Densho Digital Archive - Joyce Okazaki Interview I

Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Joyce Okazaki Interview I
Narrator: Joyce Okazaki
Interviewer: Kristen Luetkemeier
Location: Santa Ana, California
Date: June 20, 2012
Densho ID: denshovh-ojoyce-01

<Begin Segment 1>

KL: Well, this is Kristen Luetkemeier speaking, I am a worker for Manzanar National Historic Site. We're here at Video Resources Studio in Santa Ana, California, with Joyce Okazaki. Joyce and I have both completed filming of the roles that are going to make us famous in a new documentary of Ansel Adams. It's June 20, 2012, and we are gonna be talking today about Joyce's childhood before World War II in Los Angeles, her experiences being held at Manzanar, and then their family's relocation to Chicago, and her adult life back in California and her involvement with the Manzanar Committee after that. And Joyce, I know that your grandparents, especially your mother's parents, were an influence in your childhood, and that you know some things about your grandparents on both sides, so I'd like to start talking about your maternal grandparents. What were their names and what can you tell us about them?

JO: My grandfather's name is, was, Takejiro Kusayanagi, a really long name. And my grandmother's was Matsu Kusayanagi, Matsu Hoshizaki Kusayanagi. Hoshizaki was her maiden name.

KL: And they were both from Japan?

JO: Both from Japan, from Kanagawa-ken, where all the Kusayanagis and the Hoshizakis lived, I guess, as I understand it. I didn't quite understand, but that's what it is, I guess. People with all the same last names come from a certain area.

KL: Makes sense. [Laughs] Yeah. And they didn't know each other in Japan, or they did know each other?

JO: I don't know if they knew each other. Maybe their parents or somebody knew. But my grandfather came over at the age of nineteen. I think the records show that he was nineteen. I always thought he was seventeen, that's what my mother used to say. But he actually was nineteen years old, and it was 1899, and he came over with two other friends to seek their fortune. He had a wicked stepmother who tossed him out of the house, so he had no place to go. Thought he would try to find his fortune here in America, and he did, eventually. But my grandmother was... I don't know, I can't remember if my grandfather went back to Japan to marry her, but she came over in 1906, so that's seven years later, and they got married. I don't know whether they were married in Japan or whether they were married here. I missed that part of the... of the history.

KL: When he came, when your grandfather came to the United States, where did he come in?

JO: He came through San Francisco. That was another thing. My mother told me he came through Seattle, but records show that he came through San Francisco, and his boat, the listing on the boat was one that docked in San Francisco, and then from there I guess he worked his way down as dishwasher or whatever, farmhand. He and his two friends, they each... of course, each of them did very well, became very successful when they got older. One of them owned half of Orange County, a huge farmland.

KL: Do you know their names?

JO: One last name was Nitta, and it's not very well-known now, I don't think, but they had a huge farmland. And then the other one was Hoshizaki, and he was a... he did very good in importing. He would import from Japan, and he formed a company called Mutual Trading, which is still around today, I think, but under different ownership.

KL: But the three of them stayed in touch and stayed friends?

JO: Yes, stayed friends all through their lives until they all got too old. And even after camp, they all... I don't know what the other two went, if they were also arrested, but when they came back, they stayed in touch. Because they all belonged to the same ken, and in the Japanese community, the kens would have picnics. So Kanagawa-ken would have a picnic, and everybody, including the families, would get together. So that's what they did, kept in touch that way, and through other various get-togethers with the ken, same ken.

KL: And when your grandmother came, where did she, was he still in San Francisco, or had he already come further south?

JO: I believe he had moved to Pasadena, I think, because by then it was seven years, and he had, he started a bathhouse in Pasadena, because at that time, there was no indoor plumbing, so people had to take baths in bathhouses. And the men would go there and have a shave and take a bath. And I guess even a haircut, he even did haircuts. And later on, my grandmother opened a little, I guess you'd call it like a boutique, but in that time it was just a little area where she sold collar buttons and things that go with shirts, and that's how they started their business, is she started selling things. And then eventually they opened a dry goods store in downtown Los Angeles. But before then, they were living in Pasadena, and so my mother was born in Pasadena.

KL: Do you know why they chose to move to Los Angeles?

JO: I really don't know. Probably the opportunity, I think Pasadena in those days was just a small hick town with maybe a one-lane road, I don't know. Because he did move to Main Street, right across from City Hall.

