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VY: Okay, so your grandparents have this farm and they have two young children. Tell me a little bit about the farm. What did they grow on the farm and who helped them work the farm?

KI: They grew strawberries, but my uncle told me they also raised their own food. Corn, tomatoes, beans, whatever. So for commercial purposes, they had strawberries. And on the island there were many Japanese farmers who raised strawberries, and eventually there was a strawberry jam factory or something, which was the organization that purchased their strawberries. Let's see... it was one that required a lot of labor, planting, weeding, and especially picking strawberries. And so one immigrant group that they hired were Filipino males to help with the farm. And the main labor supply were Native Americans who were called, if I recall, Siwash, but they were mainly Native Americans from Canada who came south during the picking season.

VY: Do you remember... well, you don't have any memories of that farm. You were too little.

KI: Well, I remember the farm because as a child, I loved riding in a pickup truck in the back. [Laughs]

VY: Let's see. So your grandparents had the farm and then what about your mom when she was growing up?

KI: Well, my mother was the firstborn. Unfortunately, she was a female and males were preferred. But she was bilingual, she could speak both Japanese and English well. And she went to a Japanese school where she learned elementary Japanese in terms of writing. I had books of her Japanese schooling, and they were in a simplified Japanese if I recalled. So she turned out to be intelligent. And of all things, when she was in high school, her major was English, which is extremely surprising given the fact that the Japanese spoke a form of English that seemed, let's say, uneducated. There was a Japanese-English, and we were really speaking well and knowing the language well was the difficulty. And I noticed that in terms of test scores, they did well in math but less well in English. And this persisted even into the Nisei generation. But my mother was well-educated, she read because she was an English major, and on top of that, she was a talented artist. So in high school in Bainbridge, if they had a play she would design the program. And what's interesting about her drawings is they were very up to date in terms of dress and haircut, and so she was really into, if you will, American style on top of her excellence in English, and she was generally a good student all around. And at the time she graduated from high school, she was a salutatorian. And from what I gather, there was a woman called Marion Marshall, a high school teacher in Bainbridge who, if you will, encouraged my mother to go to college. And there was talk that she could get a scholarship because of her excellence, and the college that was picked was Washington State. But it never came to fruition because, being a woman, her job was to get married and have children and contribute to the family. To afford to go to college would have been difficult for their family. And so even if a scholarship was provided, it was a hard row to hoe for the family to accept that a girl would spend all this time getting educated without a prospect of, if you will, economic return.

VY: So she did not pursue college?

KI: Oh, no. She received a letter from, if I recall, some representative of Washington, congratulating her on being an excellent student. And you would have thought that, from the present perspective, that women would have been encouraged to pursue education, but she was nineteen when she was married to my father. And she did not know my father, it was arranged by a go-between who was satisfied that there was a good match. My father was a hard worker, could bring home some wages, and in turn, help her younger brother go to college.

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