<Begin Segment 5>

BN: Now, can you tell me about your oldest brother, who I guess, returns...

NK: My brother Minoru, when he was still... born in Washington state... was sent back to Japan to live with my grandmother and he and my sisters Chiyeko and Shiz, all three were taken care of by my grandmother. And she existed by the monthly checks that my father would send to Japan so his parents could survive and raise my siblings Minoru and Chiyeko. [Narr. note: The three siblings were cared for by my grandmother until 1935 when Shizuye returned to the U.S.]

BN: But then he comes back to join you before the war?

NK: Yes, during the war, about 1938, my brother graduated high school in Japan. And right around that period, there's rumbling of the Manchurian War, and everything was kind of turning military. And so the parents that sent their kid to Japan for education were getting kind of edgy, and my father was in the same boat. And he had two purposes, he needed a person to work on the farm, and he didn't want his son to get drafted. And so in 1938, after Minoru graduated high school, he came back to Venice to join the family. And so now we had my father and mother, and Minoru, my brother, and Shizuye that came back from Japan a year or two earlier, and myself and Kazuye. So the family was getting heavier on the United States side versus Japan side. But that's when my brother Minoru arrived from Japan to the United States.

BN: How did you get along with the two older ones who came from Japan? You're fairly far apart in age, too.

NK: Correct.

BN: Did you become fairly close to them?

NK: My sister Chieko, in fact, all of my sisters, they treated me as a little boy, and so I had no problem with that. But my brother, being the age difference there, eleven years, left us with almost nothing in common, you might say, except we knew we were brothers. And so, in fact, he was almost to a point where when we're living in the farm, he would say, call me a brat, you might say, because he was the oldest and I would never listen to what he would say. We lived through it.

BN: Now, before we get to the war years, I wanted to ask you about your father, because I think you had written that he was kind of active in the community with different things, which possibly contributed to his being interned. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things he did in the community?

NK: Okay. When the war broke out in 1941, my father was not one of those that were picked up by the FBI on Sunday. He was picked up on Monday, a day later. And at the time, naturally, we had no idea what was going on, but my father, before the war started -- when I say "war," I'm speaking of the Second World War -- he was very active in the community, Japanese community, like the Japanese school, the judo club, the Farmer's Association and so forth. In fact, one year, in 1940, he went back to Japan to celebrate some big celebration they're having in Japan. And because of these ties with these organizations, that caused the FBI to get suspicious of him and he was taken in on Monday, the day after Pearl Harbor.

BN: And the 1940 event in Japan was a pretty big thing, the 2600th anniversary.

NK: Yeah, right.

BN: Did he go by himself? Or not by himself, but no other members of the family went?

NK: No, he went by himself. I begged him to take me along so I could get out of school, but it didn't work and he went alone. It was a big celebration, and he was very proud of the fact that he would be invited, he really enjoyed himself.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.