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Title: Noboru Kamibayashi Interview
Narrator: Noboru Kamibayashi
Interviewer: Brian Niiya
Location: Santa Monica, California
Date: April 23, 2019
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-477-1

<Begin Segment 1>

BN: Okay, we're here in Santa Monica on April 23, 2019, we're interviewing Mr. Noboru Kamibayashi at his home in Santa Monica, and shooting the video is Yuka Murakami, and also in the room is Mr. Kamibayashi's daughter, Judy Louff. And with that, we'll begin. As we often do, we wanted to start with, if you could start by telling me about your parents, and I believe your father was the one who first, as an Issei, first came to the U.S. So can you tell us a little about him?

NK: My father, when he came from Japan, he got off at Seattle. One of the industries that the Japanese were involved in was the lumber industry, and my father got a job at the sawmills in the woods of, between Seattle and Tacoma. And there was a railroad siding in that area, for the sawmill, and so that's where I was born. And, in fact, the rest of the siblings were all born in that area called Fairfax.

BN: What was his name and where did he come from in Japan?

NK: My father's name is Hanbei Kamibayashi, and he was from Shiga-ken, Japan, which is near Kyoto. Shiga-ken is better known for its big lake in the center of Japan. So anytime you look at a map of Japan, if you look around and look for a big blotch in the map, that's usually Biwako, and that's the prefecture that my father came from. My mother came from the same village, and so made it easier to explain when people asked, and I just tell them they both came from the same place in Japan. And I had many opportunities to visit and stay at this area, so we may talk about that later.

BN: Do you have any sense of why your father left to come to the United States?

NK: Well, my father was the eldest among the siblings. And as a male, he was, by custom, I guess you might call it... he was expected to take over the household... the Kamibayashi household... and carry on the farming that my grandfather and grandmother did for most of their lives. My father, I don't know, I never asked him, but he was very adventurous, and I don't know if that was the reason, but he decided to go to the United States. And, see, my brother was born... who's the oldest, Minoru... was born in 1917. So my father came to the United States right prior to that period.

BN: Did he go back to Japan to marry your mom, or was she a "picture bride"?

NK: There are many things that, after they're gone, the parents are gone, you think, "Oh, I should have asked them this or asked them that," but that goes into that list of things that I didn't ask them.

BN: Now you mentioned the eldest -- oh, before we go further, we didn't get your mother's name.

NK: Oh, my mother's name was Suga, S-U-G-A. After she came to the United States, I remember a lot of the, if they go to a store, grocery store or something, and the people other than Japanese would see that and they would giggle a little bit and say, "Gee, that sounds just like 'Sugar,'" but her name was Suga.

BN: Did they speak English at all, or was your household a Japanese...

NK: Everything was Japanese. And so when I started grade school, I didn't know any English because my parents spoke Japanese and my siblings, they were educated in Japan, and so they also spoke Japanese. So most of the conversation was in Japanese.

BN: Now, you mentioned your father was working at the sawmill. I know this is largely before you were born, but do you know much about the type of work he did?

NK: Well, he used to tell me that he was a foreman at the sawmill, and the communication between the workers and the boss, you might say, was very, very sketchy because of the Japanese and the English differences. So, my father was kind of picked as a middleman, you might say, and when fights broke out, he had to jump in there, stop the fights, and he did many things that was expected of a foreman. So he used to tell me that he was the foreman at this sawmill, and I'm sure there was many perks that went along with that, but that was his job.

BN: And then, is that to say that that he was foreman over, like, a Japanese crew? When you say middleman, it's kind of like that.

NK: Right. It was because all the workers, who were Japanese, he was using his knowledge of English, which was very little, he was able to get in the position he was at.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.