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MN: I want to ask you two more things. When the museum opened and you started to get a lot of students from Roosevelt High School come and go through the exhibits, and a lot of these were Latino students, and they decided to, to resurrect the Japanese garden at Roosevelt High School. Can you tell us that story, and how did you feel about these Latino students being interested in this prewar garden? And what happened to that prewar garden?

BK: Well, when the war broke out, World War II, and all this information about the war and Pearl Harbor and the bad news about evacuation, the students at Roosevelt destroyed the Japanese garden there. At that time most of the students were Jewish students and Latinos, so they were aroused because of the war. I can't blame 'em. Postwar, when we came back, there were no Japanese gardens in Roosevelt, Roosevelt. It was all gone. But the students that came back and were now attending Roosevelt were mostly Hispanic, and I was raised around Roosevelt High School. Our first home was directly opposite the Japanese garden, then we moved about three blocks further to 2617 East Third Street, which was one block away from the school, so I was around the school all my life it seems. So as far as the nature of the surrounding areas postwar, it became drastically changed because of the real estate laws change. As you recall, there was race restrictions on properties and the race restrictions were eliminated soon after the war ended, and so you couldn't have any more race restrictions on the properties and so the area which was first restricted to only the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, WASPs, was eliminated from the ownership of properties, and therefore all the Jewish people that, who were prevented from owning property moved, looked like they moved wholesale from Boyle Heights to other areas, to the Valley, to mid Los Angeles. They all moved out, to Beverly Hills, everywhere, and so Boyle Heights became strictly Latino. There's only a few holdovers of Jewish people and the churches were still there, so Roosevelt became totally Hispanic and the teachers then became totally immersed in trying to get the Latinos to learn English.

And as they came over and visited our museum they were quite impressed, and as they went through the old annuals of Roosevelt High School they saw that there was a Japanese garden and they says, "Oh, that, it's so sad that there is no Japanese garden now." And so there were those that said they would like to see a Japanese garden, and that's what interested us and some of the old Roosevelt High School people. And so we formed a committee and we started raising funds, and we got the Roosevelt High School people to dedicate a certain area that we then got some money together and got a committee to install a Japanese garden. The problem there -- the first garden that I headed up and got that done was good for a while -- the problem was their gardener or the person in charge there didn't know how to maintain the garden, so it, it just went downhill. And then later on, one of the people from Japan who had gone to Roosevelt and graduated, I forget his name, Mr.... can't think of it. He's, he became very successful and he wrote a book and his book is at the museum library and also in the bookstore. He became an industrialist, very successful, and he allocated a certain amount of money to reestablish another Japanese garden and he got his, I think, daughter-in-law, one of his relatives, she used to work for Bank of Tokyo, became retired, lives in Gardena, she became the kenjinkai president for the same ken that this industrialist was from, and she's in charge of maintaining the garden. So he had set aside so much money, but he just recently passed away, so I don't know what's gonna happen, but the kids from Roosevelt did witness a resurrection of the Japanese garden that they were inquiring about. And since they came to the museum there's been two Japanese gardens reestablished, and I think it's still there, not as beautiful as the original one because the original one had a big pond and had a Japanese bridge. I was, I took a picture standing on the bridge when I was maybe five years old. But Roosevelt has a very special place amongst the Japanese Americans.

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