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TI: And so I'm guessing, for the Salt Lake City area, the media and people like that would look to you for direction or information?

JK: Yeah, well, at the time, during the evacuation period, why, people would come to my office and ask about housing and employment. And it got to the point where they were usurping so much of my time in the office that I installed an office down in Japantown and I borrowed a space from an attorney. This is when Toru Sakahara, I think he was operating a little office downtown, and I rented, or I just borrowed a little space from him, and I put in a desk. And I hired a fellow named Jerry Katayama who had just graduated from college, and he was waiting for his draft card. And while he was waiting for his draft orders, why, I asked him to go down and man this office so that, we called it the JACL Emergency Office where all the evacuees that had come in from California or from Seattle would come down and they could make an inquiry there as to housing and employment. So we didn't have any, we didn't have any money, we didn't have any resources for that type of thing. So I had to, I paid him out of my own pocket to man that office for about four months, four or five months while these people were drifting into town, which was in the latter part of '42, early part of '43, in which all the Japanese that had been evacuated, who hadn't gone into camp, and which they came to Salt Lake.

In fact, there was one incidence, I was home and I got a call from a woman, and she says her name was Mrs. Kodama. And she was, she acted real hysterical about housing, and so I says, "Well, where are you?" and she said, "Well, I'm down here in Japantown right on the corner of Main Street and First South." And so I said -- and she called me at home. And so I went down there, and I'm looking around for this Japanese woman, Mrs. Kodama. Well, I couldn't find any Japanese woman, but there was a Caucasian woman there. And she came up, and there was hardly anybody there, it was a Sunday and there was hardly anybody there. So she saw me and she came up to me and she says, "I am Mrs. Kodama, and my husband and I have evacuated out here from," I think, "from Portland, Oregon." And she wanted to know if I could find her a place to live. And so I checked around and I checked with the real estate people and they, and they found one place up on Tenth East, and there was a little house that was being vacated, and so I says to this real estate person, I says, "Check and see if she would qualify." And so they wanted to get the, get the house sold. Well, I said, "How much is it?" and he says, "$4,200." And so I asked Mrs. Kodama, I said, "Well now, you'd have to pay maybe $4,200," she says, "I can do that." And so she bought the house and she moved in. And there was a neighbor there that was a pharmacist that I knew, and a couple times after that, this pharmacist came to me and he says, "Say, there's a woman that bought this house," but he says, "there's a Japanese fellow that comes in and he never leaves." And he says, "He's out in the yard working on the yard work and working around the house," but he says, "he never leaves the place." I says, "Well, why don't you ask her why he doesn't leave?" so he says, well, he'll ask her. And so he went up to her, and I found out that he had asked her why this Japanese fellow never left the house, and he says her answer was that her husband had passed away, and this Japanese man had been her, in the household working as a servant in the house all these years. And so when she moved in, why, she asked him to come and keep house and keep the, keep the yard and do all the housework and all that. And she says, "Well, he's more or less my servant." And that's how she got by letting him know that this Japanese fellow was not related to her or was not her husband.

TI: But in actuality, he was, they were married?

JK: He was actually her husband, see, but she wouldn't admit it to him. But everybody in her hometown in Portland knew, knew the couple.

TI: And you mentioned earlier the miscegenation laws in Utah, if they had known that they were married, would that have presented problems?

JK: Well, I've known other, I knew a Japanese fellow named Miyamoto who was married to a German woman, and they had three boys. And there was no, there was no indication of any hostility or anything like that against them. I don't think that there was any hostile action except the only hostile action that I experienced was when these kids, I guess they were kids, took their guns and fired into a home, this farmhouse, where the Japanese family lived. But it so happened that the kids were all asleep, they were in bed, and the bullets passed through the window, through the house. Well, what happened was this family that lived there had two boys in the army, they were the Tsutsui family, they were farmers out here on Fifth, I think they were on Seventh East and about Thirty-third South, and they had a house there that they lived in. The two boys, two older boys were in the army, and the three younger kids were at home. And right after Pearl Harbor, the house got shot up with guns of people that just trailed along, I guess.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.