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MA: So I want to talk a little bit about your siblings. You said you had twelve siblings. Or there's twelve children in your family.

BK: Twelve in the family. There were ten girls and two boys.

MA: Where do you fall in that?

BK: About in the middle. I'm the eighth child. Seventh daughter, eighth child. One of the brothers is about third from the oldest and the other one is second from the youngest.

MA: And when was, what's the range? I guess, when was the oldest born, and when was the youngest?

BK: Okay, my oldest sister is still living. And she is, let's see, she's eighty-nine. And the youngest one is, hmm, how old is she? [Laughs] She must be, she must be about sixty-six. Yeah.

MA: And you were saying to me earlier that four of your siblings were actually born in California.

BK: Uh-huh.

MA: When your parents were still, still there.

BK: Yeah. The four oldest were born in California. But the two oldest ones, and the two oldest sisters were taken back to Japan to live with the maternal grandparents. And, and the thought was that they would bring 'em back in just a few years. Well, times changed you know, economics, and money, and everything, and so they didn't come back 'til they were eighteen, nineteen years old. So they're more like Japanese from Japan. They just spoke Japanese. I know it was hard for them when they came. But my oldest sister was married within a year, and it was an arranged marriage.

MA: She was married when she came back.

BK: When she came back to America. Uh-huh. Just a year later, she was married to a man who was much older than she was. That's how it was, that's what they did back then.

MA: And your two eldest sisters that went to Japan, was there a specific reason why they were sent over there?

BK: At the time, my mother said that they lived on a place called MacDonald Island. And I tried to locate that on the map when I was thinking about this, and I never could find it. But she said that they would have had to put the two little girls on a small boat every day to go to school. And so they just opted to take them to Japan instead.

MA: I see, so there wasn't a school on the island where they were living.

BK: No, uh-uh. No.

MA: What were they doing at that time on MacDonald Island? Was your father still working in labor foreman?

BK: Yeah, he was, uh-huh. Yeah.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.