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BY: So let's move on to your parents. So let's talk first about your father. What was your father's name?

SS: My father's name was Kenji Shikuma.

BY: And where... when and where was he born?

SS: He was born actually in Corralitos, which is a small... I don't even know if it was incorporated at the time, but it was a little village about five or ten miles outside of Watsonville. My grandfather had built his own cabin and cleared some land out there, and Dad was born in that house.

BY: And did he have siblings?

SS: Yeah. He had... there were five children who survived and there were two others who died. One as a young, like a three-year-old, and one as a teenager. So there were seven total, but only five survived to adulthood, so only five that I ever knew. Dad was the second oldest, Uncle Mack or Masasuke was the oldest, then Dad, then Aunt Sumi, then Uncle Heek, and then Aunt Emi was the baby.

BY: And can you tell me a little bit about your father's educational background and his occupation?

SS: Sure. So Dad was the only one in his generation, the Nisei generation, to go to college. And he went to Stanford in the '30s, early '30s, so it was during the Depression. But he managed to go there and lived in a dorm that was... I don't know if it was all Japanese, but it was all Asian. At the time there wasn't, like Okada House when I went to Stanford, where it was an (Asian American) theme house, I think probably because white folks probably didn't want to live with them. But he graduated with a degree in economics from Stanford in about the mid-'30s and looked for a job, got one finally as a clerk with a tractor company in either Alameda or Oakland, somewhere in the East Bay. And we think they hired him because a lot of the tractor company customers were Japanese American farmers, so they wanted, needed, really, a Japanese American who could communicate with them and help.

BY: How was he able to pay to go to go to Stanford, do you know how he did that?

SS: I have no idea. Yeah, I don't know.

BY: And so where was he when Pearl Harbor happened?

SS: So he was living in Alameda. He got married and my brother, my older brother, had been born in 1937, and he was living in Alameda, California, while working for that tractor company when Pearl Harbor happened. After that, I'm not sure if he just quit or if he got fired or laid off from the company, but before Executive Order 9066, he moved back to Watsonville with his family.

BY: So at that point he had a wife and one child.

SS: Correct.

BY: And so was he incarcerated?

SS: Yes. So they got to Watsonville before the, all the curfew orders and restrictions came down. And then was sent to Salinas Fairgrounds, that was the assembly center for the central Cal area, and from there they were sent to Poston, Arizona, the camp at Poston, in Camp II.

BY: And how long was he there? I guess he and his family, how long were they there?

SS: I'm not sure. They eventually left camp and Dad moved the family to Chicago. The rest of the family did get out, my aunts and uncles got out, and they moved to Colorado and started farming in Longmont, Colorado, but Dad went to Chicago and got a job in some kind of office.

BY: So you don't know exactly what he was doing in Chicago?

SS: I don't know. I do know that he lived on the south side of Chicago, Black area of town, and the only story he ever told me is that he remembers riding the train to work, and when he got on the train in the south side, he was the only non-Black person on the train, and when he got off, he was the only non-white person downtown, he was the only non-white person on the train.

BY: So a very divided city.

SS: Yeah, there was a strict line, pretty much.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.