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MA: So today is Tuesday, July 7, 2009, and Densho is here in Torrance, California. My name is Megan Asaka, and I will be interviewing Iku Kiriyama. Dana Hoshide is the cameraperson for today. So thank you so much for doing this interview

IK: Oh, thank you for inviting me.

MA: I wanted to start by just asking you some basic questions. When were you born?

IK: November 12, 1939.

MA: And where were you born?

IK: Los Angeles, probably near USC.

MA: And what was the name given to you at birth?

IK: Ikuko.

MA: Ikuko. And what's your maiden name?

IK: Kato.

MA: And I wanted to talk a little bit about your parents. You mentioned before that your mother was a Nisei. Can you talk about her background and where she grew up?

IK: She was born in Santa Cruz, she was born in 1912. She was, but before she was age ten, the family moved to Arizona, and they had twenty acres to farm. Her father, though, contracted pneumonia and died when she was -- excuse me, wait a minute. They must have moved earlier then, because her father died when she was ten. So I don't really know exactly when they moved to Arizona, but I imagine at least five years there before he passed away. And then my mother was the oldest of... they had big families then. So it was my mother, (brother), sister... she had three siblings plus three half-sisters, 'cause her mother remarried later. But the burden of farming really fell on my mother. They started having really hard times. She blamed her stepfather, actually, because she said that he really didn't work hard, and so the twenty acres went to waste. And because of that, the family was always starving. In those days, of course, and even in my time, we walked to school, they walked to school. And because they had no breakfast, often she and her brothers and sister would faint at school. And I remember once -- not once, it was the common story -- that if she ever received anything, she would divide it in five or four equal parts, and everybody got a little piece. So she had a hard life. She graduated from high school there, never was what you'd call an educated person, though. She was a very simple person, simple life, and that's because all she knew was staying at home and working. And so when she came out to California, and her marriage to my father was omiai, you know, the arranged marriage. And so she went from farming to, my father was... when he came from Japan, he was farming, but then after they got married he did some gardening and nursery. And she said that she never wanted to work on a farm because the life was so tough. But then she moved from one pan to another. Not exactly the same work, but the same conditions. And so she never really had a life other than staying on whatever property, so it'd be Arizona, twenty acres, California, a few acres, then Manzanar, locked there, come back, same thing again. She never drove, so my father did all the shopping. She never went to anything, 'cause he always would go to the meetings or whatever. So she had a hard life. Typical, I think, in that way. It was not unique, unfortunately.

MA: Right. And your father, then, was an Issei, so he was born in Japan?

IK: Right, he was from Kagoshima. I thought that he had come just once and stayed, but when my husband and I were in D.C., we went to the archives there, and that's when I discovered that he had come when he was nineteen, went back for whatever reason, and then returned when he was twenty. And then never went back until, gosh, it was probably about '70, '71. It was kind of like Rip Van Winkle going back after all those years, just to visit.

MA: And did he come right to, did he settle in southern California?

IK: Primarily. I don't know so much about settling, but moving around like all Issei did. Most of his work was in the valleys, farming, doing crop sharing. He also had a, like a fruit stand, worked in a coffee shop. And so did little odds and ends things. After the war, since we had nothing, he did some gardening to slowly build up stock by getting cuttings and slips from his customers' yards, and then we were able to start the business not too long after we got back. I think we were back here... you know, I tried finding the information, I even asked a friend at JANM. It was really funny, I got the, all the camp documents from the archives, paid for every page, duplicates and empties and all. And it dawned on me just a few months ago, when I was looking for something... oh, I know, we were going to UCLA to speak to Lane Hirabayashi's seminar class. So I thought, "When did we actually leave?" It was one of those things where I lived it, and there are certain dates that I know, but there was really no reason to get really the exact date. So I went to my documents, I couldn't find a release date at all. Going in, it was there, my husband's records for going from Manzanar to Tule, everything is there, but nothing about a release date. So I really don't know. I assume that we left Manzanar at the end of '45. I know we were there at least that long because I have documents of October '45 when my mother was questioned. Again, like I said, she was never really very sharp in terms of comprehension of words. And so when Question 27 and 28 came up, she answered "yes-no." So they called her in -- my father, even though he's Japan-educated and all that, he understood and he answered "yes-yes." And because my mother answered "yes-no," she was called in. And I have the transcript of the interview, it's very interesting. You can see how she's just completely frightened, intimidated, and the questioners kept pounding at her. They repeated it several times in different ways to have her say, "Yes, I'm loyal, I will do anything for -- yes, I'll be in there." And my mother was sick all the time in Manzanar. That's why I mentioned to you when we were talking on the phone that she never wanted to go back on these pilgrimages. It was just a place that she hated. But during that interview, "Oh, I'll be a nurse, I'll do anything." And the explanation she gave -- and I really don't know if that was the real, I think she was just confused. She told the interrogator that she answered "no" because, for some reason, and I didn't follow her rationale there, but she thought that if she answered "yes," because she's a citizen and my father wasn't, because Issei couldn't be, that he would be sent back to Japan and she would have to stay here. So maybe that was it, but as I said, the documents were the first time I had even seen anything along that line.

MA: Okay, so I was gonna ask, this was the first time you even know about that?

IK: Right, right. Yeah, because we didn't talk about the political, legal ramifications of the camp. It was just the life that we had, and there were no questions. Certainly not from me when I'm little, and growing up, I was very conscious of being Japanese. And it wasn't until I started teaching really, in '62, that I became really, really conscious of how everybody else at the high school where I taught, they all thought I came from Japan.

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