1939 it was the World's Fair on Treasure Island. And my mother, being the fun-loving, social person that she was, went there umpteen times. And he died, I found out, through Brad, after a fishing trip. And the picture I have that my mother gave me is that she was out having a good time. She came home, public transportation, and that when she was approaching the house, her sister and mother were waiting for her like, come on, come on. Because her father had died, and my mother felt so bad that she wasn't there. She felt very bad. Okay, so then that was 1939, and one of the things that he used to... he drove. I don't know whose car he drove, if it was their car. But my Alameda grandma wanted someone to drive the car, and my mother wanted to be the person to drive, but they said, Grandma said no, that she was too scatterbrained. And that upset my mother, so the younger sister was the one who got to drive. And the interesting thing is the younger sister, throughout her life, was the driver of her family in Detroit. Auntie Ne-san had, she was in Japan, came back maybe when she was about in her teens. But then got TB in Alameda, apparently not in Japan, but in Alameda, and was hospitalized for a number of years. And then my mother and her younger sister were in a sanitarium also for a number of months. I guess they were positive PPD, I don't know what they...

PW: What year do you think that was?

KY: That was... my mother was like ten. Oh, it looks like my mother was twelve, and she was there for, like, three or four months, and my auntie Yas would have been then seven. She was five years younger, and she was there for maybe more months, a few more months than that.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<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.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

PW: So do you know, for families in Alameda, when the announcement is made that you're going to have to leave Alameda, what happened? I understand that Alameda was one of the earlier communities that had to evacuate the island because of the military importance of Alameda? Do you know anything about this?

KY: That Grandma went... I had the feeling that, it's sort of vague in my memory, but I think they may have gone to stay with some friends in Oakland. Not that that helped, I don't know if that would have helped, but I think that they went with another family in Oakland. In fact, there was a friend at Alameda, I've seen her in the pictures, who went up to Sacramento be with, maybe relatives. And they wanted Mom's family to go up there, but they didn't want to do that.

PW: Was there a Civil Control Station where you know if the family had to register or anything in Alameda?

KY: I have no idea.

PW: So they were in Oakland when they eventually had to move completely out.

KY: I think so, I think.

PW: Do you know anything about -- again, this is your mother's family...

KY: Yeah, Dad's family I know more.

PW: For your mom's family though, do you know anything about how they went from this house in Oakland, or who the family was?

KY: Ben and something Ninomiya. Ninomiya, I think.

PW: And then from there, did they go to Tanforan?

KY: Tanforan.

PW: Okay. Then let's go to your dad's side, because they both ended up in the same, Tanforan and Topaz.

KY: Right. See, somehow the Yatabe side talked more about it, so I know more. But I know that my father got his parents all organized and he sold his stuff, he closed the shoe shop. They arranged, they knew somebody at the American Trust Bank on San Pablo who was gonna collect rent, and they rented the house to a Mexican family who stayed there the whole time. They decided to all gather in Redwood City where my uncle Tak was living, and his wife, my Auntie Kuni, had family there, they were growers. So they all gathered in Redwood City, so that they all could go up to the same place. But other things about my father was that he had made a bow and arrow, and he took that to the police, and they're kind of like, "So what were you doing?" And my father being such a good man, he said, "Well, you know, we're supposed to turn in all weapons," so he had to turn in his handmade... and then the other thing was, of course, the dog, was his dog Pete. So my father, being this loner person, and the baby in the family, and he didn't get along with his older sister who was three years older. At fifteen, I don't know how it happened, but he got a dog who he would say was the love of his life. This is before he met my mother. And he has this dog, it's like a, one of these shaggy, pretty good-sized shaggy dog. And so he said that, you know, getting ready for the relocation, he had to put the dog down because he said he couldn't give him away because the dog only ate white rice, and so therefore no one would take him, and so he put the dog down at Berkeley Humane.

PW: Was your father the only one living with his parents by that time?

KY: Yeah.

PW: Did he tell you about going to the Berkeley Civil Control Station?

KY: No, no. Actually, I've never heard. Except for when he turned in his bow and arrow.

PW: What about boarding the buses to Tanforan or anything?

KY: No, because they did it from Redwood City, but I have not heard.

PW: Oh, that's true.

KY: I have not heard. And I haven't heard, I don't recall them saying anything about the conditions at Tanforan. I don't remember them saying much about that.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

PW: And what about Topaz? Did your father talk about Topaz?

KY: Well, yeah. My father was in the, sort of the advance team that went to Topaz to kind of finish up the building. So he left a little earlier. My mother got mumps. Mumps, I think. So she was delayed, she had to wait. I don't know if they put her in the hospital, but she waited and she went by herself.

PW: Do you think she got mumps in Tanforan?

KY: Yeah, must have been.

PW: And your dad, you're saying early...

KY: Because he went early.

PW: Topaz opened September 1st.

KY: September. He must have gone, like, in August or something.

PW: So your mother was isolated, had to recover, and then she joined the family.

KY: Yeah.

PW: And who -- let's start with your father's side -- so who of that family, of the Yatabes, went to Topaz?

KY: Of that family?

PW: Yeah.

KY: Uncle Tak, his wife, and their son, who was around five at the time, Jon, and then my father and his parents. And then because the oldest sister here, Auntie Chiyo, married a medical student who was from Hilo, and she went back with him and then had her family there when she was being the nurse running the hospital, running the house. When she was pregnant with the second child, she asked her younger sister, my Auntie Toshi, to join her and help her. So Auntie Toshi then went to Hilo, met somebody, had her families there. So I had those two aunts in Hilo, and they each had two kids there. So the only family ones left here were Uncle Tak and my father. Uncle Tom had a dental practice in Fresno, so he went, he was interned in Jerome, it was he and his wife and their eleven-year-old son.

PW: And then same thing for your mother's side of the family. Who went?

KY: They all went to, my mother and her two sisters and grandma went to Topaz.

PW: So your parents met in Topaz?

KY: Technically Ogden, but in those years, yeah. It was in '44. They were both in Ogden working during the summer at a Del Monte cannery. I thought my father was topping sugar beets, but maybe that was another summer. But somehow my mother's girlfriend wanted to go out with this particular guy, and her parents said you can't do that unless it's a double date, unless you're going with somebody else. So they found, Mom had agreed, and they found somebody. And then at the last minute, this other guy couldn't make it, and my mother was, found out that my father was the substitute and she was really looking forward to it, because she had been eyeing him for a while. Her family was on Block 4 and his family was on 11. I think that's right, or was it the other way around? And somehow she had occasion to walk by, and she would see him. And she would say this, she told me this story several times, but he would be wearing some kind of homburg hat and one of those red and black lumber jackets, and he would be whittling in front of his barrack. Of course, he never, I don't think he ever noticed. He would say that they met on a blind date in Ogden and that it was love at first sight. So I guess he, I don't think he ever saw her. [Laughs] I mean, he was whittling, you know. So they went on this blind date, and after that, that was it. So that would have been the summer of '44, and then he was drafted in the spring of '45.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

PW: So I know he was drafted, inducted into the army and he served two years. Did he ever talk about that?

KY: Yeah. They took a test, they were given a test on language aptitude, and he did well on that, because remember, he was a smart guy. And it didn't matter that he was Japanese, but he was sent to, for six months to study conversational Japanese at Yale. So that was a real experience for him to go through New York and be able to go to New York City, be in New Haven. And so he spent the six months learning Japanese. I would imagine he was relearning. I mean, he knew, he spoke Japanese at home.

PW: And this was maybe 1944 and '46?

KY: '45.

PW: '45?

KY: '45, yeah. See, now, his older brother had volunteered for the 442. So Uncle Tak, at the old age of thirty-five, volunteered. And he's got numerous Purple Hearts and stuff and was in Italy. Of course, I asked, "Well, why didn't you go?" to my father, and he kind of says, well, first he says, "Well, one in the family is enough," and he felt like he didn't have to prove that he was an American. My father was very identified with being American.

PW: So after being trained in the language department at Yale, what happened to him then?

KY: He went to Japan. He went to Japan, I think it was in Yokohama. He was technically supposed to be a draftsman or something, but I think he ended up doing a lot of interpreting. And I'm not sure why, but I got the impression that he would run into a lot of prostitutes, young Japanese women, and he would help them. I mean, that's what he would talk about, was helping people, and that he would, whenever he got care packages from America, he would give gifts to his superiors. During the whole time he was in the army, from day one, he wrote a letter to my mother. And he has lovely handwriting, and so I have two shoeboxes full of these letters, because my mother saved every one. Now, did he save hers? No, he was moving around. But I've got these letters, and I actually... right after my mother died, one of my Hawaii cousins was here. We were looking at it and she's sort of reading it, and she's cracking up because towards the end, towards the end of this time in the service, there's different things being discussed, and I just couldn't, I don't want to hear it. So I had looked at the early ones, but it's just so funny to hear, here they are. I mean, they're in love, they're young. It's just funny to read my father being as demonstrative in words, because he was not demonstrative in person. So that was really, it was very cute. So I've got all these letters, I haven't looked at all of them, and I'm planning on giving them to someplace like the museum.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

PW: And going back to your mother, quickly, where is she when your father is in Tokyo, or Yokohama?

KY: She left camp around the time that my father had gone. And she and a girlfriend went, they had found jobs in Baltimore to be, she thought, stagehands. And when they got there, it looked like they weren't going to be stagehands, that they were going to be on stage. And that freaked her out. I got the impression that it was more like a burlesque or strip club kind of thing, but I can't find any proof of that. But anyway, they got right on a train and they went to Cleveland where her friends had friends. And so for a few months, she worked in a factory making bombs or something, I forget what, there was something written down. So she did that for three months or so, and then by that time, it's like summer, right, it's summer and they're getting ready to leave, the family is getting ready to leave Topaz. So she went to Detroit where her younger sister and her husband were, and spent a couple weeks there. And then she went back to Topaz to, I guess, help get things ready. But I somehow have the feeling that she might have returned to the Bay Area before Auntie Ne-san and Alameda Grandma, I'm not sure. Because it sounded like, for a while, she stayed with the Yatabes in Berkeley, and then when Grandma and Auntie Ne-san had a place, they went back to Alameda, she joined them in Alameda. The addresses changed a lot in that time.