KL: In L.A.?

JO: In Los Angeles, Los Angeles City Hall. So he had a store there. And there was a bunch of stores along that same street, and there was also a bank. It was a Bank of Italy which became Bank of America.

KL: Oh, I didn't know that.

JO: And apparently my grandfather went to the bank to borrow money for his store and became friendly with the president of the bank who was, at that time, I can't remember his name. It'll come back to me later maybe.

KL: In the middle of the night. [Laughs] "It was Salucci."

JO: But anyway, he knew the president, and apparently the president is who told him that it's okay to borrow money, but you should invest your money in stock. So that's how my grandfather became interested in investing in stock. And he did that from, I guess from the time he had any kind of money.

KL: And did your grandmother work in the dry goods store, too, both of them?

JO: Yes, yes. And when my mother was old enough, she worked there, too. The children had to work in the dry goods store.

<Begin Segment 2>

KL: Tell us about your mom and her other siblings. Who else was in the family?

JO: My mother had four sisters. Well, five sisters and one brother, and she had an older sister who passed away at birth, and a younger sister who passed away from peritonitis when she was nineteen. And then she had the sister who graduated from USC as a doctor, and then she had another one who's a beautician, and then two others. One was going to UCLA at the time of our, having to be moved to camp, and so she had to leave UCLA when she was, I think, a junior. And she then recently got her honorary degree at UCLA in May 15th of 2010. She had an honorary degree, and she got to wear the, you know, honorary degree cap and gown, which was really fancy, not like your undergraduate cap and gown.

KL: Did you go to the ceremony?

JO: Yes, oh, yes, it was such a big honor, we had to all go.

KL: What is her name?

JO: Her name is Sakae Kusuyanagi Okabe. She is still alive, she's like ninety-one or -two, and she lives at the retirement home... no, convalescent home in Keiro.

KL: Would you spell her name?

JO: Sakae, first name is S-A-K-A-E, and then nickname of Sally. And then Kusayanagi is the family name, and then Okabe, O-K-A-B-E.

KL: And I should have been asking you the other people's names probably as we went, too, Dr. Kay who...

JO: Worked in the hospital?

KL: Yeah. Would you just say her name?

JO: Dr. Masako Kusayanagi, K-U-S-A-Y-A-N-A-G-I. She never used the name Dr. Goto, because Dr. Goto was her husband.

KL: Yeah, I hear her called Dr. Kay whenever I see her referenced.

JO: And now she's Dr. Miura.

KL: Uh-huh.

JO: 'Cause she married a Miura.

KL: And then the other, I think there were two others that you mentioned, your sister, or your aunt who was nineteen when she passed away?

JO: That was Tomiko, T-O-M-I-K-O. And she was married, so her last name was Uyeda, but I found it very interesting, on her grave, she's got this huge gravestone, and all it, it just says "Tomiko," because they didn't approve of her husband.

KL: The family?

JO: I gather that, because nowhere is it mentioned that she was married.

KL: She was young. I mean, not as young as it would seem now, but to be married and to have passed away.

JO: Married and passed away all within a year. And she was also going to UCLA. And she joined, she was a charter member of Chi Alpha Delta, the UCLA sorority that I later joined.

KL: Oh.

JO: So I have her pin.

KL: And then the other siblings?

JO: The other one is, the one just below Dr. Kay is, her name is Kimiko Kusayanagi Hasegawa. Hasegawa is her last name, and she's the one that had the two children in Manzanar.

KL: And then was there an older sibling, too, that we missed, or there were just five?

JO: There was an older, but I don't remember her name.

KL: Okay.

JO: I think it was Fusaye but I'm not sure. I think it was Fusaye.

KL: That's a lot of girls. [Laughs]

JO: Then there was one brother, George (Takeo Kusayanagi).

KL: How did he fare in all that?

JO: He was spoiled rotten. He was also, had mental problems. So he did not fare very well.

KL: I guess it depends who you ask.

JO: So anyway, and then the youngest one was Irene (Kusayanagi), but her first name was Aiko, A-I-K-O, Aiko. And her nickname was Irene.

KL: And most of the kids helped out in the store, too, do you think?

