Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Ronald Ikejiri Interview
Narrator: Ronald Ikejiri
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: February 6, 2019
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-461-4

[Correct spelling of certain names, words and terms used in this interview have not been verified.]

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TI: Okay, and so after Crystal City, where did the family go?

RI: They came back to the South Bay. They ended up being in Redondo Beach, and I remember I went to elementary school and worked on the -- I won't say worked -- I played on the Japanese farms up and down Hawthorne Boulevard, and it was just really a fun time. I mean, if you wanted to find me in the afternoon, I'm probably underneath some tree with a dog sleeping. It was just a neat time, because it was just wide open. It was like a lot of things in life, if you looked at where USC is today, it really was in the early 1900s, the high society and the best place to live. And then UCLA where I went to school, was middle of nowhere, it was just open plains and not very many trees. But give it a hundred years, it suddenly becomes a really nice place to live, and I think the South Bay of Los Angeles as the same. And the Japanese were there and Japanese farmers really were able to survive and thrive in that environment.

TI: And what was it like to be a farming family back then? I mean, was that hard work? In terms of, were you drawn in as you got older to help out and do a lot of the chores?

RI: Well, by the time... after about seven, eight years, coming out of Crystal City, my parents were able to save a thousand dollars. And they decided to buy a home in Gardena. We were living with my obaachan, my mother's mother and my uncle, so there was six of us living in this home in north Redondo Beach, and we had one bathroom. And I remember my parents came home one day and I was probably around five years old when they said, "Well, we bought a home, and you're going to really like it because it has two bathrooms." And I said, "Oh my god, we're going to be moving into the Waldorf Astoria." We thought that was a big deal. Now you tell this to kids today, they laugh at you, but there's some really simple things in life, certainly in the early '50s that kind of ring out. But what was nice about it, and I'll always remember, I was probably around six years old or so, we had moved into the house in Gardena and I was going to Denker Avenue school in Gardena. And my father had his hands on the table at dinnertime, says, "What's wrong, Daddy?" He says, "Well, house payments are seventy dollars a month, I make about two hundred and fifty dollars a month. I don't know if I can make these payments." And so although you look backwards on it, you can't buy a tank of gas for seventy dollars today. But it's just one of those things that I'm sure every family went through, and it's heartening.

TI: And how did that impact you when you saw your father kind of struggling with that?

RI: You know, it's interesting, my father, one, never yelled at me, although I probably deserved to be yelled out. Two, he never hit me. Never spanked me that I can recall. But he'd always sit down and would kind of explain things to me, which was, to me, different. Because I know some of my other friends, my hakujin friends, they'd get spanked a lot. [Laughs] But it was more of a, I think it was because my father was raised in Japan, and it was more of a stoic thought. And being, looking at my father, I remember I was probably around five or six years old, really cold winter, probably in January, and my dad came home from gardening. But earlier in the day, my mom drove me down to JC Penney in Hermosa Beach, and went in there and she bought me this, probably a rayon jacket or something with a little, kind of fur on it, to keep me warm. And my father came home, he was so happy that I was able to get this coat, this jacket, and to me, that's one of my fond memories because -- other than him buying me a baseball mitt -- is that when you're a parent, you always hear about if you're children are okay. And for my father, I just kind of received that in that way, so it always makes me happy.

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