PW: Did your mom talk about Topaz and that whole process of moving?

KY: She would say that she had a great time. She would always say she had a great time. She talked about, she learned to knit, I think, in Tanforan. And so she really loved that, and she made a sweater, and so she was knitting in Topaz and also I think doing embroidery. She worked in the hospital. She worked in the hospital. I didn't hear about a social life there. All I know is that a lot of her friends lived in a different part of the camp, so she didn't get to see all her good friends, because the Takedas were there and all these Alameda friends were there, but they weren't close to where she was. I don't know if she... it seems like she didn't regularly go to church. Now, the Buddhist church was really important to her. She was YBA conventions, basketball, she was really active in the church. And I gather that she wasn't as active it was during camp. I thought I heard her say that it was because it was so far away. But if I look at the map where she is and where the Buddhist temple was, it wasn't that far away. So I'm not sure what it was, I'm not sure.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

PW: So it sounds like after Topaz closed, that they ended up back in the Bay Area, they didn't go anywhere else. After your mother's travels, though, she just... when did your father get back to the mainland?

KY: He was discharged in '47. And I think he proposed. I'm not sure about this, but my guess is that he proposed on Valentine's Day of '47. Because my mother, who saves everything, I found this calendar. And on February 14th, says, oh, she sort of seemed disappointed. And then later on there's a note, "He asked the question." So that was February. He got out, they got married in April of '47.

PW: Where did they get married?

KY: They got married at the Yatabe family house, and lots of pictures, I have lots of pictures, it's just in front of the house. And it was just a few people. And the funny thing is, I was just reading over my notes of when I interviewed her and it looks like she was married by a Reverend Yamashita from the Oakland Methodist Church. So I think it's (a relative of) Ann Dion's, it was everyone's relative, right, the Yamashita? So that was funny. I mean, it was interesting that, see, my father considered himself Christian because when he and my Auntie Toshi were young, some white woman in the neighborhood took them to the Presbyterian church in West Berkeley. So he considered himself Christian, because I'm kind of surprised, my mother was such a Buddhist.

PW: Where was the Yatabe house?

KY: Oh, it was on University and Sixth. It was right across the street from the public health building. So I grew up there. I mean, I spent the first nine years of my life in that house.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

PW: Let's go just a little bit longer. So now we're back to you. So you're born, your parents are married and they settled in Berkeley, tell me about that childhood home, describe it to me.

KY: Yeah. The shoe repair shop is downstairs, right? It's glass windows, and then the stairs lead up to the house. And there was a living room, two bedrooms on one side, another bedroom on the other side, and then the kitchen in the back, and we ate in the kitchen on a table that I have in here. And I think I enjoyed that house. My brother and I would be switched bedrooms periodically, because my parents had the farther back bedroom, and then my grandma had the one that was the west bedroom. And Paul and I seemed to take turns sleeping in the same room with grandma. I'm not sure what determined when or what, but have... I remember being in both bedrooms, my little nightlight, and then I remember all the stuff I had. The other bedroom, when I was there by myself, seemed to be... it was a big room, but it was a storage room. It had boxes. At that time, I wasn't into looking through things yet, but there were a lot of things stored in that room.

PW: And so you have a brother named Paul?

KY: Paul, yes.

PW: An what's the order of the siblings?

KY: Are you kidding? [Laughs] I mean, I can't imagine being a younger daughter, I mean, clearly I was definitely the older, the "good girl." And he came twenty-one months later and was, of course, was more difficult. I was, apparently, pretty easy. He was more difficult, and especially when he got older, I think he was a handful. Growing up, we were probably treated a lot like we were the same age. I didn't get any perks from being older, because he would be like the same size as me, and our bedtimes would be the same. I didn't get to stay up later because I was older. And unfortunately for me, he had a low frustration tolerance, and he would blow up easily or get upset. And he would insist on getting his way a lot, and if he didn't, he'd cry or whatever. So the lesson I got from my parents was they would pull me aside if I was playing some game with him and said, "You should let Paul win, because if he doesn't win, he's going to have a tantrum." So that's how I grew up. I had to... there's a word, but I had to give in to Paul, or I had to make allowances for him. I really like him now, but there were decades, later on, that I had little contact with him. It was a good thing that I really liked his wife and enjoyed her. And at some point, I mean, when was I? It was before my mother passed away, I was in my late forties. We got together and I started to really enjoy him. We have a lot of similarities and tastes and things. No, I really enjoy him, but the teenage years, not good.

PW: Do you think... your parents had such a childhood themselves of gender, kind of, divisions, and allocation. I'm not sure how you feel that might have affected your childhood.

KY: Well, I think there was a problem there, right? Because I was... apparently, I mean, I didn't know it then, but apparently I was really smart. And I heard later, my grandmother saying -- I heard this from my aunt, not from my parents -- that, oh, Kay can do anything. But I'm the girl, right? I'm supposed to be a boy, I think. And Paul was more touchy, and school wasn't as easy for him. And I think... I gather he might have gotten, maybe he was easily upset at school also. I don't know if he got frustrated, probably. So, yeah, I think the gender things were really weird, and the fact that my mother would say things like, oh, if my father and Paul and I were playing some kind of game, like Concentration, you know, the cards, memory game. And I could hear my mother talking to her sister, which she did every night, saying, "Oh, they're smart, they're playing this game, and she was not involved. So I think what was unfortunate for me was that I identified with my father and not my mother, and that would lead to some gender weird stuff, as I was a teenager into college. I do recall for much of my, through college and through, oh, probably even through medical school, I really favored men's clothes. My clothes were, I liked shirts, like men's shirts, I love wide wale corduroy, and I would find wide wale corduroy pants. And at some point, my parents got into these wallaby shoes, do you know wallabys? Well there was some picture someplace where all of us, including Grandma, had on wallabys. And they're not feminine, pretty shoes, but I wore them all the time, because they were comfortable. And like my father, I have very wide feet, and so they were more comfortable. And at some point I bought desert boots, which were kind of simplified. And my boyfriend at the time said, "That is one step too much." He acknowledged that I wore boys' clothes, but he said, "Those shoes were one step too much." I kept wearing them, didn't I?

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

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.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

PW: Tell me a little more about elementary school and junior high school.

KY: Elementary school, I loved school. But I was kind of way ahead, because my father, as a gardener, one of his clients was a school principal, and she would throw books, like readers, away, and he would bring them home. And also by this time I'm going to the library, and I love going to the library and reading. So school -- this is West Berkeley, okay, this is West Berkeley. It's not an academically progressive school in those days. When I was in fourth grade, low fourth, there were no readers, the readers didn't arrive, so there were no books. And so the teacher -- by this time I had a teacher that I really didn't like that much. So she had to occupy us with various things, so I remember we made puppets, paper mache puppets. And frustrating to me, because I wanted substance, I wanted books to read. And oh, I helped out with, I did the report cards for everybody because what else was there for me to do? And around this time -- this was Berkeley -- I think I was talkative in class until around this time, and then I kind of, I clammed up or I just felt too shy and I started getting really quiet, so I got really quiet. Then we moved. I had started school in February, so when we moved to El Cerrito, I was, had done half of fourth grade. So the option was either repeat the first half of fourth grade or skip and go into the fifth grade. Well, I knew what I wanted to do, but they had to argue it, I guess. And I learned my multiplication tables or whatever I needed to do, division or multiplication, with my father, and then I started fifth grade. Because I skipped a half grade, the school puts me in the "dumb" class, that's obvious. I mean, that was their thinking. So there were two classes per grade, El Cerrito, it takes in Richmond Annex and it's like, definitely flatlands across San Pablo. I actually felt like the teacher wasn't that smart, the fifth grade. But you get these, they started, public television started. I guess maybe it was public radio, but they would pipe in something from KQED into the classroom. And because I was in the "dumb" class, I got story time. Because my brother was in the "smart" class, two years, two grades below, he got Spanish, Spanish lessons. And it just didn't seem right. And this is one of the things where I feel like my parents, perhaps because of the internment experience, they would never have gone to the school and say, blah, blah, blah, this is not right. They would never do that, they would never have gone to advocate for me as parents today, I think, would do. So that fifth grade was... fortunately, I had the library close by, I guess. And then sixth grade I got a, it was a brand-new teacher, she had been a student teacher, a brand-new teacher who seemed to understand that I wanted to do more. But, of course, she sits me next to the most yakamashii kid in the school, who was Japanese American, who had "kissing day" on Wednesdays. He would bring candy and he would sit at one end of the schoolyard, and he would give girls candy and they'd get to kiss him, vice versa. Anyway, I am in the so-called "dumb" class, and there was a difference in the two classes. So anyway, I got through, the teacher was good.

And then when I got to junior high school, which in those days started in the seventh grade and went to Portola, which is no longer here, but relocated to Korematsu. They put me in, we were stratified from A to U, and I could tell this because you look at your homeroom card and they had a little letter there. This school, Portola, had the kids from Kensington. So the Kensington are all these white, upper-middle class, well-educated, the kids of professors, etcetera. So heavily stratified at Portola, apparently Portola was doing experiments with education in terms of putting kids in things. So I was, they skipped one whole class at the Kensington Elementary, one whole class got skipped. So that there were siblings often in the same grade, right? So I was in the class with the younger siblings who had been skipped. The smartest kids were in the top one, I was in the next one, and that was, I guess that was, at least academically it was more interesting for me. It was strange, I didn't understand... I didn't understand about class or race, really, or anything. And it was different. I think it was largely class. I felt sort of less-than because all my classmates had piano lessons, music lessons. The families had more literary magazines than my family did. They read the Chronicle, we read the Tribune. I just felt a little bit outside, even though they saw me as one of them.

