<Begin Segment 25>

TI: I'm going to shift gears a little bit and go back to Fresno. I want to talk about how Fresno changed after the war. Can you tell...

SK: Oh. Well, a lot of Japanese people didn't, you know, after being away, what, two years? Roughly two years, Japantown, you might say, just a few people that came back to the same, back to, back in the restaurant business. Just half the people, handful of people. And let me see now. There were not, that's when all the restaurants disappeared, anyway. But the packing house was still there. And some of these Chinese, I mean, we started out as being all Japanese, but lot of Japanese, I mean, a lot of Chinese people had opened their shops in the meantime while we were gone. And so Chinatown actually became Chinatown.

TI: Oh, that's interesting. Earlier you also mentioned how when people came back to Fresno, there was sometimes difficult, like anti-Japanese feelings?

SK: Oh. I remember that when they came back, I've heard of people getting shot at by, by somebody. They never could find out, but how would you like to be out in the country someplace, and somebody would take a shot at you? Fortunately, nobody got killed or anything. Nobody even got shot at -- I mean, not even shot. But they were shot at, let's say. There was a lot, well, a few incidents like that.

TI: Okay. Earlier you also talked about how many of the friends you grew up with that were not Japanese, they...

SK: Oh, when we came back, they all had the best jobs in town. Some of the police department and all the kids that used to be in the delinquent school, they were either cops or something else. We used to call that B Street College. I mean, it was on B Street, and the reform school was on, was a college. [Laughs]

TI: So reform school you called B Street College?

SK: B Street.

TI: Yeah, B Street College. Interesting.

SK: B like A, B, C.

TI: Right, right. Interesting. But it sounds like, so what you saw was you and the others, the Japanese that were gone for a few years, when you came back, it was almost like you were behind, that your friends were able to get all these good jobs and everything while the Japanese were gone?

SK: Well, then, like the Chinatown, talking about all the shops were in Chinese hand, too.

TI: And so how well did the Japanese community recover from the war years?

SK: I don't know. They did pretty well, I guess. I just remember just a few shops now, but they must have done pretty well. 'Cause I don't, I didn't hear of anyone complaining. It's just that since we went to Gila, and the other people went to Jerome, Arkansas, I just don't know what happened to the rest of the people that I grew up with.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2010 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.