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BN: Now, you moved to Silver Lake, but you're still going for a while to Our Lady of Loretto. And then you finish there, and then from there...

AK: Loyola High School. So again, I'm one of the first Japanese to go there. Then after that, a lot of the kids from Maryknoll start to go there. When I was there, we could count maybe four or five Japanese Americans. So you learn what the white Caucasian families, some of the corporate, some of the movie stars' kids. When I was there, Tony Hope, Bob Hope's kid was there, John Wayne's kid Patrick was there, and then people like the head of Otis Elevators was there, because after he left, he worked for his uncle, that type of thing, became CEO. So, I mean, there's different places and things that you see. I remember my junior or senior prom, you go up to someplace in the Larchmont area, or Beverly Hills or Brentwood, and you go to these mansions, somebody opens the door you don't know whether to shake their hands or not, you don't know what to say. Is that the butler or is that the father? Who is that? And what do you do, you look around, and these are the homes that you see in the movies kind of thing. You don't always walk around in that many square feet, that type of thing. So that was quite an experience. I wasn't going there every day, so would be on these different occasions.

BN: Were you accepted as just another student by the largely white student body? Was there discrimination?

AK: Yes and no. I mean, my counselor wanted me to become a landscape architect, that's a glorified gardener. That's because I seemed to like the outdoors, I seemed to be good with my hands or whatever.

BN: They probably didn't have a chick sexing program.

AK: Right. And so one of the things that happened was I didn't even know, what is a landscape architect? I know architects landscape. So I went in the main library here has a tower, and you go to the tower, and you go to one of these sections, and there's two books at the time on Japanese gardens. And that was the landscape architect section.

[Interruption]

AK: So we were back in terms of postwar.

BN: Right. I think we were talking about Loyola High School and being rooted to landscape architecture.

AK: And, you know, it's a question of whether or not you feel really accepted. I mean, the immediate friends I had were minority friends. When I was a sophomore, a person from Hawaii came up, and he was part Japanese and Korean, and he tried to pick a fight with me to see if I was truly sticking up for my Asian heritage kind of thing, and I don't need that.

BN: Did you go to, like, dances, football games, that kind of, the normal high school activities?

AK: And you take out another Asian girl, or Latino or some minority person, you hang out with some of the white girls because Loyola's all boys. So there'd be the all-girls schools, hang out and so forth, and usually I'd have a Japanese American girlfriend. What was interesting in growing up in Silver Lake and in the middle, I wasn't labeled Eastside or Westside. If you're labeled Westside, you're more African American and then you have that African American carriage and tone. If you're from the Eastside, you look like a Latino gangster with that kind of accent and so forth. And so I couldn't be pegged as either Eastside or Westside, because I wasn't either. So I'd hang out with the Dorsey kids or the L.A. High kids, or the Roosevelt and Garfield kids. In fact, a lot of the Maryknoll kids would be from the Eastside, let's say, Boyle Heights, we'd go further away.

BN: At that time, were there kids from Gardena, South Bay, or was later?

AK: There were, but it was more distant, more rare. The distance, I think, depends on whether or not the freeway was there.

BN: Yeah. The big migration probably was a little bit later than when you were growing up. Still semi rural back then.

AK: Well, and then remember that Venice, Westside, San Fernando Valley, the southeast, there'd be these different communities there. So the only reason why you'd go down to Gardena all that way would be because of a dance, some kind of social of some type or another. That's saying your car will get you there. So I didn't hang out too much down that far, although we had relatives from Joe Suski's wife's side who basically grew up in Watts. So there was different experiences like that, where the Miyoshis and so forth we would know. And they had their own small business and everything. Or like the Masudas, when they came back, they had a cleaners in the Eastside closer to Garfield. My cousin Donald, older sisters, my dad's older sister's son, only child, went to Garfield, then to Occidental College in football. So there's different episodic things, again, and what happened with my grandfather Kumamoto is he had a stroke and so he was pretty bedridden. And so you have the Masudas down the street in the main thoroughfare, you've got Narike, Mrs. Narike working at Barker Brothers department store downtown, just like she had done in Chicago. And she's taking care of the grandfather, the grandfather's living with her along with her son. And my dad, on the weekends, we would go and we'd spend the weekend giving relief for that aunt. So there was a routine like that that would take us out of certain areas and into that area which was mainly Latino. But there weren't that many Japanese Americans. On the other hand, around Fourth Street Cleaners, there was a group called Go For Broke, and Go For Broke was this youth group, youth "gang" and so we were working with that. Yellow Brotherhood is on the Westside, Mike Yamaki and Victor Shibata, and they were people that were working with the Westside group. So we sort of had ties into both of those. Ford Richard and some of these others like in Gardena, we didn't really do anything. When my daughter was playing basketball, CYC basketball, we'd go visit San Fernando Valley, so we'd see the community center out there. And then when we're trying to get so and so elected for such and such, we could go out there and try to get some kind of community support. That was sort of the political activity that draws. But this is more recent, let's say, after 2000, everything before then was, or maybe even less than 2000, in the '90s. But it's more recent than a lot of these other things that have taken place, relatively speaking.

BN: So back in the '50s, you're at Loyola, I'm wondering, did your parents ever talk about camp when you were growing up or even afterwards?

AK: Well, we knew we were in Heart Mountain, we had pictures, we had "reunions," so I think my folks went to every reunion that took place. And then I don't think they were ever part of the organizing committee that I can recall, but I remember even going to one or two, and at the time, a thousand people kind of thing, because there were a lot of folks.

BN: But the reunions were much later, right? We're talking in the '80s, '70s and '80s?

AK: I would say, yeah.

BN: I'm just wondering, because earlier than that, because many Nisei didn't talk about it in the '50s and '60s.

AK: Well, I would say somewhat, and the somewhat is my mom had white friends who stored different things for her. So we would go to visit Esther Brown down in Escondido, and she'd still have a few boxes of Mom's stuff, and those would all be from World War II. And so it would come up to some extent, but there wasn't long discussions about it, mainly what happened. She said she'd take care of it.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.