PW: Was there a big difference in the racial makeup of the schools from Berkeley to El Cerrito?

KY: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because Berkeley was quite mixed. I think there were at least three Asians in my class. There were several Black kids and Mexican kids, so it felt very, it felt mixed. I get to El Cerrito here and it's all, it's white. There's probably some Italians, there's a famous Italian American family that were bullies later on, and the girl was one of my friends. It really felt like working class white at Fairmont school. And then being at Portola in junior high, a handful of Asians in my class, two or three Chinese. For some reason, I think the Japanese were more in the Annex or in Richmond area, so they weren't at Portola. There were some differences when I got to El Cerrito, though. There were more Japanese, but the Japanese were, they weren't in my classes. They weren't in my classes. They weren't so academically inclined as I was being, as I was raised to be.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

PW: Did you ever have mentors in high school or around that age, anybody who encouraged you or supported you?

KY: Yeah, there was a couple, there was a woman from Hilo who was studying, got a PhD in botany at Berkeley when I was in school, and I thought, that's great. I mean, that was like something to aim for like a PhD in Botany. And the other important person for me was Ruth Fukuchi who currently is in J-Sei Home and kind of declining, but she was midway in age between me and my mother. And Ruth and her husband were my parents' most common social, the people they would hang out with or we would do things like go to Santa Cruz in the summer. Ruth happened to be the best friend of my cousin's girlfriend, that's the woman who painted that. And Tak worked at the Union, the gas station right next door. So that's how my parents got to know Tak, and then Binky brought Ruth over at some point. And Ruth was really important to me. She was the one who told me that I was... she told me that I was smart and cute, and blah, blah, blah. Oh, here's the other thing. During high school years, my brother would always tell me I was fat, ugly and stupid. Fat, ugly and stupid, fat, ugly and stupid, over and over again. This is in my head, over and over again, fat, ugly and stupid. And then my father would sort of agree, because I was, you know, muscular. I don't think I was fat, maybe chubby. I look at the pictures and I said... but I got the impression that I was not the way someone else would like me to be. And I did have a sense of perhaps being a disappointment to my mother because I wasn't as social as she was. I was more brain and she was like the social thing, and that all ties in with the Alameda stuff.

PW: Describe that more. Because she in her personality?

KY: Well, no. I think it was partly her personality, but okay, first when I was, when we were still living in Berkeley, we used to go to Alameda every other Saturday, we took the bus. We walked up to University, San Pablo, caught the 72 bus all the way into downtown Oakland, transferred downtown Oakland and then went to Alameda. And then Paul and I would have to go across the street to play with the Takeda kids. And the younger two Takeda kids, Susan and Carol, were my brother's and my age. And then the rest of the families, anyway, that's what we had to do. Now, I personally, what I liked to do with my time is I liked to read and draw or knit or whatever crafts I was into. But they didn't do that over there. You had to run around and play games and things. And we did this I don't know how many years. My father worked on Saturdays, so he and my grandma Yatabe would come back, well, they would drive to Alameda in the afternoon and we'd have dinner at my aunt and grandmother's place, and then we would all go home together. But I forget when... we stopped going all the time, but there were a fair number of visits going to Alameda. And then when we were teenagers, it may have only been like certain occasions, like bazaar or mochitsuki. But my brother and I, because we didn't fit in, we just didn't fit in. He was, Paul was someone who, if you didn't play the game his way, he didn't want to play. And I was really, really, really shy, I just was so shy. And the Takedas, it's a household of all these very sociable people. And especially when we got into our teen years, when there's more social activity, we just felt left out. And I think our way of dealing with it was to say, to look down on it, and Paul would kind of imitate the way the JA guys walked. Someone even tried to get me to play on a basketball team in those days, somewhere in Berkeley, and I just didn't fit in. And I tried playing basketball, I'm not athletic. And the other thing was, it was the days of ratted hair. My hair never stayed ratted, so it was... it was a lot. I just didn't fit. So all those teen years, I could have met Ned in those years, because he was at the house. I mean, a lot of people hung out at the Takeda house.

PW: Ned Isokawa?

KY: Uh-huh, yeah, yeah. He was friends with Kent. And I just didn't, you didn't fit in. And I think even this friend Ruth once told me that Nellie told her that she felt sorry for my mother because my brother and I were so, whatever word she used, we were so socially awkward and socially out of it. So my mother would have loved it if I was like one of those sorority types, I think she would have loved it. It seemed like she would have, and I wasn't that.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

PW: So what was your thing? Like you said that you liked to knit and you liked to read. Tell me more about yourself in those teenage years. What were you into, music you listened to?

KY: Other than the Beatles?

PW: Tell me about that.

KY: I was totally into the Beatles. That was junior year, I think. I was totally into the Beatles.

PW: Tell me more.

KY: I had a group of girlfriends that we went to a Cow Palace concert, and then we decided, we went to the Jack Tar Hotel because we thought they were staying at the Jack Tar Hotel. I remember we were walking around in the hallways looking for the Beatles. [Laughs] I don't know, we just got into the music. Was that my junior year, must have been. And so I had different groups of friends. I had some friends from Fairmont who I commuted with, right? I mean, because sometimes my friend's mother would pick me up on the way. Then I had the PE friends, the ones that, because I became what they call a PE leader, I had a different outfit, because we were the ones who were in charge. Collecting the equipment, had to referee or whatever we were supposed to be, I don't know. I had a different outfit. And so I had my PE friends, there were like three of us, and then I had to really... I think the two girls that I really enjoyed, the really unattractive, weird girls, one was in Kensington, really odd. Really odd person, but really funny and smart, but really odd. And then another one who was also, the Kensington one was, like, dark hair and skinny, and the other one was sort of round. She was also, I mean, funny, smart and funny, I mean, almost ugly. And I really enjoyed them. And my different groups of friends, they didn't like each other. I might have stayed most in touch with the PE friends, they're kind of normal, but not quite in the Hills, they weren't Kensington. They were more like, closer to Ashbury, so a little bit higher up than where I was by the tracks.

PW: What would you do socially? Like what would you guys do outside of school?

KY: Oh, not much, not socially. I can't remember doing anything socially.

PW: Did you have a job?

KY: Hmm?

PW: Did you have a job when you went to school?

KY: I babysat. I babysat either my cousins' kids, but mostly Ruth's kids, Cathy Fukuchi and Matthew Fukuchi, I would babysit them. I didn't have a job. You know, summers, one of the things I remember doing was really into italic calligraphy, and I would sit there and I would practice a letter. My father did really nice calligraphy, and you could see it in his, when he was studying Japanese in the army, on the backside he had doodles and he would do Old English writing, I mean, he did all that stuff. So I got into italic, and I'd write pages. And then I liked, I would listen to Broadway musicals, LPs, I liked that. After the Beatles, I think I got a guitar when I was sixteen. And there was a brief time when my brother and I were really together, we both liked all this music, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals, Dave Clark Five, all of these things. And we kind of got along in that period. Socially, I must have gone out and did things with friends, but I didn't... it's not like I wanted to. The Mormon missionaries did come to my house at one point because I had, one of my best friends was Mormon, and so she brought the missionaries over and they tried to convert me. My mother was appalled that they came, and I stopped them after one time. The social life was with my family, and the Fukuchis would come over. The social life was family friends and not... oh wow, I haven't thought about that, but no.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

PW: This is a little bit of a transition, but when did you first care about camp?

KY: I feel like I grew up hearing about it, because if I was with my mother, and if she ran into anybody, they would always refer to camp. They were like, "What block were you on?" Everything was before camp or after camp, "When did you make this?" "Oh, I made this after, before camp or after camp." So I grew up hearing about it, but I don't have a memory of much. I placed it once I got to El Cerrito, so I think I was more understanding after I was nine or ten. And I do remember watching one of those Walter Cronkite twentieth century whatever, it was one of those Sunday evening shows, and they did one on the internment camps. And my mother is, she's standing. She's too busy to sit down and watch television, so she's standing and watching it, and she had tears in her eyes. And I do remember, I remember that. And then if you said anything, she said, oh, she had a great time.

PW: And this was in, you were in high school?

KY: No, I was about, I was ten, twelve.

PW: All right. So you graduate from El Cerrito High in 1965, and then...

KY: First in the class.

PW: First in the class.

KY: Maybe tied for first in the class. I wasn't that smart. I really wasn't that smart, there were kids that were way smarter than me, and I had a hard time with Physics. There were kids way smarter, it's just that I was the one that, I studied.

PW: Well, but it got you to Berkeley.

KY: Yeah, but everyone went to Berkeley. In those days, the idea was that the top twelve, twelve-and-a-half percent of high school students could go to Berkeley. I mean, it was the state school then. And I didn't do that well on the merit, that test, my scores weren't that great. That's when I realized I wasn't that smart. Because I know the counselor was sort of surprised that I didn't do that well to become a merit scholar. I think I might have applied... I don't think I applied anyplace. I applied to Stanford, I think I was for medical school. No, I think it was just for... everyone I knew went to Berkeley.

PW: Was your family supportive of this?

KY: Oh, it was absolutely assumed, are you kidding? I mean, this was assumed from when I was young. Because my cousin Jon, who was, like, ten years older than me, he went to Berkeley. And people said, "Oh, you're going to be like Jon?" Of course. I was the first female to go to college. I mean, my cousin in Hawaii went to nursing school, so that's college. But it was just assumed.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

PW: What was UC Berkeley like in 1966?

