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TI: So let's, so you graduate from dental school, Berkeley, 1937, so then what happened next?

JK: Well, I had to take the state board exams, so I took the state board exam in California, and then I came to Utah to take the Utah state board exam. And before I got notice of the passing of either one of 'em, I got a notice that I'd passed the California board. So I went back to San Francisco and I checked out several of the dentists there, how they're progressing in their practice there. And it seemed that they were just, there was no progress, they were all starving to death, for that matter. And I figured I didn't have any money or anything, so I decided I'll come back to Salt Lake. And my father helped me set up a practice by getting an office here. Now, at that time, after I'd passed the Utah board, I checked around to several of the buildings to get an office, and they were all filled. In fact, I talked to one, actually, First National Bank, and there were, there were spaces there, but I asked them, "Well, now, you've got spaces, and there are several doctors in the building." And he told me at that time, he says, "We don't want our elevators cluttered up with all these Japanese." And I said, "Well, there won't be that many Japanese," and he says, "We don't want any Japanese in our building." And so they wouldn't rent me a place, and I walked across the street. And it so happened that that dentist had died in an office that wasn't really a professional building, but it wasn't a professional building, but there was one dentist already in the building. And this, with a story above his office, and then this other dentist that had died. And rather than renovating the entire office and taking out the floors and taking out the partitions and everything, why, they figured, well, "If we could get another dentist in there, that would solve the problem of renovating the whole room." So I was able to rent the room there. I think the rental for the room was something like twenty, twenty dollars a month at that time. And so that's how I started.

TI: You know, you talked about that previous building, them not wanting to rent to you because you were Japanese. During this period before the war, do you recall any other events or incidences of, sort of, discrimination against Japanese?

JK: Well, there was quite a bit of discrimination. As a matter of fact, the board of realtors had a, as sort of a gentlemen's agreement that they would not sell or lease property on the east side of town to "colored people," that is including the blacks, and there weren't any blacks on the east side of town. And the only, only Japanese that were living on the east side of town was the Hashimoto family in which he was quite an influential Japanese here anyway. And he was, and so he lived up on the, on Twelfth East, which is just a couple of blocks below the university, and that was an elite area at that time. But there weren't any Japanese living east of there, and all the "colored" people were on the west side of town.

TI: So it sounds like housing there was discrimination, how about other things like movie theaters, restaurants?

JK: Well, the restaurants, we didn't have much trouble with the restaurants. But then the movie theaters, we were always shunted upstairs. Any theater that had an upstairs, why, they'd always ask us to leave and go upstairs. Now, I didn't notice that, that type of thing. I thought, "Well, upstairs is where the seats are," and so we just went up there as normally as it could be. Except that on one occasion, I had, I didn't have any patients that day, and I thought, "Well, I'll go down to this Capital Theater, and they have an upstairs." And I walked in, I got my ticket and I walked into the lobby there, and I met this fellow that I went to school with. And he was working his way through medical school at the time, and I sat, I stopped and talked to him for a little while. And he directed me right to, to a seat down on the main, main floor. And another, one of the ushers came up to him and says, "You can't let him sit down here, he's gotta go upstairs." Well, there was hardly anybody in the theater, it was a very... in fact, if I'd have gone upstairs, I'd probably have been the only person upstairs. But then I could overhear him say, "You can't let him sit down." He says, "Well, I know him, he's a friend of mine and I went to school with him, and to high school with him." He says, "I can't go down and tell him to go upstairs." And so I could overhear their conversation, he says, "Well, the next time any of these Japs or colored, you send 'em upstairs." And that's when I first realized that all the so-called "coloreds" were directed upstairs. And yet, the irony of that is that in Japan, the upstairs are the highest-priced seats, the third and fourth floor, you're looking down, and the main floor is the cheapest seats in the theaters in Japan. [Laughs]

TI: Did you ever talk to your friend about that?

JK: Well, no, I really didn't. In fact, we had a conference with Governor Rampton, and I think he initiated a plan whereby he would eliminate all the discrimination, especially in restaurants. And in fact, up until about 19'... well, up until about 1960, a lot of, many of the restaurants here wouldn't serve a black person.

TI: But the Japanese didn't have any problems with that, then?

JK: No, we didn't have any problem, I didn't have any problems simply because the Japanese, they just didn't go to these, these restaurants. They'd go to the Japanese restaurants, and there were several Japanese restaurants, but very seldom would you see them in the hotels or at the, like I say, Sutton's big restaurant, or Bull Brummels restaurant, or the Mayflower restaurant or places like that, which is the main restaurants, that is, the bigger restaurants in town.

TI: So any other kind of incidences of discrimination that you can recall for you or for...

JK: Well, there was discriminatory actions by the swimming pools here. In fact, it's like the Wasatch pool out here, they wouldn't let any Japanese or any blacks swim in their pools until, well, until they resolved that later, at a later time.

TI: And how did you know that they wouldn't let blacks or Japanese swim in the pool? Was that... like a sign, or is it just something you knew?

JK: No, no, there was no sign there, it was just the people that conduct, the operators, the operators, I suppose they were informed at that time not to, to direct the people, or... on one occasion, this was in 1935 when our class had a class swimming party at the Cliff House in San Francisco, and it used to be a hot springs in there. And the class went there for the swimming party, and I went with them. And when I went there, well, they wouldn't let me in. They says, "You can watch, but you can't go in swimming." The rest of the class, they were allowed to go in swimming. Well, I stood on the banks and I just watched 'em, watched the classmates swim. And I didn't, I didn't care too much about going into the sulfur spring there anyway, but then this was at that Cliff House swimming pool in San Francisco, which prohibited anybody from, the "colored" people from swimming there. And I was there last year with my grandson, and there was, it's been completely renovated, and it's a big fancy restaurant and a gift house now. And there was one elderly lady there that was working in the gift shop, and so I was telling her about my experience while going to, as a student, while I was a student. And she says, "Well, that's before I was born," so she didn't recall exactly. And so I said, "When did this convert into a, into a restaurant?" She said, well, when the hot water stopped, all the sulfur was, the spring that was producing hot water to the, to these places, all of a sudden it just stopped flowing, and so they converted it into a, kind of a sightseeing area and a restaurant and a bar, and a gift house.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.