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MA: So when you were in high school, at Alamosa High School, what were your, I guess, goals, or dreams for the future, when you were that age?

BK: Everybody talks about that, and I thought to myself, "Hmm, I never used to think about that." I didn't. I just, things would happen, and I guess fortunately they were good things that happened, and I just never gave much thought to, "Oh gosh, what am I going to do after high school. What am I going to do after..." things just seemed to work out and I just never worried about it. But I would stand up for myself, like not wanting to go to sewing school. So I knew what I wanted. And I knew also that I didn't want to be in an arranged marriage, because all of my sisters and brothers above me were arranged marriages. And two or three of them were very, very bad. And I remember one sister just crying and crying on her wedding day, and I thought, "I am not going to be married like that." So I do remember that. So I was the first one in my family not to have an arranged marriage. So it made it easier for the ones below me.

MA: And your younger siblings then didn't have to have arranged marriages?

BK: No, no. They didn't.

MA: So, I'm curious about the arranged marriage and how that worked in your family. Were these mostly Japanese American men and women from around the San Luis Valley or in Denver?

BK: There were a couple of them from Denver, one from further north. But there was an insurance man in Denver and he would kinda keep an eye out for like any prospects and who he could arrange. So he arranged several of them for my sisters, I know. And then we would have baishakunin, friends of the family who were the baishakunin, and even though I wasn't an arranged marriage, I still had to go through the whole ritual. I still had to have baishakunin, go through the whole thing.

MA: Can you explain that a little more, the baishakunin?

BK: They would come and talk to the parents and say, I guess, they'd bring a picture and say, "Can we arrange this?" And I know when one of my oldest sisters was married, how they had that, when they're engaged they drink that sake, you know, three times and things like that. And I remember helping her with that and going to the future groom's home and doing that ceremony. We kept a lot of the Japanese rituals, like we'd pound, families would get together and we'd pound mochi for New Year's. And have that New Year's party. And I can remember my dad on New Year's morning, he would always get up early and fix ozoni with the, with the mochi in it, and he would fix breakfast for us that morning. We'd always have to clean the house from top to bottom before New Year's Day. And we'd have hanamatsuri, we'd learn all these Japanese dances and give speeches in Japanese. So we carried on a lot of the traditions, celebrating the sixtieth birthday and the eighty-eighth birthday and things like that, too.

MA: Yeah, it seemed like your parents kept a lot of that alive when you were growing up.

BK: Yeah, I'm glad. I loved all that, I loved all that. When we built our home, I wanted it all Japanese. But my husband didn't, so we compromised. But gradually, I'm getting it all Japanese. [Laughs]

<End Segment 14> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.