JO: No, no. By the time... I think only the first few. By the time my mother got married, I don't think her sisters worked in the store. Because my mother worked in the store, she was always working in the store. But she was, like, in her early twenties. And I don't recall any of the others working in the store. Because I used to... when I was born, and later on, when I went to school, I went to Maryknoll. And I went to Maryknoll specifically because the bus would pick me up at home and take me where my mother instructed the bus driver to take me, whether it was back home or to the store.

KL: Oh, that was her main reason for choosing Maryknoll?

JO: That's what she said. Otherwise I could have gone to --

KL: It'd be a big help.

JO: Yeah, otherwise I could have gone to the local elementary school. Because I went there in kindergarten and then I didn't go there in first grade. So my mother would always go to the store to help and work during day. So I would go there after school. All I remember was my mom working. I didn't remember any of the other kids working, but you know, it may be that when I was... I remember one time my aunt, my youngest aunt Irene, she took me up to the top floor of City Hall. We had to climb, it was a Saturday, we had to climb twenty-eight floors. So I said, "Oh, I hope we get to ride the elevator down." And guess what? The elevator was not working because it was a Saturday. So we had to walk all the way down.

KL: How was the view?

JO: The view was very good. I remember, "Oh, look, we can see everything." But then we had to walk down.

KL: Yeah. We walked down the Washington Monument shortly after my family moved to Washington, D.C., that was a long staircase, too.

<Begin Segment 3>

KL: I want to hear more about Maryknoll, but first I want to talk about your paternal grandparents who also came to the United States.

JO: Okay.

KL: Tell us about them.

JO: My paternal grandparents came when my father was eleven years old in October 1916. October of 1916, it was one month before he was going to be twelve. And they came over, they brought him over, and they came over then because his fare would have been half price. Once he became twelve, he had to pay full price. So they landed in San Francisco, and they stayed in San Francisco, and he went to school there, elementary school. Now, he was already twelve. I don't know too much about my grandparents, I only remember my father's life. He came when he was twelve and he had to start first grade, elementary school, when he was twelve. So he didn't graduate high school until he was about twenty-one or two.

KL: He started in the first grade at twelve?

JO: Yeah, twelve.

KL: How was that? Did he talk about that?

JO: Well, what could he do? He couldn't speak English. So he learned eventually.

KL: Were there others in his situation, do you think, other older kids?

JO: I don't know. I don't think so. I don't really know. He didn't ever say he had any friends, so I really didn't know. In fact, I don't even know what his parents did. I know his mother kind of was a stay-at-home mother. I don't know whether she took in ironing or laundry or how they used to do that in the old days to make money. And I don't know what he did.

KL: Your grandfather?

JO: Yeah, I don't know what he did. He --

KL: They -- oh, go ahead.

JO: He was kind of a tinkerer, and he would tinker and do, make all kinds of things. But as I said, I really don't know, and I never asked my dad.

KL: Where were they from in Japan?

JO: They were from the Kyoto area?

KL: Did he talk to you about his memories of Kyoto at all?

JO: No. He actually... his life was a little different. He was born to a family with three boys, I guess, and being the fourth boy, they didn't want him, so they sent him to the Buddhist temple to live. And he lived there for six years, however many years until this older couple wanted a child and went to the temple and got him. That's all I know. I only found out about that when we went back to Japan. In 1997 we went back to Japan because my father wanted to visit his mother's grave before he passed away. So we went to Japan, and he could barely walk himself by this time because he was ninety-two.

KL: That is a long trip for a ninety-two-year-old.

JO: But he made it. And in Japan, the graves are not level, they're on stairs and up hills, and so he had to climb up this hill of stairs, but he did it. And he went to say, pour water on his mother's grave and add a little flowers. But that was the first time that I heard that he had to go to a Buddhist temple to live. Because we went to the Buddhist temple, "Oh, here's the temple where I had to stay."

KL: Oh, my gosh.

JO: I said, "What?" "Oh, yeah." He had to stay there as a child. I said, "Oh, my goodness."

KL: Did he just live so much in the present, you think, that he just hadn't...

JO: He just didn't think about it until taking a trip back there and walking across this area and seeing how it was. It was just amazing.

KL: Was the grave that you visited the grandmother that raised him that he went to see, or the woman who...

JO: Yes, uh-huh, the one that raised him. The sad story was she was married, the father was an abuser, he used to beat her. I guess she couldn't take it, she killed herself. So he was in college by then when he came home from a day in college and came (home) to see his mother, dead. But he never shared that until later on, I think this trip, then he started talking about it. So it was kind of like unspoken. My mother knew about it, I guess, but never said anything.