KY: It was great because we had got, my senior civics teacher had invited two guys who were El Cerrito High graduates, and they were active in the Free Speech Movement to come to talk to our civics class. So that got me really excited because they were talking up what was going on with the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio. So when I got to Berkeley, my father did this, perhaps, passive aggressive thing, I don't know. I brought home a Parents' Confidential Statement so I could get financial aid so I could live on campus. He never filled it out. And I, for whatever reason, I couldn't say, "Hey, Dad, why don't you fill this out?" There was no way I was saying anything, so we never did it. So I never got financial aid, so I had to live at home, which was a disappointment for me. I wanted to be on campus, I wanted to have a campus life. So what I did, which was perhaps not wise, we were on the semester system. I'm taking a full load, you can imagine, math, everything. I'm going to get a PhD in something. And I decide I'm going to get a job for the Christmas holidays. And I apply for a job at El Cerritos Capwell's, and I wanted to do giftwrap, because I was always really good at giftwrap, my giftwrap through high school, I did really imaginative things. And they told me I was too short. And it never occurred to me to argue that or say I could stand on a stool. Now, my Auntie Kuni's sister worked at the Oakland Capwell's and so she got me a job in giftwrapping, fancy wrap. I, of course, just tried to do plain wrap, but they said, "You're supposed to be in fancy wrap," so I did fancy wrap. So this is, like, crazy, but three days a week, and they had to be the days where I didn't have an afternoon lab. So I would take the bus to Oakland, from Berkeley to downtown and work until closing time, I don't know, nine or something. And then my parents would come pick me up. And I did, three days a week I did that, with a load of classes, it was kind of crazy. If I looked at this, I says, that's not a good idea. But I so much wanted to move on campus. My mother was afraid I was going to get consumption, TB. So I did that, and then after Christmas, that ended. Fortunately, we were on the semester system so that I could still cram. And then I think I got a job, I think I got a work study job, definitely for the summer, dissecting aphids in Albany, Gill Tract.

PW: And that was your freshman year?

KY: After the freshman year, yeah. And then I got myself into the co-ops, into living in a co-op.

PW: What year was that?

KY: For my junior year -- I mean, for my sophomore year. So I lived at Stebbins Hall on campus.

PW: How was that?

KY: Well, it was pretty weird, because the first roommate I had, I think was psychotic. She was an electrical engineering/computer science major, and she talked all night about all these things that were in her head. I eventually, everyone looked at me and said, "How can you stand that?" So I did get, I got out and got a really nice roommate who was actually, she was twins, and she and her twin were on their way to medical school, so that was a nice little thing. Because I had never, I mean, all through college I did not think of going to medical school. I was going to be a PhD, scientist, research scientist.

PW: And when did you determine that? So you're at Cal, and when did you start realizing, okay, there's a track that I'd like to start pursuing?

KY: Well, I loved science, and I had this idea with this woman who was a botany major. I was tending more towards biochemistry, and so I took all these classes that were appropriate. I had full heavy science curriculum, and in those days, you could place out of... there was a U.S. history requirement and something else. Maybe government, I placed out of it. And so I had one year in the co-ops, and then the next year, because I had this friend from, Chinese Hawaiian friend from my classes, she invited me to join three of them from the dorms in an apartment. So the junior year I lived off campus in an apartment with three other girls, and one of those was the woman who was living in this house for twenty years. She just moved out last year.

PW: So these are the friends that you just hung out with?

KY: These were, yeah, I had different stages of friends, but my first friends were Asian, because I'd never had that before. So I had a Chinese friend and a Japanese American friend and I loved that. I mean, it was just great, I don't know, I've never had before, especially the Japanese American friend. And then in the co-ops, also I gravitated toward having these Chinese friends. And then when I moved into this apartment, well, the one woman was Chinese, but she had a boyfriend already. But the other two women were Jewish and political. And my particular roommate Wendy was really into it. She eventually got a PhD in political theory, so she was a lot of my education. I mean, she would talk Nietzsche, Rousseau, I mean, she was really into. And there were some really great professors at Berkeley at that time, and she kind of thought it was too bad that I was placing out of all these non-science classes, and she thought my education was really lopsided, which it was. The better non-science classes were hard to get into, because there were big lecture halls and then too many students wanted them. Oh, and I started going to demonstrations immediately. It was Vietnam Day at first, Vietnam Day. So that was even when I was living at home, I would go to demonstrations.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

PW: My next question was going to be was your politically active on campus, so just go ahead and...

KY: Not really. I went to these demonstrations. I was very shy, passive, could not talk. So I would just go, and I was never in any kind of planning group. And as the years went by, we had, senior year was pretty, a lot of things were going on. It was the Black Panthers and Eldridge Cleaver that first quarter. Second quarter was, Asian Studies started, I mean, all that stuff started. And I felt funny about that, because by that time, I had this white boyfriend. And I remember somebody -- and I almost think it was Floyd Huen who said this, "You Asian women with your white boyfriends." So I felt like, uh-oh, I'm going to back off here. So that was funny. So did not get into the inner planning group at all, I was just on the outskirts. And then the last quarter was People's Park. And so there was just a lot of stuff. And I stayed, I stayed in Berkeley and got a job. Oh, because I had applied to graduate school. I had a really hard time -- oh god, should I get into this? I had a really hard time my senior year. I had this white boyfriend who I knew through Wendy, who I met through Wendy, and he was into my education. He saw me as an illiterate biochemistry major. I mean, so he was into "educating me" at night, and he would lecture me first on politics, that was the first one. And the next one was going to be, maybe it was some reading, because he had a list of things I should read. The last one was going to be metaphysics and philosophy. I mean, he was going to give me all this education, it was ridiculous. But somehow I ended up applying to graduate school and I got accepted at MIT, and I just blew it off. Because he was into alternative education and we were going to move to Mendocino, he was going to start a school, I was going to bake bread and grow vegetables, that's what I was planning on doing after. And so I just ignored that. When I look back on it, I thought, hmm.

But fortunately, I was befriended... well, anyway, I had this older guy, married guy that I met in one of my labs, and he liked to talk to me, I don't know why. And at some point he said, "Well, it sounds like you're just going to stay with this guy." And all of a sudden it was like a lightbulb. It never occurred to me that I could break up with him, it just didn't occur to me. And that was it. I broke up with him, that was right at the end of my senior year. I got myself this nice little studio apartment on Berkeley Way and MLK, and I got a job. This guy actually helped me get a job as a lab technician in molecular biology and virus lab. So that was perhaps, the next two years were perhaps my favorite years because I was working, I had money, making money, and there were all these interesting people, graduate students, postdocs, and the lab technicians, the other lab technicians. And I got treated really well because I sort of came with the reputation of someone who could have gone to graduate school. And I was working for a relatively young PhD who unfortunately had already, by the time I went to work with him, a couple of cerebral bleeds, hemorrhages, and apparently lost something from what I heard in terms of, he was like a boy genius, but lost some of that. Anyway, he was one of these really careful researchers and would repeat and repeat things, repeat the experiments until something didn't work. And he never published anything, so he didn't get tenure at Berkeley, but he was there during the two years I was there.

I met interesting guys, this is when I started backpacking and going camping because these guys were, we'd (take) things from the storage, the storehouse, the warehouse, and we would look at a roadmap, we'd find the end of the road towards the Sierras, and then we'd go to the Earth Sciences building and look in the library and look at their topo maps. And then we'd get a topo map, I don't know if we stole that. And then we would go and just... this was 1970, I guess, yeah. You know, where hiking and stuff hadn't really gotten that big yet. And we would just explore, and I would go with all these guys and have, it was really great. Oh, and then some point along the way I went into medicine. That was the draft.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

PW: Well, I was going to ask about all these major current events that are happening around you, too, right? So there was, of course, the Vietnam War, which you've already alluded to, but there's assassinations of the President as well as Martin Luther King, and there's the Civil Rights Movement. Were you affected, how would you be affected?

KY: Oh, yeah, I think I was. Because I remember when Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, I remember when he was shot. Who was I for then? I couldn't vote yet. That would have been '68, right? JFK was killed when I was in high school, so that was a big thing. That was the first time I saw my father cry, the only time, practically the only time. Then the draft was a really big thing. So right after... well, let me go back a little bit. When I was working as a lab technician, I got really involved in the AFSCME union. I think that since I was never, like, an activist in college, I wanted to be more involved when I was working. So I decided the AFSCME union seemed like a good thing. So I became the assistant shop steward of our building, of our lab. And I did a lot of leafletting, I went to meetings, and there were meetings, I think most of the people were probably sectarian. I think Young Socialists, Socialist Workers Party, I think a lot of the union was run by really very political people.

PW: Can you explain what AFSCME actually stands for?

KY: American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. And they were basically the non-academic employees, so it could be lab technicians, glassware washers in our building. Janitors... I think, I don't know if janitors were in the same. But in our building it was largely glassware washers, and I kept trying to get them to come to a demonstration or do something, some activity. And my boss -- this the PhD and boss of my lab, who was a former, he was in SDS. He pointed out to me, he kindly pointed out to me that it seemed strange that here I was with a bachelor's degree, could go to graduate school, whatever, trying to organize these glassware washers who had high school education if that. And they didn't care about the issues that I was into, and really all they wanted to do was go shopping, because that's what they talked about. And he pointed out that it was kind of strange that I was trying to organize them when I was coming from a totally different place. So sort of around that time it was the draft and the lottery, and the graduate students, the male graduate students who up 'til then had student deferments because they were cancer research -- that's what we were doing in the lab was cancer research -- they were going to lose their 2-S deferment. So that time, one of my friends in the microbiology department, and the graduate student in my lab, decided to apply to medical school, so they can keep the student deferment. And somehow this crazy guy in my lab, he looked at me and he says, "And you can do that, too." And it had not occurred to me, it was like one of those lightbulb things, I said, "Oh, yeah, I could." And because it came around the same time my boss said it was weird that I was trying to organize those people, I then realized what I could do was I could go to medical school and become a doctor for these women. And in my mind, I the kind of medicine I wanted to do was always, I was going to do family practice for the urban underserved, that was sort of the terminology. So that's basically what I... I applied with that in mind, and that's what I did. Family practice was barely started, I mean, it continues the lowest prestige specialty. That's what I...

