<Begin Segment 4>

RP: And tell us a little bit about some of your, some of the holidays the family celebrated.

MK: I beg your pardon?

RP: Some of the holidays that you celebrated when you were growing up?

MK: Oh, the regular ones like we always do: New Year's, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. We did the Japanese ones, Girl's Day, March the third.

RP: How did you celebrate Girl's Day?

MK: We had the dolls and everything. And we had the special mochi at, at that time. But no, mostly the holidays were just the holidays that everybody just celebrated. I think we had Obon. We still have that to this day.

RP: Right.

MK: But I think because our parents were Buddhist, after camp my mother did convert to Methodist. And my father said it was all right if she did. And I think it served her well. I think that's why she lived a fairly quiet life. She never did get really excited. She was good that way.

RP: How about your dad?

MK: He was on the quiet side. And so I... when we were children you, you'd hear parents arguing and all this kind of stuff like you would normally do anyway. But I think they, they were just too busy to... life was not complicated. And I think that made it easier for us too. Because not living in Japantown, it made a difference. Because we always used to say, well you have to watch out what the neighbors are gonna think about what you're doing and things like that. But we didn't have that.

RP: Were there other Japanese families in the North Beach area?

MK: Oh yeah, but we were, you know like one here and one there. But we knew each other. So, it worked out okay.

RP: You mentioned that your family was Buddhist.

MK: No... in the early days.

RP: In the early days?

MK: Yeah. But then this Pine Methodist Church would come around and pick up the children for church. And so from an early age we, all of us daughters, went to the Pine Methodist Church. It was on Pine and Larkin. And we participated in all their activities and things like that. It, to us it was a normal childhood. We didn't expect big things. We didn't expect expensive things or anything like this. But I think in those days everybody was in, more or less, in the same category. And I think we all grew up happy.

RP: And how, how successful was your father's business?

MK: He did good until 1929. And then after that the business was going downhill. But somehow or the other they managed to feed us and provide for us. But later on there was more competition. And I... well, you grew up not expecting everything to begin with. And I think when you, when you're brought up that way it's much easier. It isn't like, you know, so and so had this and we don't have it.

RP: Right.

MK: We never... I didn't anyway, I didn't feel that it was hard for us. But I think Japanese culture is different. You're brought up that way. You live that way. And to this day... we provided more for our children because we knew what we did without, but then that's this day in age too with all this technology floating around and everything. And if you don't have a cell phone, kids think you're just terrible and you know, you're supposed to be texting your friends and all this kind of stuff. Because when you look at our grandchildren, they're all doing all this stuff that it doesn't even really phase me really. I carry a cell phone...

RP: Right.

MK: ...in case I have an emergency and I need to get a hold of somebody fast. That's about the extent of my cell phone.

RP: You had some other social occasions. You mentioned about that every, was it every year that all the dry cleaning people would...

MK: Yeah.

RP: ...get together and have a big picnic.

MK: Yes.

RP: And where was that held?

MK: In the Sunset District. In those days Dolger had not built all those homes out there yet and you just had blocks and blocks of sand dunes. And I don't know, I guess we were allowed by the city to do it. But everybody just packed up a big lunch and we went out and had games and baseball games and competition, running races and stuff like that. And it was fun. I don't... Playland at the beach was there, below the Cliff House there?

RP: Oh, right.

MK: Where the rides are. And there was some rides there and my mother and father would let us, they called these little cars "little red bugs." And you went you around on a course on that and they would let us do that. As we got older they let us ride some of the other things but... I don't like these thrill rides so to speak.

RP: Right. Another event to look forward to during the year was the prefectural picnic?

MK: I beg your pardon?

RP: The prefectural picnic?

MK: Yeah.

RP: Yamaguchi-ken.

MK: Uh-huh.

RP: Can you tell us a little bit about that? About the prefectural picnics?

MK: Oh, outside of the fact that... gee, everybody just went. We just had a good time. They would be singing. The dances that we do at Obon, a lot of us grew up learning those dances. And we just did it just to socialize. I can remember the family across the street, the father of the family, he taught all of us how to do some of those dances. But it's like Japanese folk dancing. I can remember doing that growing up.

RP: Do you still, do you still have, have those?

MK: Well, they still do that at Obon.

RP: Uh-huh.

MK: Even here in Sacramento. Yeah. But I don't participate anymore. I'm afraid I am not capable of doing it anymore. You know, I'm sorry my husband isn't here for you to interview because we had no boys in our family and boys are brought up different from the girls. He was the oldest and the only boy in his family. And he was not expected to do anything in the house. And his father would take him here and take him there and everything else, leave the girls at home. And that was one thing I brought up when we got married. I said, "This is America, you know, it's not Japan, so don't expect me to wait on you hand and foot." And when I said I wouldn't do something he learned to put up with it and do it. And that included light housekeeping, washing clothes when it was necessary, you know, things like that. But you can't live... because we lived the American way so to speak. We don't live the Japanese way. We all... husbands are expected to pitch in these days.

RP: It's different, yeah.

MK: Yeah.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.