KL: That'd be a hard thing to figure out how to tell your children.

JO: Yeah. So anyway...

KL: So was he an only child then?

JO: He was the only child, he was adopted, probably around age seven or eight, and lived with them. But his father, for whatever else, made him go to college. I mean, he was not particularly brilliant because he had to start first grade at age twelve, and he finished high school when he was like twenty-one or twenty-five. It was quite a ways. Maybe he was twenty-five when he finished high school. Then he went to Berkeley, UC Berkeley, because his father made him. And I said, "Why'd you take architecture?" "My father made me do that."

KL: And you said his father was a tinker, so maybe...

JO: Yeah, I said, how did he know to make my father take architecture? Although my father said he was an engineering graduate, he wasn't. He was an architecture graduate. And so... and architecture is a school for five years, so he had to leave the school one year to work, and then went back, and I think he made it in six years. But he did go to college, did as his father said.

KL: He finished at Berkeley?

JO: Yes.

KL: That's interesting that it was his father who wanted him to do that.

<Begin Segment 4>

KL: I know your mom studied PE, and hearing you talk about her siblings who became a doctor and a beautician and stuff. That kind of makes sense, but I wondered how her interested in PE developed.

JO: I really don't know, but I understand she was a tomboy and loved to play baseball. I said, "What?" I couldn't picture my mother being a tomboy at all.

KL: Or being eighteen at all? [Laughs]

JO: I thought she was more of a flapper-type, you know. And then we looked back at her photographs, now that she's gone, we have her old albums, she just wore the fanciest clothes, always dressed in the stylish outfits with the fur collars. I don't know. So PE didn't seem to fit her, but maybe it was because it was an easier curriculum, because I don't know if she was all that willing to study that much. But I know her father wanted her to go to college. He probably would have had all of his children go to college, but some of them were not smart enough. The one that's a beautician was not, didn't want to go to college. And then the next one that had to leave UCLA, she was a sociology major, but she never went back to college when she got married, and did not attempt to finish college while she was in camp. And you know the story of the Quakers helping all of the drop, people who had to drop college to find other schools to attend. She didn't even pursue that, she just wanted to get married.

KL: But your mom had finished college?

JO: Yes.

KL: Where did she enroll? Where's her degree from?

JO: USC. You know, the dad, my grandfather believed in sending his kids to USC, I guess. Except my aunt went to UCLA, but my mother went to USC. And so, and then she also had a car when she was very young. She started driving when she was sixteen. I think she went to college when she was seventeen, so she had a car. I said, "Don't you think it was strange that you had a car at such an early age?"

KL: What'd she say?

JO: "No, no, it wasn't that unusual."

KL: And how did you, you told me a little bit about your parents meeting each other.

JO: I don't know where they met, but they met in Southern California, probably at a college function. Because he was in Berkeley and she was at USC, and he would ride his motorcycle down to see her on weekends.

KL: That's pretty dashing.

JO: Yeah. And she was really taken with him. We have her diary, and reading about it. [Laughs] I haven't read it all, but I really should read more about it.

KL: What drew her to him?

JO: Oh, he was really good-looking, good-looking guy. And he was not, he was pretty tall, I think he was about five-six at that time, kind of shrank after a while. But he was pretty tall and thin and good-looking.

KL: And interested enough to ride his motorcycle down.

JO: Yeah. And he'd come down every so often to see her. But she's the one that had a car.

KL: Yeah, I mean, that's a nice thing to have, too.

JO: Oh, and whenever they went out, she always had to take her sisters with her. So the two younger sisters, sometimes three, would go with her.

KL: Did she resent that? What did she think?

JO: Well, she just had to do it.

KL: How would they...

JO: They liked it; they thought it was fun. Especially the one that's a beautician, she used to talk about how they used to all go get in the car and go with the sister and my father and mother on dates.

KL: That'd be exciting, I would think. Did they get you to say your parents' names on the tape, too?

JO: Probably not.

KL: I forget sometimes about the important details. [Laughs]

JO: Okay, my mother's name is Yaeko Nakamura. No, Yaeko Kusayanagi first, then Nakamura.

KL: And your dad?