PW: Speaking of family, like I'm kind of curious what the dynamic was like for you and your parents at this point because, again, so much is happening in the world generationally.

KY: Oh, well, I don't know how much I told them. My brother, when I went home, my brother would be pro-United States government during the Vietnam War, because he spent all his time with my father. So my father was, he thinks the army is a great thing, he learned a lot being in the army. So I'd go home and they would all be saying, in support of the United States and Vietnam, and I'm doing all this antiwar stuff. So I didn't really, didn't talk much about it. What else was going on? Women's lib had barely started. My father at one point, when I was in high school, had mentioned something about I could be a doctor. But that just went, and it was just one time. And I think that... I have a feeling the family had thought my father should have been a doctor because he was smart, but he didn't do it. Yeah. So I think that when I told my parents that I was doing this, it went over well, they were good with it. But I think there was more of a reaction to the driver's license. Now, my mother never drove. Because she had this experience, her mother said that she was too scatterbrained to drive. So when she got married, my father tried to teach her to drive, but apparently gave up. I knew all this. So I turned fifteen and a half or whatever, and my brother is not far behind. Somehow you take driver's ed, but you have to get practice, right? I had the feeling that my father didn't really like taking me out to practice drive, I just picked that up. And so I never got my license. My brother, of course, immediately gets his license because Dad's taking him out driving, no problem, he gets his license. So I'm a junior or something, and... oh no, when is it? But I had to get a passport because I was going to go to Europe. And my father had to go with me to get a passport because I didn't have any ID. And then that boyfriend thought this is ridiculous. So he taught me to drive. He thought this was ridiculous that I didn't, he taught me to drive. When I got my license at some point, I was out of college, I got my license. And my mother was thrilled. I think I told her over the phone, she was really excited. And my father, maybe he just went, "Hmm." And my brother was happy, but at least my mother was. [Laughs] But like in Alameda, the only person who drove was Nellie Takeda. Nellie drove everybody everywhere, Nellie drove my grandmother and my aunt, she drove them to, she drove everyone to their medical appointments. She was the driver.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

PW: So you ended up at UC San Francisco. Did you move to San Francisco?

KY: Yeah, I moved to San Francisco. I'm coming off of the best years of my life, I'm going into the worst. I moved to San Francisco... where did I live at first? Oh, I found myself a place to live on Cole Street. You know, as soon as I walked into that first class, I don't know what it was. And I just had a really hard time. It was like I had experienced two years of being an adult, being free, and then all of a sudden like I'm back in high school. And it just was really hard. Plus the teaching was horrible. I mean, the teaching was... like a professor, with some fancy professor, right, would come and teach one class. I mean, there was, (no) continuity in the class, it just was horrible. And then I had this boyfriend who I really liked who was one of the graduate students. Right when... he was off to do a postdoc right in middle of my first year of medical school. He was, as a white guy whose mother had gone to law school, he was very supportive of my going into, of my going to medical school. But this was the days of... we smoked a lot of marijuana. So as soon as the weekend came -- oh, and homemade beer, people were making homemade beer. So homemade beer while we were making dinner, eating it. And then after dinner, it would be smoking a joint. And then he was particularly fond of cognac, so we had cognac there, too. So guess what? Like the next day, I wasn't very clearheaded, and I think we did the -- I mean, this will be Friday, Saturday, Sunday night. And what happened with the end result was I failed anatomy. And I have never, I'd never gotten anything lower than a B in school, and I failed anatomy. It just was... I mean, I was a wreck, it was horrible. And I think by this time the boyfriend had moved to Cambridge to do a postdoc at MIT. So it was bad, it was bad. Most of the other students who failed anatomy were black or brown, so they were kind of surprised that I failed. [Interruption] It was an oral exam, two big white people in white coats were giving me an oral exam. And one male, one female, both very imposing, tall white people, doctors. And they asked, the first question was something about the parasympathetic nervous system, which was, to me, was hardly anatomy, it was more physiology, and I kind of blanked. And so basically it got bad from there, and I failed anatomy. So because I was not black or brown, I think, I got special sessions with the professor in anatomy. We went to the lab and worked with me and said, "You shouldn't have failed this." I mean, he could tell.

[Interruption]

PW: Were you able to make up the course, or what happened?

KY: Oh, yeah. So I worked with this professor a few times, and then they passed me.

PW: So those two years in particular at med school were very difficult because you were just having trouble with the academic?

KY: Well, I mean, I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't like it. There were a lot of people like me who were a little bit older, and there were a lot of us who still had this sort of anti-establishment thing from our days at Berkeley or wherever. So we were not the favorites of the more standard professors, the more liberal humanitarian people, professors liked us, they thought we were very humane. But to the standard professors, we were unruly. I knit a lot, and I was one of the back three rows. Other people in the back three rows were reading the newspaper, we were bad. We were disrespectful, but older. We were older, we weren't like straight from college. The first two years were not great, also because my boyfriend, we had broken up, he had gone. But then by the second year we got back together again somehow. Once I got into the rotations in the hospital, it wasn't quite so bad, but I wasn't prepared. I didn't know anyone who was a doctor, I didn't know that being a doctor meant staying up all night or working all night. And I didn't understand the responsibility that was involved with being a doctor, and I also had a hard time giving orders to others. I was a lab technician, I was a good lab technician. I could anticipate what my boss needed, which pipette, bring it out, I knew. But if I did that, the older residents said, "Well, no, don't do that, the nurses will clean it up." And I had to learn a whole new thing about giving orders. But it was just the responsibility part, I had never been responsible for anything, and to be responsible was hard, was very hard for me. I don't think I was a great medical student, but I got through. I chose to do a residency in a non-academic place. I could have gone to San Francisco General, they wanted me in Fresno. Oh, I did some rotations in Fresno, and it was great, but I didn't want to be in Fresno. They had a really good family practice program there, the head if it was this hippie from UC. So I went to Seattle, to a small family practice program which only had four residents per year. And it was kind people. My residency mates were a Sansei woman from Idaho, a Jewish radical feminist from New Jersey, a Hawaiian Chinese guy from Honolulu, and me. And we were really unusual. I mean, given Seattle, it was a very unusual group. And to have three out of the four be women, there had only been one woman previously, and she was like six-foot tall. So it was a good place, and the residency directors were really kind people, I mean, just amazingly kind. And they would say that they had to learn how to deal with residents who were crying, because we all cried, because it's hard, I mean, it's rough. But they were kind, and I got through that, but never went back to Seattle really.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

PW: So keep telling me about the trajectory of your profession. So once you had finished that...

KY: I finished and what happened? Oh, that same boyfriend again, the one who was in Cambridge, had gone to, had finished his postdoc, got a job at the Salk Institute. And we had reconnected, right? So I would make trips down, it was infrequent, but I would see him. But then in May of my last year... we finish in June.

PW: What year is this?

KY: '78, he breaks up with me. Ostensibly because he was having trouble getting grants, he was depressed, and he knew I was depressed, right? I mean, I wasn't a lot of fun during these years, and he just didn't want to be with someone who was depressed, so broke up. So in May of that year, when I'm like halfway moved down to San Diego, we break up. So I spent a few months in Seattle looking for jobs and figuring out what I was going to do, and I got a job in East Oakland Public Health Service. It was a national... what do they call it? It was a National Health Service Corps job with loan repayment if you got that kind of loan, but I didn't have that kind of loan. So it was a community clinic in East Oakland where everyone, it was a collective. And everyone was supposed to make the same amount of money, which at that time was $4.50, $5.50 an hour. And I agreed to that because I wanted a job. But I'm supposed to get a National Health Service Corps salary, which might have been $30 or something, but I was supposed to turn that money back. I was supposed to turn it back in to the collective. It was a rough job. There was one other doctor, of course, white guy, his wife was the nurse, main nurse. The doctor, the nurse, the administrator and the social worker, they were all white. They started this collective by gathering people from the community. We had a Native American, we had a Chinese, we had a Puerto Rican, we had a Mexican American, and was a very good selection of people to be in the collective. And as I said, everyone made the same amount of money, which kind of bothered me because I had debts. And these other white people, of course, they came from upper middle class families. They had money. So I eventually I might have been credited with the ruining of the collective, because I asked for my salary at one point. And it was very interesting because when I started, they started hiring, there was a Black administrator, and there was a Black community health worker who's married to a doctor. And there were a couple of, there was a Black nurse practitioner/midwife, and a Black pediatrician, and there was no way they were working for a collective salary. They were working as consultants, and they made twenty dollars an hour. And at some point I kind of became friends with that group of Black professionals, and they supported me in trying to get, keep my whole National Health Service Corps salary. And so I just remember this meeting, and it was, like, silence. So the consultant professionals, they're not part of the collective, so they're not there. And so hardly anyone voted for me to get my salary. Because the people of color who were the community health workers, I think they thought that if I got my whole salary, they wouldn't get what they were making, which was more than they would have made if they had a job in a non-collective place, so they abstained. Even though I was really close to them, they abstained, it was weird. And then I quit. So I worked there, it was just a little over a year. But let me tell you, I was on call every other night for deliveries. I was on call for admissions and deliveries.

PW: Which neighborhood was this?

