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RP: And so he, your father settled in the San Francisco area?
MK: Yes.
RP: And he got into the dry cleaning business.
MK: Yes.
RP: And how did that come about?
MK: First he came and he worked as a houseboy. And he studied English. He was in the East Bay someplace I think at that time. But this one larger dry cleaning trained a lot of people. And he had no skills when he came. And he wasn't... as far as I know, they did no farming in their family. And my mother's side did a little bit of farming. But that mostly for their own consumption. 'Cause I remember her saying, oh, she would work a little bit before she went to school in the morning. But on the whole I don't think... I think they were middle class. I don't think they had to struggle for a living. I think they did all right. And then he, you know, even when we went to visit in later years you could see where they had managed their land well. So...
RP: And where was your father's business located?
MK: San Francisco.
RP: Uh-huh.
MK: On the outskirts of Chinatown, outskirts of North Beach.
RP: And that's where you lived?
MK: That's where we lived.
RP: Where you grew up.
MK: Yes.
RP: Uh-huh. And what are your earliest memories of growing up in that San Francisco, North Beach area?
MK: I guess, I can remember starting Japanese language school when I was about the second grade, and it continued until Pearl Harbor. And that's when they said no more language schools. So, I think I finished the equivalent of what they would call eighth grade. But you know, over the years you lose a lot if you don't have the Japanese speaking people around you.
RP: Right.
MK: But my mother and father both learned English. So what we couldn't say in Japanese we just said in English.
RP: And what language was spoken in the home, primarily?
MK: Both.
RP: Both?
MK: Yeah. I was talking to another friend of ours who had, she was a Japanese national. And she said her daughter did the same thing, spoken Japanese to her, spoken English to her friends. And it just came out that way. We had no problem with it.
RP: And you grew up in a pretty diversely ethnic area, in North Beach area.
MK: Yeah, at that time North Beach was predominately Italian. And so most of my classmates were Italian. We were on the outskirts of Chinatown and so naturally we had a lot of Chinese friends. There was a Filipino group that would meet around there. And so we, the contact we had them because they would patronize my mother and father's business. But we grew up with all these different races and actually we didn't think twice about it really. We didn't let it bother us. But San Francisco's still like that though.
RP: Yeah, always will be.
MK: It is a melting pot.
RP: Right. And your, you had three other sisters?
MK: I had three sisters.
RP: And can you give us their names and their date of birth?
MK: Okay, Taiko, she was born on January 20, 1921. Chizuko, she was born on August 14, 1924. And my younger sister, Sadama, was born on March 18, 1928.
RP: Okay.
MK: The oldest one is deceased now.
RP: Oh, okay. And did you get, did you feel close to all your sisters or was there one particular sister that...
MK: Mostly I played with my, just my younger sister. At the time of the evacuation my older sister was attending UC Berkeley. Actually, she was in nursing at the hospital in San Francisco. Chiz had graduated from high school at sixteen and a half. If you had all your credits then they let you graduate early. So then Sum and I were the only ones left in school. So, yeah.
<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.