<Begin Segment 9>

BN: Then after you finished Smith, you kind of stayed back.

JK: Yes.

BN: And then you talk about Columbia. And then the other thing I was interested in is now, you kind of entered this Nisei social network in New York, in contrast.

JK: Right. And I was at Columbia, because to teach in Hawaii, you needed a fifth year. And so my parents said, "Stay up there and get your master's."

BN: So the intent was you would get that and you'd come back to Hawaii?

JK: Come back, yeah. And then in the meantime, in New York, there's this whole Nisei bunch of people running around. And four of us were in the same apartment, we were roommates. And so pretty soon the word gets around, there were four people, four young females, singles, there. And there were people knocking on our door, and one of them happened to be my future husband. [Laughs]

BN: Were your roommates people you had known before or did you meet them just later?

JK: I knew only one before. She was at Smith with me. So the two of us...

BN: Oh, so you knew her from Smith, not from Hawaii?

JK: From Hawaii, too. She was at Punahou, too. But the other two were, they were going up there anyway, and then they heard about us, so they asked if they could hang. And so the four of us were roommates together.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.