KY: I was in San Antonio, East Oakland. So we were on East Fifteenth. Oh, moved to East Fourteenth, and like Ninth or Eleventh in there. And it wasn't a Vietnamese (neighborhood) yet, it was largely Black, Mexican, Black and Mexican. And I didn't speak Spanish, but I just knew a little bit. I could get by with the interpretation help from the community health workers. But that was... and at the time, I lived in East Oakland. Because you had to live in the neighborhood, right? You had to live in the neighborhood, right? You had to live in the neighborhood where you were working. So I lived in East... oh my god, my car got stolen twice and I got burglarized twice.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

PW: So from there, where did you go?

KY: Oh, so then I lucked out and I was told, I still knew people at San Francisco General's family practice program, and they let me know that there was a... it was not a postdoc, it was some position. The guy wanted to leave to become a carpenter, so they needed someone to take up the second half of this. It was like a postdoc or some kind of position, so I did that. I wasn't very good at that either, because I'm not an academic kind of person. But from there, I heard that there was a job opening at South of Market Health Center, in the South of Market area, where I had done my rotation. I had done a rotation there as a medical student, and it was a great community clinic. And I met a friend, I didn't really want to work full time, and this friend, she was just finishing her residency, she didn't want to work full time. We went in as two women proposing that we split it. And they bought it; they went for it. I'm surprised because that means double the benefits, right? But they went for it. We beat out a guy, but they took the two women, and we each eventually ended up being seventy percent time or more. But it was a really interesting clinic, and it was a great place to have a job. Patients went to San Francisco General, we had community health workers, a really diverse staff. So I was there for my four years. The others worked there many years longer. I left because I got, I had to deal with my anxiety. I felt terrible if I did a bad circumcision or if I missed a diagnosis, but there were all sorts of things that just, I was never, I just wasn't that confident, I was just insecure. I had no confidence. And the anxiety was, I thought, "I don't like this."

And Reagan became President. So what that meant was they kicked everyone off of Medicaid. You could only get Medicaid, Medi-Cal, if you were, if you had SSI, if you were disabled, or if you had dependent children. So I saw all those guys, all these guys who were underemployed or whatever, they got kicked off of Medi-Cal, and so we had more patients. And then all these guys came to San Francisco from the middle of the country, they had to do "workfare" in order to collect general assistance benefits, you had to work. But they didn't want to work, they didn't want to sweep streets, whatever. So that's a lot of, "Oh, I have this headache, I have this headache." They basically were just trying to get out of work. But I had many great patients that really needed the medical care but it wasn't a great time, Reagan. Reagan wasn't a good time. So a friend of mine from East Oakland, he did this. He did that, he was a silkscreen artist, he did those two. And this is a loaner, but I don't know where he is to give it back to him. So he did photo silkscreen and he was great. I'd go over there and he'd give me tools and he'd say, "Here, have these pencils," or, "Try this," or stuff. He somehow, his girlfriend had to move from Oakland to take over her father's house in Queens. So he decided to go back, and he said, "Oh, you could go to New York and you could take classes at The Art Students League." I said, another lightbulb, right? So I quit my job. I worked four years, four years, yeah, and I quit my job and I moved to New York.

PW: This is the early '80s?

KY: Must have been '84. And took classes at The Art Students League. And yeah, that was... I had another boyfriend by then.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 21>

PW: Were you working when you were in New York?

KY: Yeah. For one year I didn't work, I just took the art classes, and then I realized I went through a lot of money in one year in New York and I decided to get a job. So I got a job at the Montefiore Family Health Center. It's a similar kind of thing to San Francisco General's family practice so people kind of went back and forth. I knew some people there, because it was one of these socially responsible do-gooder family practice people, you know, progressive liberal whatever. So I worked there for a year three days a week. That's in the Bronx, so I commuted from lower Manhattan, took the train up to the Bronx. And then for two half days a week to supplement that, I got a job with the Health Department, no, Department of Education. I did school health in lower Manhattan. So that was also interesting because I went all over lower Manhattan which included Spanish Harlem, but a lot in the lower east side. And I would do school physicals or work physicals or whatever. So that was... it got me into these different neighborhoods in New York, which I probably normally wouldn't have gone into. The other reason New York was doable was because a good friend from San Francisco was a physician's assistant, she was planning on moving to the East Village, because a friend of hers had an apartment that she didn't want, she was living elsewhere, so she took that apartment. And then my roommate from medical school is from New York and so she was doing a fellowship, residency fellowship and she'd had, her two-year-old daughter at the time was my goddaughter. So I had plenty of people in New York to make it really a place to go to. And it was an interesting life, because my girlfriend, my medical school roommate, her boyfriend was, he was a photographer. He was from San Francisco, a Black photographer. So his world are all these kind of really hip Black artists. I mean... and so I could tag along and go to these things. I mean, they were really interesting. I don't know if I have the photographs here.

PW: What was his name?

KY: Jules Allen. I think they're downstairs. Here's one of his. Photography by Jules Allen. Now so my friend is now, I don't understand it, but she got into more management administrative stuff. She is now the chief medical officer of New York's health and hospitals. She has a huge job. And she's just, like, a year and a half younger than me, and she's still working.

PW: What is her name?

KY: Machelle Allen. She took Jules' name. They did get married, oh yeah, they did get married. They got married when their daughter was five. Yeah, I went to that wedding.

PW: So around this time, by the way, I'm just realizing, if you're talking '84, '85, is when redress is starting to get traction. You didn't hear anything about it?

KY: Oh, I knew about it, I just wasn't, I just wasn't... I don't know, it wasn't my world. My friends were Black, Jewish, and Irish Catholic. But I just didn't, for some reason, Wendy, my college friend, the one who was housemates here, she got me to go to the hearings in San Francisco, because she thought it was important. But she had to tell me because I just... if I mentioned it to my parents, they were, my father was not into it. And those weren't, I didn't know those people. There were a couple of times when I was in medical school, so '71, '75, when I did some things with some various collectives, some stuff in Japantown, but I just didn't fit in.

PW: What were your impressions of the CWRIC hearings, though?

KY: Not much, not much. It's a regret that I wasn't more present for that. But I thought it was fascinating, and I was perhaps more interested in who were the people interviewing from the Congress? I was not, I wasn't into it. I don't think I had that identity.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 22>

PW: Okay, so now we are in 1988 roughly, and you are still in New York, correct?

KY: '88?

PW: No, you moved back to San Francisco.

KY: No, I'm back here, I'm back here.

PW: When did you move back to San Francisco?

KY: I moved back at the end of '86, and I got a job at the Southeast Health Center in the Bayview. I worked there for eight years. I think it was okay for the first four, it was an incredibly dysfunctional place. Just famously dysfunctional, dysfunctional for ages and ages and ages. And a Black woman who had come after me and then left to become the medical director in the Western Addition Clinic, somehow she, I don't know, I had breakfast with her and she said, "You know, you don't have to stay there." See, once again, it never occur to me that I could just leave. And it was like another lightbulb. Some of my friends had just gotten tired of hearing me talk about how dysfunctional this place was. And I actually went and joined this woman at the Western Addition Clinic, the Maxine Hall Health Center, and I spent seventeen, eighteen years there. It was a little difficult at first because it was largely an internal medicine clinic and these were internal medicine people from UCSF which is one of the prized residency places in the country, and I come in as family practice. But it worked out and we eventually got more balance, we had family practice people. And it's a great staff, largely female, largely women of color, couple of gay women doctors. It was a good place. I mean, of course, it had its ups and downs and messes and stuff, but basically it was a good place to spend my last seventeen, eighteen years. I also got interested in acupuncture at this time. So for like a number of years I was really into learning to, I wanted to retire and when I retired I wanted to be an acupuncturist. I found out that I really wasn't... I didn't know how to take care of people who had money to pay for appointments. It was hard for me to charge people a going rate. My patients didn't have to pay because they were all either Medi-Cal or county supported. I never worried about billing, but when you say, well, "That's going to be a hundred and ten dollars," I couldn't do it. I couldn't advertise myself, couldn't market myself. And then my mother passed away suddenly.

PW: What year?

KY: In the end of 2001. And I used to spend my days off, I'd take her shopping. And since she was no longer there, I thought maybe I might as well work. And they wanted me to be medical director sort of as a... at least some interim thing until someone who was more appropriate to be medical director until her kids were old enough that she didn't have to be home all the time. So I was medical director for almost four years, which was not really my thing, but we survived.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 23>

PW: So going back just a little bit, though, from the time that your mom had passed and you were doing this, in the '90s, you started to become more aware of the community, the Japanese American community. So this was when the Sansei Legacy Project began?

KY: Yes. And I date it all to... you remember that Oakland Museum Strength and Diversity exhibit?

PW: 1990.

KY: So my mother and I went to one of the first panels, which had, I think Hisako Hibi, I think Kiku Funabiki was on it, maybe Mei Nakano, I don't quite remember, and then Diana Akiyama. And this was, I don't know, it was this eye-opener for me. More than an eye-opener, because I started crying and I couldn't stop. And it was something about when they talked about going to the bathroom in the latrines and there were no dividers, my mother never said anything about that. And then Diana Akiyama's talking about her father saying it was like a rape. And if you've been raped, you don't want to talk about it. And that was a total shock to me because she's saying that it was racist. And here I am working with all these Black and brown people, and I'm not thinking that I was ever... so I remember crying openly. I had a hard time stopping. And there was a very nice, there was a white woman, public health nurse that I knew from work who was there for some reason. I remember talking to hear, and I'm just... tears. And then Diana Akiyama said something about how the Sansei need to get together and talk about this. And she passed out cards that we could put our...

PW: And this was at the Oakland Museum event?

