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BN: Were you involved in sports?
GK: Oh. All the boys were involved in sports, but I was very poor in sports. So they put me on a team, but I always played right field where the balls don't come.
BN: This is baseball.
GK: Baseball.
BN: What about beach and water kind of sports? Because you're right there by the ocean.
GK: Oh. Well, we used to live about half a mile from the beach, Puuiki Beach. And what I remember my young kid days, was that we used to go camping at Puuiki Beach. And we learned how to swim there all by ourselves. But the thing I remember about going camping that was a big thing, and we would bring our dinner. And the dinner was a loaf of bread, and you would cut the bread in half. At that time, they didn't have sliced, you see. And then you scoop out the inside of one half, and you pour a can of pork and beans into it. And you ate that, and that was dinner.
BN: Now you mentioned that your family went back several generations of priests.
GK: Yes.
BN: Was there assumption that you or your brothers would also enter into, be Buddhist priests?
GK: I suppose so, but we, the children were never convinced. They didn't want to become priests. So my brother became a lawyer, and then doctor, and then myself a lawyer, and then the last one became a professor at University of Washington.
BN: And your father, there was no pressure to...
GK: Oh, no. We just refused.
BN: Growing up, because your father was a priest, was he particularly strict in terms of enforcing that you spoke Japanese? I mean, how was the family?
GK: My father left most of the raising of the children to my mother. And my mother was so-called strict person, like when it came time to volunteer for 442nd in 1943, I think, March, I didn't want to go because it was a volunteer thing. And I didn't want to volunteer. Well, lot of my friends, we were at the University of Hawaii then, they volunteered and formed a labor group called VVV, Varsity Victory Volunteers. And they were allowed to clear the brushes around the island. Well, I didn't want to do that, so I started to work. And I worked as a carpenter when I didn't know how to do carpentry work. But I remember my specialty was to build outhouses for the miners who were digging tunnels in Kipapa Gulch, for instance. That was the ammunition tunnel, I think. Well, I joined the group that made the outhouses, so I became a specialty.
BN: We need them.
GK: Yeah.
BN: Just to kind of finish up with how the childhood, the youth period, did you do mochitsuki and other kinds of, Bon dance, those, participate in those types of things?
GK: Definitely Bon dance, but mochitsuki, I was too young, I think. But I remember all the Bon dance because it was held in, right next to the church.
BN: How big of a temple was it? Do you have a sense of how many people attended? Was it pretty big?
GK: No, it was not that big, because, well, the special services got big, but the monthly services were not very big. And my job for the monthly services that I remember was to pass out the zabuton (cushions) because they used to all sit on the floor. And the other job that I had was to make the hot water for the tea. And I had to time it right so that when the service ended, the water would be hot.
BN: Relative to your other, to your friends, people you grew up with, did the fact that you grew up in the temple, as the son of a priest, did you feel like you were raised more, kind of Japanesey?
GK: Not especially. But the thing that I remember was when growing up, they used to have community baths. One in our camp, and the other in the next camp. And the community baths, you have one big bath for the men and one big bath for the women. Well, one of the baths in the next camp was one big bath, and the partition was put down to separate the males from the females. But that partition did not go right down to the bottom of the bathtub. So I remember diving under the partition to the other side.
BN: How old were you then?
GK: I don't remember.
<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.