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BN: So it's October 9, I believe it's October 9, 2023, and we're interviewing today Kathy Masaoka at her home in the Silver Lake area near Griffith Park. My name is Brian Niiya, and I'll be co-interviewing with Issay Matsumoto, who will take over at certain points, and Evan Kodani is doing the videography. So let's go ahead and get started.

KM: Okay.

BN: Thanks so much for sitting with us. And what we often do is we start by asking about your family first, and we'll start with them. I thought maybe we'd start with your mom's family. So you could start by telling us her name and when she was born, and a little bit about her family.

KM: Okay. My mother's name was Chizu Kadota, and she was born in Santa Maria, California. She was the oldest daughter, and the first citizen child of ten kids. She had an older brother that had been born in Japan, her parents were Toshi and Soshi Kadota, and her father actually -- and I always thought that this was a myth -- but he had gone to law school and medical school in Japan, had come to the United States and was here for ten years, just working, went back in 1916, got married, and then my oldest uncle was born there and they returned in 1918 into the Santa Maria area. My mother -- how much do you want me to say about my mother? More?

BN: Yeah, definitely.

KM: So she was, because she was the oldest daughter, she sort of looked out for the rest of the family, and learned some of the skills like cooking food and sewing, and did a lot of the American things like cooking American food. So introduced that to the family, and so her family was very, very important to her, always, the most important thing to her in her whole life. She would do anything for them. When camp came, she had gone to, I think, sewing school in San Francisco for a bit. She was working at the Santa Maria gun club, but her family was sent to Gila. But her father was picked up by FBI, from what I learned, on February 19, 1942, along with a couple of hundred other Issei folks from the Santa Barbara county. So that was pretty huge, since there were only like over two thousand people that lived in that county, over two hundred and fifty of them were rounded up in a matter of a few days. Family didn't know where he went, so they just knew that he ended up in Bismarck. I guess he never told them that he had been in Griffith Park for a few days, or Tuna Canyon. So he joined them, I believe, at Gila, eventually.

BN: Okay.

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BN: I know you mentioned that later you went back and actually did some research on this, on your father's or grandfather's internment story. Was there anything in the records that indicated why he was arrested?

KM: I'm trying to remember. He was a member of the... what was it called, the Japanese organization.

BN: Uh-huh, the Japanese Association.

KM: Japanese Association. But from what I gather, almost everyone was. The family would say things like, I had heard that he was the president of the Japanese school. And when I brought that up to them, said, "Oh, nah, it wasn't anything important." That's what they said. But I do know from some little tidbits, that he did have company from Japan, like writers and other folks that stopped by their home. My grandfather was actually not much of a laborer. They would always talk about how he didn't work much, he rode around on the horse and just sort of oversaw the people that were working, and then he'd go to the library and read. So I think that he was pretty much into reading and that kind of stuff, so it would make sense that they would have people like that stop by. So maybe that was what it was, he had a lot of association with Japanese people coming.

BN: I mean, any of those things would do it. And then was it your sense that they were fairly well-off economically?

KM: They talk about boom years and years that were horrible, and it was all farmers.

BN: Farmers, yeah.

KM: They'd have shoes one year and then put cardboard in the shoes the next year. They have a car one year and things like that. So I think... they moved a lot, which I think is pretty typical because they couldn't own the land. I think the lease was put in my mother's name because she was a citizen.

BN: But they stayed in the same Santa Maria...

KM: Santa Maria, Arroyo Grande.

BN: And then just for clarification, the uncle that was born in Japan, he came with the family?

KM: Yes.

BN: Did he eventually naturalize?

KM: I believe he did. I mean, I really never thought of him as having been born in Japan.

BN: It's like a technicality, really.

KM: I mean, he was a year old when we came.

BN: Right, kind of like Mitsuye Yamada, culturally basically Nisei, but just...

KM: Very Nisei.

BN: ...by paperwork, Issei.

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