KY: Yeah, it was at the event when you're milling around afterwards. And I turned in a card with my name address, phone number on it, and I didn't think about it after that, but I think I told friends that I had this really emotional reaction to it. And then, like, in November or so of that year, I got something in the mail from Michael Yoshii, and I guess also Diana. I grew up with... I have a picture of me and my brother with Michael and his older brother. Michael's about five years younger than me. And so I remembered him, and it was no question. It was going to be the first Sansei gathering. And so I went, and it's at the Buena Vista church social hall where I had spent a lot of time as a kid, because we used to go over from the Takedas' house a couple of doors away and we would play in the social hall or go around. So it was an amazing thing for me, because I was going to someplace familiar. It was a place that I had turned my back on when I was a teenager or a little bit later, and here I am back at the Buena Vista social hall. And there's a group of about thirty maybe, everyone has black hair. And for me, it was a little... I had a lot of family gatherings and we were all Japanese. Other people in the group, they were really like, it was something new for them, because they had not ever been in a room that was just all other Sansei. And everyone went around, and it was around the time that our parents got the checks. So I think that might have been one of the topics.

PW: The reparations?

KY: Yeah, the reparation that people talked about. So that was, you know, I remember being quite comfortable in this group, which would be unusual for me because I wasn't used to being with all these Japanese. But there clearly were other people who were more uncomfortable than me, and there were people who had even less contact with other Japanese than me. This did not appeal to the people who were into redress. They were not the political people from the city, these were all largely East Bay people who were, like me, assimilated, scattered or whatever, not belonging to one of the churches, so that's who we were. And then what I remember, I wrote in this thing that I just read where, at the end, you do one of these games where you have a ball and you throw it to somebody and you have to say one word. And this reminded me, my word was "comfortable," because it was a surprise to me. And then there were several more of these gatherings, that I guess Michael and Diana put together. I was torn for the next one because there was a Gulf War demonstration. I chose to go to the Gulf War demonstration instead of the Sansei gathering. And then I think in the summer, Michael brought up doing a support group. And that really appealed to me because it would be a smaller group. He was going to be leading it, and it just was so much more appealing to me to be able to talk in a smaller group. Because even though I was able to speak in this group of thirty, I knew it'd be more comfortable in this smaller group. So I was part of that first SLP support group. We met at, one of the outbuilding at the church. I think for a while it might have been every Monday night or every other. There are still people, Amy Funabiki, Jean Ishibashi, Marion Cowee, Keith Nomura, John Hamamura, a few others. But we stayed together. Michael left because he was starting another group, and we just went on talking without him. We got, Jill Shiraki was our first staffperson, and then Diana Akiyama had kind of moved, I think, to Southern California. And then Jill worked half time, and then we got Audrey. And then by this time, we'd formed a coordinating council, so I was on that. We planned, we started planning the actual gatherings. Came up with inventive ideas.

PW: Tell me more. So what were the kinds of things that you were...

KY: That we worked on?

PW: ...working on? Yeah.

KY: We would invite writers. I think that Ruth Sasaki came, but I missed that one. Do you remember the guy, David Mura, who wrote... did he come or did someone talked for him about his book? For some reason, he came at one point. [Interruption] But various writers came and we'd have a discussion with them. We did some exercises, because right at the same time, I was doing those Unlearning Racism things separate from the Sansei. But I knew a lot of people who were in co-counseling, Reevaluation Counseling from Seattle. I never got that involved, but I had a bunch of friends who were in it. And that somehow led me to these Unlearning Racism retreats and workshops. So one of the ones I really remember was one of these "crossing the line" exercises where everyone's standing up, and then you have a line, and they say, "Cross the line if you've ever experienced such and such." "Cross the line if you ever felt such and such," and that was a good one. We had one later on anger, women and anger, how we dealt with anger. Marion Cowee and I got together, because I have a lot of the papers. I don't think I have everything, but we tried to organize all these gatherings we put on. We did some stuff with a children of Holocaust survivors group here, I forget what it was called. But the woman happened to be the sister-in-law of a good friend of mine. I forget what her... but we did one on children of Holocaust survivors, and also legacies of camp. We put together one of the last things we did, and it may have been what ended us, is we got... we must have had money. We were putting on a big conference, it must have been in 1999, maybe it was 2000. And we planned it for months and months and months, but we were going to have people from all over the country. We got people at least from Chicago to talk, and it was called, I think it was Legacies of Camp, because I made the big poster, Legacies of Camp. And we had Satsuki Ina, of course. It was at the JCCCNC, and we planned it for a really long time.

We also had, every year in November, we had like an anniversary dinner, and my parents loved this. So this was great. At least my mother got to experience this, that in her lifetime she got to go back to Alameda with me. So in the social hall there would be these big, the annual dinner, and she gave nice money, donation to Sansei Legacy Project. She was very happy about that, and she saved all these clippings. Because we would have various things, we'd put on skits, and it would make it into the Hokubei because JK was one of us, kind of. Yeah, I met some... I met slightly younger people. I was probably on the older end of things, maybe within a year or two of me. There were a number of people just a few years younger. And it didn't go, not quite as young as Kimi, maybe, but it appealed to a certain age group. But more people would come to our annual dinners. And then I would take part in, as a thank you, I would help at, when Buena Vista was preparing for its holiday dinner, we would try to do things for Buena Vista. They turned out to be our... they were, our money went through them so that it could be a donation. Somebody from Buena Vista took care of our accounts.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 24>

PW: In this kind of community work, did this lead to other volunteering opportunities and things that you envisioned?

KY: You know, I think that in Michael's vision, it was supposed to. You sort of heal yourself and you go out and work with other communities. For me, I don't know if it did that with me, because I was already working. My life was working with really underserved people. So I already had this, so I don't think I did much. I was very involved with the A-bomb survivors, so I was part of Friends of Hibakusha with Geri Handa, and every two years, helped organize the medical visits.

PW: Say a little bit more about that, people don't necessarily know.

KY: There was a committee of A-bomb survivors in the mainland, and they had helped get the Japanese Hiroshima Prefecture Medical Association to send over a team of doctors every other year to do medical exams on the American A-bomb survivors. I got recruited because I was in a study group called the East Bay Socialist Doctors group. We were a study group. And I think Floyd Huen came. Do you know Floyd? He's the husband of Jean Quan. You know Jean Quan.

PW: Of course.

KY: Well, Floyd is a doctor, and he's like my age, and he worked in my system but he also worked at Highland, he's kind of a community clinic doctor. He came and told us about the A-bomb survivors, with the Japanese doctors coming to examine the American survivors and that they needed help. They needed help organizing and staffing. So that's how I got involved. In LA and in Honolulu and Maui, there's enough Japanese American doctors that they would have their own office and nursing staff and you could just have the exams done there. But here, that's not the case. So we had to find places that we could have, run a whole clinic after hours and basically on the weekend. And we had to find people to staff it, so I would get my doctor friends to work as health workers doing heights and weights and blood pressures. Because the health workers in your clinic, they're not going to work on weekends for free. So all my doctor and nurse friends would come and they would help. Every two years you do the flow, traffic flow, collect lab samples, sometimes draw blood, and they had different stations. There was the gynecologist, there was the surgeon, there was the internist, we had to move people around.

PW: What years was this happening?

KY: This happened, I think the first one I helped out on was in '83. Might have done '83 and '85, and then I moved to New York, so I wasn't involved for a few years. And then when I came back in the late '80s, I then got involved -- because they had by this time started, they started Friends of Hibakusha earlier. Reverend Hanaoka... do you know him? He was at Buena Vista for a while. He's been at Pine� and he himself is a Nagasaki survivor. He and others started Friends of Hibakusha, which is supposed to be like a community support group for the A-bomb survivors. And that was an interesting thing because in Japantown at the time, a lot of these community groups were either, I don't know if they were started or they were... but all these sectarian groups, all these politically progressive JAs had started these groups, or I don't know if they got in or what. But I could see a little battle within FOH between CWP, Communist Workers Party and League for Revolutionary Socialists, they both had people in FOH. And I would have to say that LRS probably won, their person stayed longer. And one of their doctors was the one who, I worked with him for all these decades, really nice guy to run these exams.

The important, the name, John Umekubo, who was a doctor, he's a Japantown doctor. He was the one who was really the head of it because he was the one who belonged to the medical association. The Japanese liked these medical, you know, like the medical association. I would never join the AMA or the California Medical, I'd never join that. So Umekubo was good because he was active in all these things. So he was kind of our spokesperson out front. And then Richard and I, Richard Fleming and I, would be the ones in the back making sure that things worked and everything was in place. Yeah, so every two years, certainly from '87 on, we spent a chunk of time doing this. It usually happened in the summer. Geri Handa does all the work. I mean, she's just amazing. And unfortunately I've been sort of saying we should probably just disband. Because the last time we had a, there was an exam was in '19, 2019, and I think there were just thirty people who came, because they were all pretty old. And a couple of times ago, the Japanese decided that they weren't going to examine the second generation. And the second generation was who was bringing the survivors to the exams from Sacramento, from Fresno, from many places in northern California. I think they're doing an exam in L.A. There was a split in the committee of A-bomb survivors, one of these huge irreparable splits. The LA and Hawaii broke off from CABS, northern California CABS. Some horrible split that... and these weren't even JAs like us, these were more from Japan people. And it extended to Hiroshima, because we didn't, I think there was one time when the doctor came and it was a really cold reception when certain of our people went to greet her at the airport. It was one of these like, it wasn't talked about, but it was really intense. So there were a few times that was difficult. So they split, it used to be that the Japanese team would do Hawaii, LA, San Francisco and Seattle. And that's a long trip for someone to be away from their home practice. They did split it to one group does Hawaii and LA and the other group does San Francisco and Seattle.

PW: But it sounds like timing-wise, this started up before Sansei Legacy Project.

KY: Oh, yeah, it did, yeah.

PW: So this was moving before, and then Sansei Legacy Project, 1991.

KY: 1991.

