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MN: Well, let's talk about your parents. Did you spend a lot of time with your parents or at your barrack?

BK: We were in the same barracks, but everybody had a different thing that they were working on. My dad was a carpenter so he'd be gone all day, working on the projects and coming back. And we never got together. My mother worked in the mess hall. My sister was a librarian, and my other sister was in the, teaching the small kids. And each had their jobs, and we'd never sit together as a family to eat. They ate at the barracks or the blocks where they worked, and lunch time you're supposed to go back to your block where you slept to eat, but sometimes you're at one end of the camp and by the time you walked you'd miss out. Yeah, the family was very loose. We never sat together to eat. We were independent. I sat with the boys. My sisters sat with their teachers. And my father ate wherever they had to eat with the carpenters, and my mother was in the, in the mess hall, wiping dishes and doing everything to keep the tables clean.

MN: In 1943, when you were a senior in high school, the government passed out the controversial "loyalty questionnaire."

BK: Oh, yeah.

MN: Did you discuss this with anybody, and how did you answer it?

BK: I wasn't confused. I didn't discuss it with anybody. I just put what I wanted to put in and that was it. There was no question in my mind. I'm a loyal American and I'm not pro-Japanese. I don't know anything about the Emperor, so I just filled it in and signed it. There was nothing in my mind. Then I heard other people had problems.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.