<Begin Segment 26>

SY: But it is interesting 'cause family's, is family always been important to you? I mean, were...

KS: The relationship in the family is always been important to me. It's just that it only involves myself and my immediate. I don't go, I don't go too far outside of that.

SY: But you, but the same is definitely true for your father, mother and... when...

KS: This, you know, this is probably a guilt situation, but I know the fallback, I mean, I know the emptiness that my father, my mother, all that, and my brother and sister, we don't have the kind of open relationship as normal families do.

SY: But you've managed to stick together.

KS: I have within me, that feeling is very important, but I couldn't develop it with these people. So now I have my current wife and have her children and I have all their grandchildren and so forth and so on down the line. Though I'm not overly involved with them, I appreciate them being around, I would do what I can, but it's not something I'm really obligated to do all the time. And there is a little space between how I treat my brothers and sisters and how my feeling, how much of it is real, or how much of it is duty. And in a case with my one, first wife's daughter -- she's also Japanese too -- but then I have a great deal of affection for her, but she's the only one. I have affection for my daughter that passed away. She was the only one, but that was the only blood relation I had outside. Now, I don't know, to be honest with you, just how far I would go with anything other than the immediate family that I have.

SY: But that is, you can say that about your own father and mother, even though you weren't close they managed to keep the family together.

KS: My father was responsible for keeping the family together 'cause there were times when I questioned my, questioned his, my father. And, "How can you put up with a mother like this? Other people have divorced just like that."

SY: So it was important to him.

KS: It was important to him. And I guess if you want to have an honest, clean judgment of personality, you consider what he has put up with, what he has, and what his loyalty is. Then you have to admire the man for being loyal to what he has committed himself to.

SY: Right. I mean, that, it sounds like you kind of picked up on that.

KS: I did pick up on that, and I don't condemn him for what he was doing. And it's just that there's two levels to that. I can appreciate his efforts and I can appreciate everything he had done, I can appreciate everything he has tried to do to his best ability. And considering where my mother was up here [touches head] and what her ability is, of what she can do on a daily level and all the, what do you call it, circumstances in which she surrounded herself mentally and what was supposedly taking place around her -- which is an imaginary thing as far as we were concerned because it didn't make sense -- so it became a problem. She was a problem and it became a situation that my father was handling that problem the best he could without throwing her out.

SY: Really? And did, do you ever think back to those years in the, when you were in the orphanage and your parents weren't there? I mean, at the time it didn't seem to affect you, but when you look back at it now, do you feel like it had some effect on you and the kind of person you are?

KS: Well, on the surface it had absolutely nothing there, and on the subsurface it still had absolutely nothing there. There's nothing that I can go down and says, or have a feeling that there had been some influence someplace. There's nothing, nothing there that I can put a feeling on and says, "Oh, this took place and, yeah, this is what probably, why I do this now." There is nothing of that kind, in my whole... you can go like this and cut out all that past, since there was nothing there that you're taking away from what I do now.

SY: Very interesting. Yeah.

KS: At least that's my feeling.

SY: Right. No, that's important. Wow. That is really, I mean, considering anybody else who looks at it might thing that must've been hard, but it's really, you've really managed to...

KS: It's keeping each page, and once you turn the page you don't remember what's on the other pages. There's today, you read today, and you might remember tomorrow, or yesterday, and then once that page has gone beyond three or four pages, it becomes a new incident. And whatever took place in the past, unless it's a serious thing or something, memorable thing, that event that took place at that particular point, that memory may stay with you over a longer period of time, but the pages just, everything goes with it. I mean, I can go back, I'll probably, during the course of the conversation I have little incidences in my three or four year old situation, or five, probably five even up to, yeah, it would have to go five and four and three, I'd have little spotty incidences there that I can flash, there's a flash in memory that took place. But it's nothing important that took place. Other than one incident that I was told that my, either, I don't know, maybe actual sequence of the story, but we had a little tool shed -- you know on the farm fields you have tools left in there -- there was a hoe sitting on the ground. My brother dropped and fell off and landed across his nose on the hoe, so he cut it. Children have a tendency to do this, to get hurt themselves so they don't -- I jumped off that thing and did the same thing, broke my nose up in here. And I think if you go back you'll see a scar here, and my brother also has a scar there. [Laughs] But that's an incident that was brought to my attention some years ago, and I remember it, and it explains what the scar came from. And there was another incident that took place that -- in the old days the back door of the car used to open this way, not this way. And we were coming back, as I understand, from Los Angeles or some town back to the farm house, and my brother opened the door and got thrown out the car. And I was accused of pushing him out the car. I remember that. 'Course, he got his toys and all that sort of thing, appease the situation. But it was an incident, incident that I was sitting in the back and he opened the door, and he flew out the door and I got accused of pushing him out the door. [Laughs]

SY: And those are things you remember, of course. Yeah.

KS: Yeah, you would remember that.

SY: Yeah, that's right. But it's not like it has, you don't associate it with anything that happened to you today, but you remember that incident on its own. Interesting. Wow. You have a wonderful memory, though, honestly.

KS: Well, I don't consider that good memory because it's so spotty. I mean, there's a lot of incidences prior to and going to and all that, and if I go along, I don't know who the friends were that my father took us to. And they had elaborate toys and we used to admire the kids riding these little trucks and all that kind of thing, with wheels on it. I mean, we admired all that stuff, but then it's, these are probably well-to-do family and they had these nice, fancy toys, and we go home to our little tractor. [Laughs]

SY: That's really, the fact that you remember it is pretty amazing.

KS: Well, that wasn't necessarily, I just recalled it 'cause it ties in pretty close to that incident, being thrown out the car. That time period.

SY: Well, you were also very, very young. That was probably prewar, living on the farm.

KS: Yeah.

SY: Yeah, so you were not even --

KS: Right around four years old, three, four and five, somewhere around that little age group. We used to walk around the farm on our own, my brother and I. We'd take, walk around the field and all that sort of thing, and play around the irrigation ditches. There was one irrigation ditch that we used to go to and catch crawdads, get a piece of bacon and a string, and take it home, boil it. [Laughs]

SY: Wow. Yeah, young boys do interesting things. So and you, when you were, when you used to walk around Manzanar outside, when you would kind of explore, it was, is that, there was a fishing area, right?

KS: There was. We weren't, I wasn't conscious about fishing. Probably was too young for that, but I recall later on, where the, there was a gentleman that went out the camp and went up the Mount Williamson area. Apparently there's some lakes up there. Now I know there are many lakes up there, and we go fishing that direction too. But there was an irrigation, not irrigation, there was a reservoir pond just outside the fence line, about... [looks off camera] is she about dead? [Laughs]

SY: The, you remember the...

KS: There was an irrigation, I mean, not irrigation but there was a reservoir pond just outside, just on the other side of the hospital, maybe about five hundred yards. And there was a pond there and a water reservoir, and I seem to think and remember that, because the creek was coming down from the mountains and that, there would be trout or fish in there.

SY: Wow.

KS: But I didn't, I didn't see it, so I don't know. I related that lake or that reservoir with that flood that we had in our ditch digging. [Laughs]

SY: Right, right.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.