Densho Digital Archive
Friends of Manzanar Collection
Title: Kenji Suematsu Interview
Narrator: Kenji Suematsu
Interviewer: Sharon Yamato
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: April 19, 2012
Densho ID: denshovh-skenji-01-0020

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KS: Well, going back, the time period after graduation from high school, went into the military and then throughout the military career, took you up to the, past the point where I was going through camera repair school. And during the time I was in the Alaska photo lab, working out of there, I made a relationship, or gotten to be friends with a couple of people there, and one of the persons there was a gentleman that worked at Golden Enterprises here in North Hollywood. So he says, "When you get your discharge, come down. If you intend, if you need a job, come and see me," kind of deal. So it's, basically that's what I did. I came down, when I got discharged out of Seattle I came down and talked to, his name was Grant Locks and he introduced me to the president of the company and I got hired on there for camera refurbishing and that kind of work, sort of a trainee thing, level. And I stayed there for some several years, learning to just work. And I had some incidences in the local community there while I was trying to get established, trying to find a rental, place to rent and all that sort of thing, and seeking out apartments and all that. And I ran into a lady down there and there was a facility open, but she wouldn't rent it to me, and I said, "Oh, you're still fighting the second World War." [Laughs] But anyway, that was just a --

SY: Was that true? I mean, was it really racial, you think?

KS: It was racial, strictly. And I made a comment to her, I says, "You're still fighting the second World War." And I just left it there and looked for another apartment to see if I could find one. I did one find one Ventura Boulevard, but I stayed there.

SY: Do you remember other incidences like that when you came back from...

KS: No, that was the only strong incident of that kind that I've run into that kind of irked me. But I imagine there were others, for reasons, the reason that I'm a Japanese that I wouldn't be accepted or whatever the situation, but I never dug into it. I never put myself in a position where I was confronted.

SY: But you thought about it.

KS: I thought about it, yes. We all thought about it.

SY: And was it something you thought about only after the war?

KS: Basically... well, we were in the army, that was not a thought in our, in the situation. We made buddies and all that. I had made very good, close buddies in the army and all that, and our relationship was different. Yeah, they may be Jewish, they may be Latter Day Saints or whatever their situation's still there, we're fighting, buddies. And there was no, there was no feeling of, "Yeah, you're this or you're that." We were in the same spot, we're in the same place, we're gonna have to depend on each other on certain circumstances, and so we, that's how it was. And throughout the military situation it's always you either make friends or you don't, and you either do things for, because you like them or they ask you to do it so you do it. Like when I was up in Alaska, there was the base that I was on, the had a little fire department and the fire chief's wife was involved with a community thing about making a little stage show of some sort. They needed a background painted, she came and talked to my, the shop, I mean the commander of the photo lab, says, "Can I get permission to use him to do the artwork for the backdrop?" [Laughs]

SY: She knew you were artistic.

KS: Well, she saw many of these cartoon posters I made for the bowling ball teams, each bowling ball team had a logo, like with a cartoon character, like in our case, we were the photo shop so we had the photo bug, an actual photo bug with a bowling ball. And the tankers had a tanker doing the thing, and I just went down the line. Each of our organizations was called either tanker, photo lab, or artillery, or whatever department they were in. So I would make a cartoon character of whatever the, to identify their team, so to speak, and she latched onto that and she needed some Paris, France type, archways representing whatever they were doing. So I did get called on in that sense to do some of those little things.

But back in, when I got back to North Hollywood and got, picked up the job there and started doing camera repair, camera refurbishing. What we did is taking aerial, surplus aerial cameras, stripping it down, replating everything, repainting everything, and then fixing everything up and colubate it, calibrate it and everything else, so they'd resell it as a new camera. So that went on for several years on my part, but then I started slowly shifting into optical, manipulating optical and acquiring, like the engraving machine, learning how to, being able to manipulate that on my own and do all kinds of stuff beyond what they were doing. And after I'd gotten a reasonable background in optics and stuff, I developed a good interest in optics, and I says, "There's less people in optics than there are in mechanics." I says, "That'd be a field I would love to get into." So from there, I left to a company called Thompson Optical. That's down, a little bit south of L.A., or south of Japanese Town. And between that and my, I'm trying to support myself, so I worked for a bank company in the camera department, sales. So I got to work on both ends on that. And I developed a method and I tried to understand all the aspects of lens testing and all that stuff, 'cause they were doing manufacturing, my job was to test the lenses. So I acquired a knowledge on that firsthand and learned also the intricacies of some of the machinery and coding machines and stuff on my own. I was just nosy. I'm being nosy. [Laughs] Get to know all I can. And certain operations there, they needed an extra machinist or needed an extra engraver or something like that, I would be the one to be able to do that. In fact, I had gotten myself into trouble; here again, the plant manager would figure out in long, multiple sheets the process of how to do the engraving, to enlarge this, to do this, each step by step, and I said, "Jesus Christ, that's a long ways to do this." So I went to the scrap bin, picked up a large sheet of aluminum, calculated out what size the original letters needed to be in order to reduce it down to one common size. Each letter, each line had to be of a certain size, so you multiply that to whatever and make a master template of it. Now I could put that one part on there, clamp it down, put my master in the correct position, pick my corners up, and just go through and engrave it, and it'd take about three minutes. Go through the whole thing. Whereas the other way, it may take three days. He was so upset. He says, "I spent hours laying out this..." He says, "I calculate all my work so that the job takes X amount of time." Said, "You spoiled it by saying that this sixteen hour job now only takes three minutes." [Laughs]

SY: You made it more efficient.

KS: Tough. [Laughs]

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.