JO: My dad's name is Genshiro Nakamura.

<Begin Segment 5>

KL: And she studied PE, and she student-taught, but you were telling me about how she was never able to get credentialed.

JO: No. She didn't really student teach. You know, when you're in college, they send you to, before you finish, they send you for classroom experience, and she did that at Audubon junior high school. I think it was (Foshay). It's right there on Exposition. But they would not hire her for student teaching, so she couldn't get the credential for student teaching. And when she went to Manzanar, superintendent Genevieve Carter offered her a position of teaching PE and giving her a temporary credential. No, what did they call it then? It was not a temporary, it was...

KL: Provisional?

JO: Provisional or something, to be able to teach. And then if she taught for a certain number of, certain months I guess, they would give her the credential, the credit for student teaching. But she was teaching by herself, PE classes.

KL: Was she still in school when you were born?

JO: No, no, she was finished. I was born three years later. She had as one of her students Mary Kageyama Nomura.

KL: Oh.

JO: And also my aunt Irene was one of her students.

KL: What does Mary remember about her classes? Have you talked about that?

JO: She says she enjoyed her classes because she liked drawing, and my mother would assign them drawing different parts of the body, the organs and stuff, and she was good at drawing, and so she got an A. She's very artistic, you know, Mary is.

KL: So she was teaching them anatomy to some extent.

JO: Yeah. Well, she taught health, PE and health. But her health exams were really hard. In fact, my aunt did not do very well with the exams, and so she got a B instead of an A. Mary got the A.

KL: Did your mom talk with you at all about her pregnancy with you or where you were born?

JO: No, she didn't talk about the pregnancy so much, but I was born at Good Samaritan Hospital. I don't know if she might have had a difficult time, she didn't really say.

KL: But Good Samaritan Hospital.

JO: Uh-huh.

KL: And then do you remember your sister being born or coming home from... was she born in the hospital, too?

JO: Yeah, she was born at Queen of Angels Hospital. And I remember when... well, you know, they kept us... I was at my, I stayed with my grandparents while she was born, for a little bit. I was not too happy because I was the only child for a long time and I got all this attention. So used to look at pictures of me when I was young with my sister, I was not smiling but my sister was happy. [Laughs]

KL: She's three years younger than you, is that right?

JO: Three and a half years younger.

KL: Okay.

JO: So there I was, very unhappy. And this intruder coming in and getting my space.

KL: Do you have memories from before her birth?

JO: Not really too much, other than I remember my aunt, I used go to play at my grandmother's house with my aunts. And Irene would play with me.

KL: Yeah, it's good being the first and only grandchild or niece and nephew or whatever.

JO: And they all thought I was a plaything, so it was always fun. I think things changed after she came. But I don't think it changed all that much, it's just my perception at that time, apparently. I was still able to do more than she was, that's for sure.

KL: But she was a pretty happy kid?

JO: Yeah, she was always happy, and she was always, she was always very aggressive, so she would fight with me later on, anyway, hit me, twist my nose.

KL: It was a sad day, having a younger brother, the day that he was bigger than me was kind of a sad day. [Laughs]

<Begin Segment 6>

KL: What do you remember about the house that you lived in in Los Angeles?

JO: It was a nice little house. I think the house, I remember the address, it was 2958 East Second Street, and it's up the hill. And at the bottom of the hill was Evergreen Baptist Church, and I used to go to pre-K, nursery school there. And I used to also go to Sunday service.

KL: Did your dad maintain anything of Buddhist traditional practice?

JO: No. In fact, the whole family was Christian, Methodist. The grandparents were Methodist.

KL: But you went to Baptist services?

JO: Well, that was only at that time. In camp I went to Christian church, reluctantly, but I went. And let's see... so the house was, I shared a bedroom with my sister, and my parents had a bedroom, I think. So it must have been a two-bedroom house. But the interesting thing about this house that I remember was it had a room in the back that was sort of like a porch, covered area, but it was our toy room. We had all kinds of toys back there, and it was fun to play there. And that's what I remember, and then a small backyard. But it was a rental, so it was not our own house.

KL: Is that the only house that you lived in before going to Manzanar?

JO: It's the only house I remember. I may have lived elsewhere, but I don't remember. When I was first born they were living in a smaller unit. And when my sister came, maybe that's when we moved there, I don't really know. But that's all I remember.

