Densho Digital Archive - Fred Korematsu - Kathryn Korematsu Interview (denshovh-kfred

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TK: When did Fred first tell you, or did he tell you, he was involved with the Supreme Court cases?

KK: Well, see, we had talked to Mits when we knew that Fred had come to visit his brother. We said, "Is that Fred Korematsu of the case?" And he said, "Yes, it is." So I knew about the case, and we really didn't discuss that very much. I knew he had lost, and I really don't have a lot of memories of, of talking about it. I knew he always said he didn't ever want to live in California again, but his, he hadn't seen his parents in seven years, and he knew his mother was not in the best of health. So we gave up our very good jobs because the weather there was just... neither of us had been brought up in that climate, and it was not easy to take. And our children are very glad that we did go to California. [Laughs] 'Cause they said, "We don't, we're glad we weren't born in Michigan." [Laughs] But the case... no, we did, I'm sure we talked about it, and I knew that he wanted in some way to reopen it, but we knew even then attorneys were not cheap. People, high-paying jobs were, didn't pay anything like the low-paying jobs do now. People make thousands of dollars now, if you made a few, if you made a few thousand dollars a year back then, that was good money.

The time we started talking about things was... I'm not sure what year it was. I'm guessing it's about 1978. Clifford Uyeda called Fred. He was president of the JACL at the time, and they were gonna have some sort of, I think it must have been their convention in Salt Lake City, and he said Gordon and Min were going to be there and he would like to invite Fred, and Fred refused to go. He was interested not in... well, this was just kind of -- I don't know, he didn't, we weren't sure of what was gonna happen, and he just didn't want to become involved. And so I said to Fred -- we didn't know about the Hokubei Mainichi, and we knew about the Nichi Bei Times published in San Francisco. I think we had seen that at the nursery, but I'd only seen the Japanese section. [Interruption] And so we never took that because we couldn't, neither of us could read Japanese. So I thought, well, I said to Fred, "I'm going to start taking the Pacific Citizen and see if I can, you know, let's find out what's going on. I think he mentioned redress, and Fred knew he didn't want to get involved in that, because he was, wanted to do something about his case. And so we started taking the Pacific Citizen, and that's... one reason Fred never went to the commission hearings is because we got the idea through the Japanese, through the paper, that the JACL was in charge of all of that. And I know that the night before, Wayne Collins, Jr. was going to talk, he called Fred and asked him if he had anything to say, and Fred said, "No." I don't, I suppose he was going to tell about his father's experiences with -- 'cause he did, Wayne Collins, I learned later, did so much for the Japanese community, the renunciants, I think to a certain extent Peruvians, I'm not sure. And that would have been... and he did it all through the ACLU, which he was not an ACLU attorney, they couldn't even afford a full-time attorney, but he, I think he was paid through the ACLU, as best as they could pay him.

TK: Can I take you back to Detroit again, that early years of your married life before you had children, what would you do every day?

KK: Well, I worked, Fred worked.

TK: How did you, how did you enjoy yourself during that time, before you had children?

KK: Well, we were, Fred became a member of my church, he had been brought up a Christian, and we had church activities, we had friends that we did things with. We took trips, we took vacations, and we just kept busy, that's all. And we hadn't, we knew we wanted children, but we had just only apartments. We hadn't tried to buy a house, because we really didn't think we'd settle there. We kept talking about the weather, and how it affected us. We were there three years, and then we left.

TK: And came to California.

KK: And went to California and stayed at the nursery for quite a few months. That was a very good move, because two years later, Fred's mother died, and I think...