Densho Digital Repository - Ron Kenmotsu Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-546-5)

<Begin Segment 5>

TI: Okay, so before we go there, then upstairs, there was a family of four that lived upstairs?

RK: Yeah. The two girls were sent back to Japan before the war. Well, not before the war but before camp. So they grew up in Japan, and so there was already a family of four that lived upstairs.

TI: And did the girls from Japan that went there before the war, did they come to San Francisco after the war?

RK: Yeah. Well, it was almost, I think I was in, in those days, they would call it junior high school. So I think I was in junior high school at the time, and then my mom says that we were going over to my uncle's place to meet our cousin, and I went, "What are you talking about? I already know my cousin." I had no idea that there was two girls living in Japan.

TI: And I'm curious, age-wise, the kids, were they all about the same age or tell me about the age breakdown. I know you and your brother...

RK: Yeah, me and my brother were two years apart. The boys that lived, the cousin was the same age as my brother.

TI: These are upstairs?

RK: Well, they were living downstairs, but they were in the back. The boys upstairs were like twelve, thirteen, fourteen, something like that.

TI: When you were like two or three, they were about ten years old?

RK: Yeah.

TI: Now, this might be stretching your memory, can you remember the names of the people in each of the...

RK: The two that lived downstairs in the back was... I can't remember the father or mother, I can't remember their name. But the boy's name was Mineo Hirai. The two girls were Chizuko and Tazuko. And then the boy, nobody wanted to call him Hei Min, so we called him Fred. So he goes by Fred, he still does. The two girls, I can't remember what their English names were, but I still remember them as Chizu and Tazu. And then the other, the Sekino family, it was the two boys, it was Osamu and Tadayuki. The two girls were Reiko and Sachiko. So they always had Japanese names, they never had English, per se.

TI: So when the, so I'm thinking about this, sort of, upstairs/downstairs, all these people living together, so it feels a little crowded. I've done lots of these interviews, a lot of people, the Japanese Americans who came back from camp, didn't even have a place to stay. They lived in hostels or...

RK: Well, we didn't actually have a place to stay either, but we got back to San Francisco -- this is what my mom told me -- they had an apartment in Japantown. So I don't know how long we lived there, because of the other people that were living in the house, they had to move back in to their place.

TI: But when you say people that lived in the house had to move someplace else, the house that you ended up living in in Sacramento Street, who owned that house and who...

RK: My mom.