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BN: Is there no middle school? It's just the grammar school and then the high school?

KS: Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how that worked. Because I remember going to middle school in the summer, the year when they first had the, not the Sputnik, but they had the flying saucer thing. I forgot what year that was, when they first had that flying saucer. I was going to this middle school. So then from Clark/Division, I think I had to take the streetcar and stuff to go to Waller High School. But after we moved, I could walk to Waller High School.

BN: What was the student body like at Waller? Was it a big school?

KS: No, it was not a big school. But it was not a wealthy neighborhood. And I think ninety, a hundred or so, they used to have the graduation program in German or something. But anyway, over there, they had a lot of ethnic people living there. They had the Germans and Italians, lot of Italians lived there. So then there were schools in Chicago, so there was ours, there was Waller, and then if you go ten miles north, there was another school called Lakeview. If you go north, you got another high school. But I think as you went north, the people were wealthier, so the schools were, quote, "better" than ours. So at the end, what they did was they renamed the school from Waller to Mid North High School or something like that. Meanwhile, close by, there were always these private schools, so the rich people go to private school. And then also close by there were Catholic schools, so then people go to parochial schools.

BN: Did your family have a church in the area?

KS: Okay, so my father and mother, they went to this Presbyterian church. And then, I don't know when it was started, I don't know if it was prewar Presbyterian or not. But that church met at some Caucasian church, so they didn't have their own building. So they went there for a long time, and then, I don't know what year, maybe 1950s or '60s, that church bought a building of their own, and now the building of their own was north where we lived, so we used to go to that. So at first the church was south of where we lived, and now it's north of where we live. And then the only other church was Reverend Hibino, I don't know if you know him. But I think he still might be living, because he was the minister down in Wintersburg. Oh, I was going to tell you, the minister in Jerome was, I mean, before the war was John Yamasaki. So he was in our block, and I remember the day that he got beaten up, and he had to be whisked out of camp. But my parents didn't talk too much about it, but we all knew the next day that something happened, that he wasn't there anymore.

BN: What was the name of the church in Chicago?

KS: It still exists. And then they moved again, but I didn't go to church, my father and mother went to church.

BN: But it's a Japanese church?

KS: Yeah. So then I don't know, but it still exists.

BN: Were there other kinds of elements of Japanese community institutions that your family was a part of besides that? I assume you're not going to Japanese language school anymore.

KS: No.

BN: But anything else? Sports leagues or anything?

KS: No, we didn't participate in that.

BN: So mainly church was kind of this connection to the Japanese community?

KS: Uh-huh.

BN: I wanted to ask you about, we were talking before that you had the cousins who were from Japan. You said one of them actually perished during the atomic bomb. Was there any kind of communication with the Japanese relatives at that time?

KS: Okay, so this family, they had a boy and two girls. So then they lived in Japan during the war, and several years after the war ended, the boy came back to the U.S. So he lived on Sawtelle Boulevard.

BN: In L.A.?

KS: Yeah, in L.A. And then he died about twenty years ago, but he was more than ten years older than me. And then one died during the war, and the third girl, she might have lived about ten years ago. So then I went to Japan a couple of times, but when we go to Japan, she would be the contact. I think she graduated from Hollywood High, so then she spoke English like any Nisei. So then I think the people in Japan would still criticize her after fifty years, that, "You have an American accent." So then we used to see her. And then when we go to Hiroshima, the mainland, that's the contact. Now, on the island, my mother had a cousin or second cousin or somebody that lived there. So then my mother had land before the war, because she was the only child and stuff like that. So she had a house. These are tiny places, so she had a house in the village part, and then she had a house on the outskirts over there, and that's where the farm was. And the farm on outskirts, when MacArthur was there he took over that farm, gave it to somebody else. So I remember when I went to Japan, then I stayed at the house in the village. And that was the house that I was born in, I stayed there. And then my mother's cousin said that he'd been working to put electricity in the house so that when I'd come visit, I'd have electricity. But I stayed there, slept there one night. And then so I stayed there one night and then I said, "I want to go see the other house," where my mother's farm was. And he said, "No, no, you can't go there." I asked several times, said, "No, I can't take you there." And then finally he said, "The farm was given away by MacArthur, and if I take you there," they're going to think I'm trying to get the land back. Okay, "so that's the reason I don't want to take you there." But he said, "Okay, I'll take you there." But then finally, this is about a mile away, we're walking through the bamboo groves, and as we come close to the house, he keeps on shouting in a loud voice, "These are people from America, but they're going to go back to America right away." [Laughs] "They're going to just take a look and they're going to go back to America right away." So that's how I got to see it.

BN: What year would this have been?

KS: In the '80s.

BN: But years later.

KS: Right.

BN: In Chicago, I'm curious, because you mentioned before the war, you're speaking Japanese. After the war, is it different?

KS: No. So then I didn't go to a Japanese language school at all.

BN: You mean, you did before the war.

KS: Yeah, before the war. After the war, I didn't go. So I forgot everything I learned.

BN: And your parents' English was...

KS: My father could read a newspaper, but my mother didn't read the English newspaper. So I guess they wanted us to read the newspaper. And Jerome and Rohwer, used to subscribe to the Little Rock newspaper so we could read the newspaper and see what was going on.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.