<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So now I'm going way back.

RO: Okay.

TI: Back to your childhood. So let me sort of recap a little bit. So you're born in 1936 in Tokyo, as a baby you came over with your older brother and your parents to San Diego. Let's talk a little bit about San Diego and where you lived, the house and the neighborhood and so tell me a little bit about that.

RO: Well when we arrived in San Diego apparently we docked in San Pedro and initially we were in this city called Newell or Newark, I wasn't aware of that. I was so little I don't have any memories of that house. But that was the church apparently, at first, and then the parents, our family moved to San Diego to Webster Street. 3042 Webster and my father built, helped with the building of a new church and we were there from '37, '38 to 1942 until we were sent to Santa Anita. But my dad apparently was good at organizing things because after that, after we returned to San Diego after the war, he was sent up to San Lorenzo where again he was responsible for constructing a chapel, a church. So I guess my dad was very good at organizing and being responsible to the building construction.

TI: Now when he would build a church, especially like San Lorenzo when you're a little bit older and you saw this, did he have to also do the fundraising to raise the money to help buy the supplies and build the church?

RO: Well, the San Lorenzo church was the property was donated from the Shinoda family, Dan Shinoda who had the nursery, there was a... they had a huge, well, at that time I thought it was huge but they raised roses, gardenias and primarily roses. They contributed, I worked at the nursery during school breaks and Christmas breaks and all. And they contributed, they sent down a lot of their roses for the Rose Parade. 'Cause I had pricks in my fingers, I was at the end of the assembly where I would have to take the roses and put them twenty-five and put the string on and all that. So they... Dan Shinoda, the Shinoda family apparently donated the grounds to San Lorenzo for the church and so my father though, because of his experience in San Diego in helping that church build, the construction, overseeing the construction of it he was then sent up to San Lorenzo and he did the same thing, he worked with the... Dan Shinoda was not only a businessman but he was also a minister.

TI: Oh, that's interesting. That's kind of an interesting combination. You don't hear about that very often.

RO: Yes, that's right.

TI: It's almost like a conflict in some ways it feels like.

RO: You would think so right. But he was the English speaking minister and my dad was the Issei minister and so after we lived in that Victorian house for a while, then they started the construction.

TI: So let's go back to San Diego and for you what childhood memories do you have of San Diego?

RO: A few, a couple. I remember going to kindergarten, my first day in kindergarten and of course we just spoke Japanese at home. So I still have that visual memory of standing in the middle of the kindergarten school classroom crying my heart out 'cause I couldn't speak English, I spoke Japanese. And that's my memory of kindergarten is that I obviously learned how to speak English but it was terrifying 'cause I didn't know, I mean, I spoke Japanese at home. I must have learned some English because there were other children at the church, but my primary language was Japanese.

TI: Now were there other Japanese at this kindergarten or this school?

RO: No, that was the whole trauma of this thing was that we were the only Japanese family, Japanese American family at this school that was fifty percent African American and fifty percent white. And we were the only Japanese American family there. It was terrifying and then after, I don't have any recollection of what happened in kindergarten other than that one memory of standing in the middle of the classroom crying my eyes out. I do have memories after we returned from Poston.

TI: We'll get to those later because actually I want, yeah, you to talk about the differences that you saw.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.