Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Jane Kurahara
Narrator: Jane Kurahara
Interviewer: Brian Niiya
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: August 31, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-514-11

<Begin Segment 11>

BN: So after your year at Columbia, what happened after that?

JK: Yeah. So after a year at Columbia, we got married, and then he went to school and I went to work. And he went to the School of Social Work, and I picked up some jobs as... what is it? First I was in a daycare center, and then I taught kindergarten in a Brooklyn Friends school. And then when we were expecting, I took a clerk typist job in a social work agency. And in the meantime, he was going to social work school, and he found that he really, really liked working with gang kids. And so he did work with gang kids in social work school, and then he went to work for his older brother who was in charge of Manhattanville Neighborhood Center. And they were working with gang kids there. In fact, they even hit the Tribune as one of the few social work agencies that were succeeding with working with these kids. And so that's where I first was born, and then we decided to... he needed to get out on his own. And so he got a job in Chicago, and we moved to Chicago, and then after that, we moved to Milwaukee, and that's where our second was born. By the time we were there, I was kind of resigned to living as a kotonk. [Laughs] Until my dad wrote and said, "Come home," and I thought, "Why?" But we'd been fourteen years then on the mainland. And he said, "Your mom just retired and she's not well. She really needs family here. So my husband got a job with the YMCA in Hawaii, and we came home. My mom was super happy, but she was a babysitter, you know, for the kids. She was well after that. And we've been here ever since.

BN: And your husband was okay with moving to Hawaii?

JK: Yeah. In fact, when we would meet other people and we would say one of us is from the mainland, one is here, they'd always say I was from the mainland and he was from here. Because he was always suntanned because he loved fishing.

BN: So he fit right in.

JK: He loved the life here, yeah.

BN: I know he has a really interesting story, but just for time's sake, I'm not going to go into it. It was covered in your prior interview. But just for the record, what was his name?

JK: Conrad Kiyoto Kurahara.

BN: Yeah, he definitely has an interesting story. And then just in terms of chronology now, what year did you end up moving back?

JK: Was it 1960? It was around there, yeah.

BN: So your sons have some memory of living in...

JK: My older son does because he was in kindergarten when we left Wisconsin. Younger one, not so much. He wasn't quite two.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.