<Begin Segment 13>

SY: So your experience at Cal was fairly, was a pleasant one, a good one?

HK: I would say for the most part yes. Made some good friends, still maintain contact with some of them. Yeah, that was a good experience. It was quite a transition from a high school, fairly smaller high school to the university which was like at the time was about 20,000 students. It's a huge transition from this high school to this enormous university campus, so that was quite an adjustment.

SY: At the time how was your father... how were your parents able to support, 'cause several of your family went to Cal, correct?

HK: Yes, well my sister, the one who got the honorary degree, which unfortunately she didn't graduate because of the camp, and then the last three, Sachi, my younger sister Momo and me, the last three of us got our degrees from Berkeley.

SY: And was that something that happened by design, I mean how did that happen?

HK: Well, you know, it's a funny thing. People say, "How did you happen to go to Berkeley?" Well, I didn't really have much choice 'cause he just said, "You're going to go to Berkeley," so I says, "Oh, okay." So the expectation was there, so that was for a lot of us in our time. so the last three of us actually got degrees where one more sister would have gotten a degree if she had been able to continue with her schooling. So it was just understood we were going to go to Berkeley, and that's the way it worked out. It was convenient, it was close, it was public, it was reasonable, so that was the place to go for us.

SY: And your parents at the time were doing what?

HK: After the war they didn't continue farming. My father, like a lot of the other Japanese American men, went into gardening, and that served as a survival thing for a lot of Japanese American families. The father and frequently the mother also would go gardening. And they worked very hard again and they made do with whatever they could, and then eventually my father and... by then my brother was discharged from the army and came back. So my father and brother started a nursery, a bedding plant nursery. They started just in the backyard with a little lean-to green house, and eventually they grew and we'd build greenhouses and lath houses and began to grow. I was in high school then when they were doing this, so I had to come home from school and work and weekends and vacations, et cetera et cetera. So it was a lot of hard work again, you know, they didn't have all the mechanization they have today so a lot of it was just by sheer manual labor. And I could tell myself I don't want to be doing this for too much longer, I'd rather go to school and become, quote, "a professional" or something. Anything but all this hard work. So that was my choice and I guess my father would, probably would have liked me to come into the nursery business with my brother so he would say "Kawahara and Sons" or something like that. But I said, "Well, yeah, that's a nice thought but I think I'm going to go my own way." So I started doing some other things. Fortunately my brother and my father established the nursery, grew it, developed, and it's very successful today. They're wholesale bedding plant growers. Fortunately my brother's two sons, John and David, got into the nursery business as well, followed through, and they run the nursery now and it's really grown and developed. So I think they were primarily the moving forces to make it what it is today, because it's a fairly large business today.

SY: And is it called Kawahara and Sons?

HK: Yes.

SY: Really?

HK: No, it's just called Kawahara Nursery.

SY: So even though there was pressure, some kind of underlying thing for you to go to college, you didn't feel that same pressure to become a member of this business?

HK: No, not quite the same pressure. I think my parents realized that Harry was a little bit different in some respects, that he's not going to be going into this nursery business or farming business or whatever. He had some other interests that motivated him to go another direction. So they were kind of understanding of that and so I guess my father, I would, probably had some ambivalent feelings. "Yes, it would be nice to have my younger son in the business, Kawahara and Sons, da da da, but at that same time he's got his own interests, his own things he wants to pursue, so just let him do that." Which I appreciated that, so they kind of let me go my own way.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.