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TI: One of things I love about these interviews, at a very early age, sometimes there were some characteristics that come out, that that person has their whole life, showing up. When you talked about going to San Francisco, in your very early memories, about that time, you also had a sibling arrive, your younger brother. So do you remember when that happened in terms of his birth of anything like that, or when he first arrived?

RK: No, I don't have a lot of memories of what happened all the way back to San Francisco.

TI: Yeah, because on some ways, your younger brother Richard was born also in camp, Amache, in June of 1945, so that was before you went to San Francisco. So you talked about your early childhood memories in San Francisco, and you talked about living with your mother's sister. But do you remember the address of where you lived in San Francisco?

RK: The first place was 3610 Sacramento. There was actually two families that lived on the lower flat area, and then my uncle, the Sekinos, lived upstairs in the upper unit. Because they had two sons, so they took the larger unit.

TI: So this is, it sounds like a duplex?

RK: Yeah, it's almost like a duplex.

TI: And upstairs there were four people who lived, and then the downstairs unit where you lived with your parents and your brother, who else lived down there?

RK: My dad's cousin. And they had three kids, so they lived in the back, the back portion of our place, we lived in the front.

TI: So they had a family of five, there were three kids, and then you had a family of four, so there were nine living downstairs.

RK: Yeah.

TI: So how many bedrooms were downstairs?

RK: The downstairs... my mom and dad slept in the living room, they had a, basically a couch, it rolled out into a bed. And my brother and I slept in the next room. And then...

TI: And what kind of room was that? Was it like a...

RK: It was like a parlor, basically, is what it was. It was like a sitting room. But then they just converted it into a bedroom. And then my dad actually kind of took one of the smaller rooms and converted it into a kitchen, put a little small refrigerator in there and a little stove, and then we had one bathroom that we shared between both families. And they had one big bedroom where the mother and father and I think the son slept, and the two sisters slept in the next room. But they had a bigger kitchen, they had the main kitchen, and that's the way it was. We lived that way for, I don't know, about ten years, until everybody started moving out.

TI: And so it sounds like, downstairs, even though it was one unit, it was sort of configured into two separate living spaces, the shared space being the bathroom? That was the one thing that we shared?

RK: Yeah.

TI: And how was that for you growing up?

RK: Well, I mean, we weren't in school yet, so it didn't bother us, my brother and I. My mom's sister stayed with my uncle in the country, and then when she got a job, then she came, she lived with us.

TI: Downstairs?

RK: Oh, this was after we moved upstairs.

TI: Oh, after you moved upstairs.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2024 Densho. All Rights Reserved.