<Begin Segment 7>

KK: I think I remember my father as mainly a very patriotic man who believed in America and what America stood for. Because, you know, when he was, during World War I, he tried to enlist in the army. But because he already had children, they would not take him, but they took his brother Clarence who did serve in the army. And Clarence later died in Heart Mountain relocation center, camp. But my father, it's very ironic that they, the FBI thought that he was such a super, super spy and important person, because I remember my father... he had no property. He had ten children, and he had many jobs in his lifetime. So he did not, he was not a man who was able to keep, make money and keep it. So our family really struggled through the Depression. The girls had to go to work, even before they got out of school, they went out and worked as schoolgirls. And then afterwards they worked and lived at home, but most of their pay came to help support the rest of the family. These are the older two sisters, the older half of the family. The first five, I think, really supported the last five of us. And being the youngest, I guess I've been supported the longest of any of them. [Laughs] But you talk about my father, I guess when he was in Utah, he worked on the railroad at one time.

HS: That was before I was born, I think.

KK: And he came in, I think, 1908, is what I remember. Somewhere in that time. We're an unusual family in that we're third-generation Christians. His parents became Christians in Japan, and therefore, and his father was in the cavalry, and therefore was not a, didn't have property, was moved around. And so he had six sons, right? Was it six? Eight? Oh, okay, eight. But anyway, the boys really didn't have that much future in Japan, so how many of them came over here?

HS: Almost all of them at one time.

KK: At one time or another all of them came to America, and this was the land of opportunity for them, and they made the best they could. And my father was in Salt Lake and worked as a floral designer.

HS: He knew people in the Mormon church, and after the war, many, many years after the war, he went to Salt Lake City to the Tabernacle, and he ran across somebody there who remembered him from like 1919, in the 1920s. And it was really a nostalgic time for him because here were two old men recognizing each other, and renewing friendship that they had had. Dad was a wonderful one for making friends everywhere. In Los Angeles he worked as a floral artist, and he was in and out of the homes of movie stars. He would make floral decorations for them, and so when visitors came he would take people and say, "This is so-and-so's house, and this is so-and-so's house." And sometimes we even went into them. And he always made friends everywhere, just anywhere he went, he would make friends because he was so good in English.

KK: And his English was self-taught. You've got to remember, he only went through... what's high school in Japan? I think it's tenth grade or something. I don't think it's like our twelfth grade, I think it was less than that. But he came over and he taught himself English. And if someone did not see him, they would not know it was a Japanese speaking, his English was that fluent. And his vocabulary was fabulous, and he had a terrific memory.

HS: And he could type. He could type with these four fingers faster than I could type with all my fingers.

KK: But another job he had was as a traveling salesman for an import-export company, and he was instrumental in S&H green stamps using Japanese goods as...

HS: Premiums?

KK: Premiums. And in that job he traveled by railroad all the states west of the Mississippi.

HS: You know, I can remember one incident. We lived in Salt Lake City, Mae and I were just little kids then. And Dad was introducing the game of mahjong. We knew how to play mahjong, so he was going to introduce mahjong to the people in Salt Lake City, he was gonna sell sets there. So he put us in the show window of ZCMI which is one of the big department stores in Salt Lake City, both of us in kimono and we were sitting there. And we had a card table and mahjong set up. Mae and I were supposed to be in the window playing mahjong. Well, we fought. [Laughs] So they finally had to take us out. I don't know whether you remember that, but I do.

MM: Not at all. [Laughs]

KK: But in his traveling as a salesman, he traveled, of course, on the railroad. And to while away the time, he used to crochet and knit. And I've seen some of the things that he made for these two girls, collars for velvet dresses and things like that. But the interesting thing is that he would go to a city and he'd look up... of course, his main job was to look up the department store, and so he'd look for the most important, biggest department store in town. Then he would, on his own, go and look up anybody who had anything to do with writing Christian hymns or having had a relative who was a missionary. He had a fabulous memory for people, and he would find out of there was any connection in that town and he'd go visit these people. And they'd invite him for dinner, and he played the harmonica, and they'd have a good time. But that's how he got to know people, and he'd always know who the richest person in the town was, and the most influential, those kinds of things. And of course, having gathered all this and having it in his memory. When they incarcerated him, and they put him on a railroad with the blinds down and they were traveling. He was giving a monologue to the other internees in the railroad car, and he would do it in Japanese and English so that the guard would also be informed. And the guard got suspicious and took him off and told his superior that this man had a fabulous knowledge of the country. And so I think this partly led to some of why they thought he was a spy. But it wasn't that at all. And the last job he had before the war was with an insecticide company. And because most of the farmers in and around Imperial Valley in California and Orange County were Japanese, and he was bilingual, they gave him their accounts. And not only that, they asked him to help with the research that was being done.

HS: Experiments, uh-huh.

KK: So he went to the L.A. museum, county museum, and he talked to the entomologist, and he learned all about insects and everything. And he had these great big volumes, you asked me a picture of my father, my father's lying on the couch reading these great big volumes and falling asleep with these books falling on his face. And I'd try to lift them up, and they were really heavy books. But he became very knowledgeable, he would mount and preserve insects and specimens and things and you could imagine our dining room with the walls lined with specimen bottles, you know. But, of course, in the research they would have control fields, they would use one kind of insecticide here and another kind of insecticide there. And then he was working with Proctor & Gamble who had developed detergents before the war. And why the detergents were developed was not to clean our clothes, but was to clean vegetables and fruits of insecticide. And so he had a little pin of detergent that was really magical. You just take a little finger of it and put it in water and you cleaned your glasses and your dishes. We had this before, when I was a little girl doing dishes. [Laughs] So anyway, he went around and he supervised these kind of test fields. So you know what those things kind of translate into, and, of course, how did they --

HS: Maps, too, showed exactly where these fields were and names of the farmers.

KK: And then they would dust the fields from air, so, of course, there were little small airports around where the dust crop airplanes would load up with the insecticide, etcetera. So all of these were very incriminating, but he was working for a U.S. company, you know? And here was this man who was really a super-American in one way. He was very critical, though. I mean, he really believed in America, and he...

LD: What did he believe in America?

KK: That it was a land of opportunity, that the laws, that we were governed by laws, and he believed in free speech and this and that. He encouraged Buddy to go over and write about the Japanese-Chinese war because he thought, yes, we should have the right, the Japanese should know the unslanted view, the Japanese side of the news, not just the American Chinese, pro-Chinese side of that. But he always thought also that Buddy should be kept up on what was current here in the United States. So as Hana says, he clipped out articles and wrote to him and kept him up on the news. I always remember he always subscribed to the Christian Science Monitor even before the war. Because he said they gave them about the most even evaluation of news. And so he would send clippings and write his opinions, and he was very free with his opinions about what was going on, and he was very knowledgeable about politics, government, economics, as it dealt with the Japanese and with the farmers, especially. So I can see where the FBI might have thought he was a very important "spy."

HS: He used to take Edison on these field trips when Edison wasn't in school.

KK: Me, too.

HS: That's what got Edison interested in farming. Edison really wanted to be a farmer. It never materialized.

KK: And I remember going out with him and visiting these farms and what he had to do and helping him gather the specimens and putting them, see that they're carefully kept and all those things. And getting vegetables from the farmers, going out to the fields and picking fresh cucumbers and taking them to the irrigation and washing them up and just eating it fresh off the vine. It was really terrific. But he was not a man that had any property of his own. And he wasn't a very... he was a good father, but he wasn't one that could provide material for us.

HS: He wasn't a very good provider.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1985 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.