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TI: During this, right after the war in Gardena, what was your mother doing?

RI: My mother first worked, when she started working after my younger brother started going to, he was five years old and going to school, my grandmother lived with us. My mother was able to go to work and she worked at a very famous bakery called Busy Bee Bakery. Everyone would know that, it's in the Town and Country shopping center, Western Avenue, next to Kyoto Sukiyaki, and that's where I got introduced to something called Long John's. It was opened by a couple from Hawaii, and this was just the best thing to have. It was better than Krispy Kreme or anything that you're going to get today, and my mom worked there. And then she worked for probably around thirty or so years for Ron Matsunaga, who was a dentist, but then became a physician and then a well-known plastic surgeon. And his first office was in Crenshaw Square off of Stocker, and then he moved to Wilshire and Beverly Hills. But my mom worked for him, and Dr. Matsunaga's family originally was from Fresno, so there were a lot of long term family ties.

TI: How about, for you growing up, Japanese American activities? I mean, did you do Japanese language school? What type of things did you do, other than just your normal schooling in terms of community stuff?

RI: Well, because my father was active in the Gardena Buddhist Church Japanese school, all of us were required to attend the Nihongo gakko on doyobi, on Saturday. Well, I wanted to play baseball, I wanted to do other things than go to Japanese school. I go to school Monday through Friday, why do I have to go to school on Saturday? So I ended up going, and unfortunately, after nine years, I never graduated. I think the teachers just passed me because they knew my father was the principal and it would be embarrassing for the principal's son not to be passed to the next level. But I recall... now that I think about it, how arrogant I was. But I remember one day my father sat me down and says, "You know something? You're gonna regret not studying and learning how to read and write Japanese." So I looked at him and says, "Dad, Japan lost World War II, we don't need to know Japanese." He said, "You're going to regret what you said." Well, going back twenty years later, I'm in Tokyo, and I'm with my clients. I could probably understand fifty percent of what they're saying, but I don't understand a lot of the things. Japanese is so much nuance, so you can kind of pick up the rest. But after going to, being in Asia and Japan for about thirty years, my Japanese improved dramatically, but I figured out why. Not only karaoke, but also because the language was taught with images. Learning Japanese or any language on the chalkboard is not a real good way to learn if you're visual. And even today, most people in other countries learn Japanese by manga, and so it's really a wonderful thing, but Japanese school was one of them. And the second thing that I was... Boy Scouts was important.

TI: And so was the Boy Scout troop associated with a church, or who was the Boy Scouts...

RI: No, we were not associated with any church, but there were so many of my friends who were all part of the Boy Scout troop or Explorer troop, and we'd go camping and hiking and doing those kinds of things. Today, there's probably more church groups that support Boy Scouts, in fact, I work with the Gardena Evening Optimist Club and we sponsor Boy Scout troops. And it's amazing, I think their efforts, what they do now is so different from when I was in Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts you try to become an Eagle Scout, there was no big push. You either did it because you wanted it or you didn't.

TI: This was back when you were in the Scouts?

RI: But today, I wouldn't say it's an expectation, but there's so much greater support for you to earn your merit badges, to learn new things to achieve Eagle Scout, which is still very, very difficult to do. And I think by becoming a Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout today, it's far different from before in the sense that you... because maybe technology, you know more.

TI: So back then, did you become an Eagle Scout?

RI: No, I made it to Star, and I didn't make it to Eagle Scout because I think you had to do ten pull-ups.

TI: [Laughs] But you were an athlete, you were playing baseball.

RI: Well, but the whole thing is, if you weigh more than your arms can lift, that's a problem.

TI: Well, and so, in terms of, like, your Scout troop, how many other Japanese Americans were in your troop? I'm trying to get a sense of just the composition of your friends, your acquaintances, while you were growing up in Gardena.

RI: If we had forty or fifty Boy Scouts, probably at least thirty were Japanese American, we were all Sansei, we grew up together. And even today, when I'm in Gardena, I run into some of my friends, we go, "Oh, remember that time we hiked from Pasadena all the way to Wrightwood?" which is by the 15 freeway and five or six days of hiking. I remember that, so we can't even walk to the parking lot today. But no, it's really nice to be able to have that experience. I can tell you that growing up in Gardena, I never, ever felt any form of discrimination. And I guess I think about it, certainly in junior high and high school, basically Japanese Americans ran the school. And whatever, we were active in sports and student government, or different drama or news, whatever it would be. And so you never felt like you were anything than what you could be, so there was no cap. Whereas I know growing up from others, you may have felt that, but Gardena was really a wonderful place to grow.

TI: Yeah, other than Hawaii, the interviews I've done, Gardena is pretty unique in that sense. Even in the Bay Area and things like that, I don't quite come across something where Japanese Americans were sort of the dominant culture.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.