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TI: So I'm going to go back to you. Well, before we go back to you, we talked about, a little about your father and mother. How about siblings? How many brothers and sisters did you...

RK: So I have one older sister.

TI: And what was her name?

RK: Her name is Rita.

TI: Good. So let's go to you. So you were born in San Francisco, so tell me some of your early childhood memories of growing up in San Francisco.

RK: So the area that I grew up in, at the time I was growing up was the area of San Francisco which the Italian Americans had originally, mostly situated in the North Beach area of San Francisco. And there was like a secondary area in San Francisco where I grew up, where there were a lot of Italian Americans living. And on the main street there, there was like a delicatessen with, kind of focused on Italian, a lot of the small grocery stores were Italian American kind of grocery stores, so I grew up in this area that had a lot of Italian Americans. I think we were probably the only Asians in that, in that particular area of town. And as a kid, my close friend was this little Italian American kid, and I used to go over to his house quite often. He'd come over to our house. We had Cub Scouts together and the whole thing.

TI: Now, why that neighborhood? Do you know why your parents decided to live there?

RK: So they lived, I think when my sister was born, they lived in the Japantown area of San Francisco. And then it was like an apartment. So they were looking to buy a house, and it just turned out that that was an area that there were homes available, so that's where we ended up.

TI: Okay. And so hanging out with Italian American friends, what are some activities that you remember doing when you were growing up?

RK: I mean, the typical things, you know, playing baseball, playing catch, going to football games or baseball games. I know that his name was Paul, that was my friend, his family was very involved with the 49ers. So once in a while, we'd get to go to a game together or whatever, you know, typical kind of things that kids would do.

TI: So how about, so you're in this neighborhood, how about staying involved with the Japanese American community? Were there things that you did?

RK: So that's where I, as a Cub Scout, I was involved with kind of the local Cub Scout pack, which was in my neighborhood. And then when I got a little older, to join the Boy Scouts, my father brought me to the, one of the troops that was in the Japantown area. And that's kind of where I started to get connected to the Japanese American community. It was called Troop 58, which was one of the three troops that were kind of situated in the San Francisco Japantown area.

TI: And about how old were you when this happened?

RK: So I would have been eleven, yeah, something like that, as a Boy Scout.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.