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SY: Can you sort of describe your father? I mean, what was he like?

RN: My father was not very tall but he was very, very muscular. I have pictures of him in the JANM exhibit there. Because also he was the judosensei and so he had the dojo and, let's see, I think it was in the Virgil area.

SY: That was started after the war?

RN: No, this was before the war.

SY: Before the war?

RN: Yeah. In fact, that's one of his big proud moments is that he was part a judo demonstration team. Because they didn't have that as an Olympic sport, but he and his school did the judo demonstrations at the 1933 Olympics here in L.A.

SY: Really? That's impressive.

RN: Yeah, so he was very proud about that.

SY: Very much so. And then was he... he wasn't an educated man so much?

RN: No. I don't think he even finished high school. He went and started working on fishing boats early on.

SY: So the judo was very important.

RN: Yeah, it was pretty much family, judo and work.

SY: I see. And then your mother, can you kind of give us the picture of her?

RN: Yeah. My mother, as I said, when she was young she helped out picking whatever harvest it was. And then later they did settle, that's why they settled in the Venice area and they had the produce stand in kind of Culver City, Venice, that area. So that's probably how I ended up in Venice. 'Cause she went to Venice High School and graduated from there. And there's a big blank area until she met my father.

SY: So was she always a very hard-working kind of person?

RN: Oh, yeah, yeah. You had to help out all the time. So yeah, she was. And yeah, I don't know too much about my mother until she met my father. They had the... the market was on, oh Hillhurst. Yeah, Hillhurst Avenue, just a little ways from the Los Feliz Hills area.

SY: Uh-huh. They really stayed sort of in that central Los Angeles...

RN: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting because where we had our house, home, it was like four Japanese families there. I think what was interesting is that that's why I was kind of multicultural, because on one side of Chevy Chase Drive that we lived on, was pretty white, working class, and then on the other side was a Chicano/Latino barrio called, the gangs called it Toonerville. So it was a barrio on one side. So a lot of my friends in elementary school were Latino. And then when I went to Irving junior high school, it was kind of mixed with a few Asians, but mostly Latino and mostly working class white students. And then because I lived on the east side of this one street, I went to Marshall High instead of Franklin High School. So Franklin, most of my friends went there, and so that was a pretty multiethnic school. Mine turned out to be very white, Jewish, professional class students and so I had a little difficulty transitioning from there.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.