<Begin Segment 2>

BN: Do you remember much about your father?

JK: No, I don't. All I know that I can piece together is what people (have) told me. He was very partial to me. My sister has nice big eyes, I have slits. And so people would say, "What a beautiful child your second daughter is, or (your) third daughter." And he would say, "You look at the pictures of Japanese beauties," he said, "none of them have big brown eyes, they all have slits like my oldest daughter." Very partial. I have that kind of stories that people have told me. He carried me wherever he could.

BN: You were only six.

JK: I was four and a half when he died. So I have very, just vague memories.

BN: What did he die of?

JK: I had the doctor read (his death certificate, and) it seems something to do with the gallbladder after surgery. It was a short illness of two weeks. This is 1930.

BN: So here your mother was twice a widow.

JK: Yeah, two times a widow. And so I asked her, "Why didn't you get married again?" She says she doesn't have luck with men. [Laughs]

BN: You mentioned the two sisters, the two half sisters in Japan, but you mentioned your father also had a family.

JK: My father had a daughter, and she was with him in Alaska when his first wife died. He buried her there. (...) His daughter married a Shinpei Nagao who was, at that time, already a graduate of Doshisha. He manufactured shoyu in Seattle. And I missed seeing (my sister) by six months when I went to the mainland in '52.

BN: So they settled and lived...

JK: Yeah, all on the mainland. One daughter, my niece, who is a year older than me, came to live with us. She was an exchange teacher at McKinley High School for the year.

BN: This is much later.

JK: Yeah, after the war. She came out (...) of camp and went to college, and then got a job at McKinley.

BN: So how much older, then, was the...

JK: My father and my mother were twenty years apart. And my mother was thirty something when I was born, (and) my father was fifty-six. That age I remember.

BN: When you were born?

JK: When I was born. So you can see how proud and happy he was. [Laughs]

BN: To have kind of a second chance for a family.

JK: Yeah.

BN: What did they do initially after they got married and settled down?

JK: Okay, my father was a lumber merchant using his own barge to bring lumber by the time my mother met him. Lumber from the Pacific Northwest to sell here as well as a contractor. So he built houses. He used to go out to the Waialua site. He built our house, our family home in Kaimuki, as well as two other homes on the same (lot). He had bought the whole hillside and built houses there. (...) He died in 1930, so that was in the '20s that he did that. He was way ahead of his time, I think.

BN: Then he suddenly passes away and leaves your mom with four very young children?

JK: Yeah, this is the story that I got. He was asked by some relatives to go to the police station to report that one of their daughters had run away with a Chinese man. So he had to go and report that to the police station. And he went back to the family to tell them that, "This is what I did already. Police will help you find her." And then naturally they drank osake, and then he went home (to) Kaimuki, Sixteenth Avenue, 1536 Sixteenth Avenue. And he told my mother, "Is the ofuro hot?" He said he was just shivering. And she said, "Yes, it is," so he went in, took a real deep (soaking), but by the morning he was in the hospital. Something to do with the gallbladder or kidney or something around there, an acute case, according to my doctor, who read the death certificate for me.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.