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Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Kathy Nishimoto Masaoka I
Narrator: Kathy Nishimoto Masaoka
Interviewers: Brian Niiya (primary); Issay Matsumoto (secondary)
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: October 9, 2023
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-542-13

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IM: My other question is just about, generally about this earlier time period. Do you remember particular friends that you had that, I guess, who were your friends at the time and what kind of an impact did they have on you?

KM: At Maryknoll?

IM: At Maryknoll, and then at Immaculate Heart.

KM: Oh, okay. Well, yeah, friends have always been kind of a little issue there. No, I had a best friend when I was little, Diane. And she lived a block away, and we would spend all our time together. And then her mother said, "You see each other at school, why do you need to see each other after school?" And so I think that kind of dampened the friendship a little bit. Then I had another friend that lived a couple blocks away, and I would spend time there. Then my sister would say, "Why are you friends with them? They're just taking advantage of you. They just want you to help them with their homework." And I'd be like, "Really?" So that was my sister's running thing, "We'll they're just taking advantage of you." So I always had a best friend, and my best friend then became this woman named Amy, Emi, actually. Her father was Kibei, too, surprisingly. There were very few people that had Kibei parents, so we kind of felt some affinity, I think, and we were also not your typical, I guess. We didn't fit in with that little group, the cliquey group. So we kind of hung out together with another person, and she was fairly bright. She spoke Japanese, she was actually very good. So we were friends for quite a while. And she went to the same high school I went to, Immaculate Heart. So we continued to be friends at Immaculate Heart, and it's funny, because even though I decided to hang out with, not the Japanese, I eventually ended up with a group that was sort of mixed. It was the Japanese friends I came with, African American, Latino, two Latino women, and a couple of, two or three white folks that were from La Crescenta didn't quite fit into the, into the mainstream of Immaculate Heart, which was these children of Hollywood people. We had the daughter of Nat King Cole up there, Lucille Ball's daughter went there, so I know, kind of high powered, a little intimidating. And my mother really loved that kind of environment, it was like, ooh.

IM: So the more mixed group that you had at Immaculate Heart, it was mostly women, correct?

KM: Well, it was a women's school.

IM: Oh.

KM: It was all girls, thankfully.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.