<Begin Segment 17>

MN: Now, okay, let's see. You graduated from high school in the summer of '38, then you went to Glendale junior high and then you went to UC Berkeley. What year did you enter UC Berkeley?

KM: 1940.

MN: Did you enter Berkeley as a civil engineering major?

KM: Right.

MN: When you were there, where did you dorm?

KM: Huh?

MN: Where did you dorm?

KM: Oh, a place called, I think that was called Euclid Hall, but it was a predominately... oh, our first semester there, I was at the Blues dorm, that's right. And then I transferred over to the Euclid Hall next semester.

MN: Now what is Euclid Hall?

KM: Huh?

MN: What is Euclid Hall? Is it an all-male dorm?

KM: Yeah.

MN: Was it all Japanese Americans?

KM: All Japanese and all male dorm, yeah.

MN: And when you say Japanese, are you talking about students from Japan?

KM: No, all Niseis.

MN: And what kind of meals did you have there?

KM: Well, when the first semester there at the Buddhist dorm, we had teams of two or three guys that did, they did the cooking one night a week or whatever it is. And so they would be cooking their favorite dish or some dish that they knew how to cook. And then in Euclid Hall, they had a paid cook. So he used to cook a meal for six days a week, and then on Sunday we have, everybody had to make their own, you're allowed two eggs and something or other. And he had a big pot of rice, so that was your, either your breakfast or dinner. You had to cook your own.

MN: Going back to this Buddhist dorm, was this at the Berkeley Buddhist Church?

KM: Yeah.

MN: How big was the dorm there?

KM: I don't recall, but there was probably ten or twelve guys in that second story... Berkeley, what street was that? I forgot what the street was. Anyway, I think I was teamed up with about two other guys. So there must have been... not more than say fifteen buildings built, that stayed there.

MN: And then you moved into Euclid Hall. Can you share with us what happened to Euclid Hall after the war?

KM: Euclid Hall was... I think it probably was sold in the '50s or '60s. Because you couldn't get enough Japanese or Niseis or Sansei or Yonsei kids to build there. That was that time when everything was geared to integration. Everybody had to mix in with other nationalities or something was wrong. So the number of students that were applying for dormitories were excluding Euclid Hall, so they couldn't make the ends meet. So I think they sold it for about a hundred thousand dollars. Today probably worth five or ten million dollars. Because it's only about a block away from campus. And then it's got room for, oh, I think it was about forty students, the dorm there.

MN: Is the building still there?

KM: Building is still there. I think about five years ago I went up there and we had a, they chartered a bus so that we could see some of the old spots of the campus. And somebody asked the manager of the Euclid Hall, which is taken over by the YMCA or something like that, that if we could have some old residents before the war that wanted to take a look at it and see how the place looked like now. And I was surprised that the rooms were about the same, nothing had changed much. It's really wonderful.

MN: Now going back to your days at Berkeley, this is your first time away from home as an adult. Did you get into any trouble?

KM: No, no. I used to get very lonesome, very lonesome. I think this was the first time I was away from home. So I got homesick quite a bit. There was a couple of female students that I went up to, to Cal on the train, and they were very helpful. They were, I think they were one year ahead of me or whatever it was. But they acted more like a big sister.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.