PW: Something around that. And then how long did that run?

KY: Well, it technically sort of ran for about ten years, but a number of us just continued meeting once a month for what we started calling a "living room." So one Sunday a month we would get together at someone's house and then we'd order takeout. Because if you made it a potluck, people would be late preparing something. So we decided we'll just do, order out and someone would go pick up the food. So that's still going on in a way, but because of the pandemic, we kind of went to Zoom, and some people just didn't want to do Zoom anymore. So it's now a tiny group of four or five, six of us, and it's every two weeks on Zoom. But we used our name for a number of years afterwards for writing a letter, we wrote a letter to the editor after 9/11. And there was a writing project that Brian Dempster was doing. We had a grant and we never finished it. This is very bad, but we never published the book. And so I have all these writings from, we all practiced, he had us doing writing exercises, how to get people to write, blah, blah, blah.

PW: And the same time, we did an oral history with your mother for NJAHS.

KY: No, I used their guide and I interviewed my mother, my father. My mother's... both sisters, but that couldn't have been very easy because her older sister didn't speak English that well, but I must have done it. And then her younger sister, who was not at all open at all, at all. And I did my aunt, my Hilo aunt. Yeah, I did a bunch of them, I was terrible. I started with my mother, but I would talk too much. And I didn't give her enough time. And then, even though I said that my father shouldn't be around, he came in. So I have in my notes, I said, "Dad walked in." [Laughs] Because my mother's going to defer to him a lot, but it was okay. I'm glad I have it.

PW: What year did you do that?

KY: I couldn't... oh, maybe I have a date. Because I went back and listened. I have a feeling it's got to be the mid-'90s.

PW: Well, when did your father and your mother pass away?

KY: She passed away in 2001 and he passed away at the end of 2012. Where did I write these dates down? I would say the mid... oh, here, 1992. Yeah, 1992.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 25>

KY: And then the other thing we did was one of the projects that the Sansei Legacy Project did was, do you know who Nobu Miyoshi is?

PW: Tell me about Nobu Miyoshi.

KY: It's this. She wrote this, and it was in the Pacific Citizen at some point. I probably have that article, but Michael Yoshii had found this, and he realized that it was, like expressing a lot of the ideas that he was having independently.

PW: You should say what the title is for the...

KY: Oh, okay. It's The Identity Crisis of the Sansei and the Concentration Camp. And Nobu is a family therapist in Philadelphia. She worked at, I think, University of Pennsylvania, and part of the whole family therapy. Family therapy was a big thing in, I guess, '70s, '80s. So he actually got her out here, Michael invited her out. She is the same age as... no, she's older than my parents. She was born in 1911. So this is all going on in the '90s, so she's in her eighties, so she's pretty old. And she and Michael, they got this idea to have this project called Exploring Family Legacies where she would meet with family, all generations if possible, and she would conduct maybe six interviews about the effect of camp on them. But what she found out, or what they found out was that all these families had too many issues. And so she spent many, many sessions, because there were too many family issues to go over. Now, I actually a number of the tapes just because -- did I pull on this? -- because when we closed out Buena Vista, the stuff had to go someplace. So I have some of the tapes, not all of them. I've got to talk to Michael and Jill about what to do with these things, because it's all real private. So I had a number of sessions with my family, and really, another one of these really important things for me. I knew about this happening, and I think I mentioned it to my parents. And, of course, my family, if you say something they don't want to hear, they just turn around and walk away, so I got nothing. And then, I don't know, maybe a couple years later, after she's been doing this a while, I really wanted to do it. And Michael suggested that the way to do it is to ask them to do it for me. So I did, and there was no problem. So my parents would meet with, we'd do it at my parents' house. My brother, of course, he's in Pennsylvania, so he can't do it. It was a good... it was good. Because she really felt like my family, on the spectrum of Japanese American families, we were way over on one side of being not verbal, not communicative. Way over. She said we did mind reading. She could tell that we were very connected, but we did it by mind reading. And that my mother, who's normally effusive, loves people, in the house she was really subdued because my father gave a really, I don't want to say he was a damper, because he was so quiet himself that my mother really couldn't, she was pretty quiet around him, too.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 26>

PW: Did you ever go back to Topaz with your parents?

KY: Uh-huh, yeah.

PW: What was that like?

KY: That was intense, it was really intense. It was 1993. I had already, I had been doing the Tule Lake pilgrimages as the doctor. I went starting in 1991, I went on four of them. And so somehow... and I'd been going to the Topaz reunions with my parents. I have to look back when I started going, but I kind of invited myself to these reunions, they were usually down on the peninsula, and I liked meeting the people my mother know. So that pilgrimage was a big one, I think there was probably four hundred people. And I got my parents to go, we flew to Salt Lake City, stayed overnight in a hotel, and of course, being the Sansei Project, we organized small group breakout sessions. We didn't call them breakout sessions, but we had small groups. And my parents weren't interested in it, so they went off and they went walking around the city. But the Sansei Project had organized that part along with the Topaz reunion committee. Yeah, there was no museum. We went out to the site. I was friends with Toru, in fact, I may have even been going out with him at some time previous. Sorry. [Laughs] But my mother remembered Toru from camp, because he was on the same block. And she remembered him, so she was thrilled to get to meet him, and also because he had these music singing parties at his house, my mother loved those things.

PW: This is Toru Saito, correct?

KY: Yeah. So at Topaz, he'd been there a number of times, so he was able to take my parents to where exactly their barracks were. So my mother really did... they even got on the TV news or something, someone came up to them when they were walking around. So that was good. I remember, I was on the bus going there. I don't know where my parents were, but I was sitting in the back, and I was close to where Michael Yoshii was. And I just remember the anticipation of getting there, because I'd heard about it all my life, and I just was so, I really felt hyper, I was just hyper-aware, I just was wanting to take everything in. And I remember kind of moving around. We got my mother under, there was some kind of canopy, they had a tent or something. I remember getting her there with her friends and making sure she had enough water. And then my father and I stood in the back, and I just remember feeling really emotional, and wanting to be right next to my father who I knew wasn't going to say a word. I kind of remember one speaker after another, but I don't remember what they said. But it was just like taking in the sun, the weather, the air, all that dry dirt. I mean, yeah, that was really something for me. And my father even wrote about it; he wrote a letter to my brother and sister-in-law about how he was really glad he went. He didn't really want to go, but because I wanted to go, they went, and how he really was glad he went. And it's interesting that he talked about the people who spoke in Delta when we had dinner. And he also spoke about how nice the people were, of Delta. He talked about the kids who were the volunteers, who were pointing out where these old, what barrack was being used for what. It was really interesting, the whole last part of his three-page letter to my brother is about the people of Delta. So I was going to show that -- I'm sure Jane has seen it because they published all these things into one of the Topaz pilgrimage books, they might have edited it. So I don't know, I have to go back and look at what was in it. But when I saw that, it really made me happy that he was acknowledging. And he remembered people, he said that there were two sons there, and they looked just like the old man, the older guy, who was a real tall person who worked at the camp, and he worked under him. So that was good.

So that was '93, and the Nobu things were much, are later, they're after that. So what happened for me in the Nobu sessions was that... I think there were many sessions. We talked about different things, just regular stuff. And my mother talks about being lonely, and I'm saying, "What? Lonely?" Samishii? And I'm saying, what? I mean, I'm here all the time. That was hard, because somehow, even though I felt like I was there all the time, somehow she didn't feel connected. And I don't think I ever worked out what that was. I mean, I don't know, that never got resolved. So yeah, that was hard. But then somehow we got around to what my father felt about camp. And Nobu's talking about any pain of camp, and my father says, "No, I'm okay." And he kept saying that. And then I had this freak-out moment because, for a moment I thought maybe I was crazy, because if he denied any pain, why was I so messed up? Why did I have all this emotion inside me, that I would cry in public at the Oakland museum? Why? And Nobu... see, I don't know how much I can put into my father finally giving into Nobu and finally agreeing that yes, there could have been pain even though he couldn't feel it. And I was preparing for one of the talks at Salt Lake, either the grand opening or something, and I found this thing, and I'm going to read this. "Carrier of pain. Although the Nisei may have consciously avoided transmission of indebtedness to the camp, it is suggested here that to some extent it has, nonetheless, been passed down subtly or subconsciously to their children. Family therapists have learned the many ways parents are sustained and even consciously relieved of pain because their children are covertly 'asked' to bear it. Such children, as children in general, want to be responsive to their parents' needs, partly out of fulfilling their own identity needs to do what is significant and expected." Anyway, "I suggested that the pain suffered by the Issei and Nisei has been passed down to the succeeding generation and through modes that were culturally influenced, that is, through non-verbal cues. The Nisei may not be acutely aware of their own pain as much as the Sansei who are bearing it for them."

PW: That leads me to my final question for the day, though, it's a perfect segue. How do you think that that the Sansei generation will be remembered?

KY: Oh. I think that we'll be remembered for doing what our parents wanted us to do, and have entered into successful careers and being relatively accepted. I would like to think that I would also like to think of the Sanseis being remembered for things like redress and standing up for other people's rights. Just like I always felt like the fact that I had so many Jewish friends, I felt like they had some understanding of what it was like to be a persecuted minority. All my early friends were Jewish, and they were the ones who, to me, were leaders in a lot of the political stuff that I was on the outskirts of. I mean, I didn't do the main thing, I didn't get married and have a family. That would have pleased my mother.

PW: Is there anything else you wanted to share in talking about...

KY: No. Just thinking about this has made me want to look over, has made me, looking at my life, and being, actually, quite relieved and grateful that you change during life and you don't stay in the same rut. That actually, with age, despite all the physical bad things about aging, the other part of aging is better. It's an improvement over being forty or fifty, even.

PW: Thank you so much. This has been an incredible discussion and oral history interview.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.