KL: It was up a hill, you said? What else do you remember about the neighborhood?

JO: It was just a lot of little houses. And it wasn't all Japanese, it was mixed, I think.

KL: Who else, what other groups lived there, people from other groups?

JO: Our next door neighbor though was Japanese, I remember that. And they helped to store some of our things in their garage, in their basement. We didn't have a basement in our house, but our house was a rental. They owned their own house, so we stored some things in the basement of their house, and that's where I stored my toys. And when we came back after the war, and this is of course in 1952 or later, went back to the house to see our things, and they were all ruined from the...

KL: Yeah, ten years later.

JO: Yeah, moisture and everything.

KL: Do you know your neighbors' names?

JO: Yes, they were the Ikedas, but I don't know the parents' names. And I think it was Ikeda. And then later on, I met a friend whose husband's brother married one of the daughters. So her name was Mutsuko Ikeda, and now it's Mutsuko Okada.

KL: How funny. Who were your other neighbors?

JO: I don't remember any of the other neighbors. I don't think we were friendly with them. They may not have been Japanese. You know, it's funny, but in those days, it seems like that's the only friends that they associated with, were Japanese. Like my mother and her friends were all friends from her college days, and they were all Japanese.

KL: But your parents' primary... did they use English as their primary language?

JO: Yes. They didn't speak Japanese at home. So that's why, consequently, I can't speak it at all. Yeah, and my father, even my father's friends were from his college days. And a lot of them were my mother's friends from her college days. And that was... see, now I don't know too much about the social activity, because right during that time they were all, my father was busy working seven days a week, like probably eighteen hours a day. He was helping my grandfather in the store, and my grandfather made him work all the time, so they didn't have much of a social life.

KL: Was Evergreen Baptist predominately Japanese American?

JO: Yes, it was predominately Japanese.

KL: Did you guys celebrate, did you have favorite holidays or do anything in particular for birthdays that you remember?

JO: For my birthday, it was July, I never had a party. Never had a... I don't remember one single birthday party, because it was always July, school was out, and we never had a party. Christmas, we celebrated Christmas with Christmas decorations and presents. But we were not very wealthy, so we were... anyway, I think we were not that wealthy because my father worked for father-in-law, and he didn't get paid that much, I don't think.

KL: Oh, that's right, he worked in your grandparents' store.

JO: Yeah. Don't think he got paid very much, so whatever the going rate was for slave labor. [Laughs] I say that.

KL: Did he like it?

JO: My grandfather?

KL: Your father.

JO: My father. Well, he... because he couldn't get a job because of prejudice and even though he was an architect, he couldn't get a license because you had to work as an intern for an architect for so many years before you could qualify for a license. He was never able to do that because nobody would hire him. So anyway, he just, when he first graduated college, he worked as a florist delivery man, because he worked for San Lorenzo Nursery, that was all Japanese.

KL: Do you think he was disappointed by the way things turned out, or do you think he just went on?

JO: Well, I have to tell you this story. He got the job working with my grandfather until after... went to camp, when he went to camp he went to New York. He went to New York to look for work, and I guess he had in his mind all along that he wanted to leave camp, but he had no money, so he went to work to pick potatoes and thought, I think he thought he would get more money that way, but I think they paid him the same wage, he couldn't get paid that much more. So he went to New York to look for work, and he got a job, he got hired as a draftsman with American Brake Shoe, so this was a national company. And they used to make brake shoe switches, brake switches for railroads. Railroads were big in those days. And so he got the job, but the job was in Chicago, so they moved him to Chicago, they gave him fare to go to Chicago, because he didn't have any money. Twenty-five dollars plus a one-way ticket doesn't take you very much anywhere after having to feed yourself for so long. Now, he did have a friend in New York, and he stayed, I think he stayed at the Y there also. So then he went to Chicago, and went to work as a draftsman, and he did this until he got transferred to Los Angeles, and he went to work in Los Angeles. And when he went to work in Los Angeles, he met up with a friend who also went to architect school, and this friend was working for the Department of Water and Power, and said, "I can get you a job with the Department of Water and Power in architecture work, but you have to take an exam and qualify." So he did, and he qualified, and they offered him the job. And according to what I heard, my mother didn't want him to take the job because it would mean that he would have to take a step back in pay. But he really wanted to do it, because it was in his line of work. But he didn't do that. Come (1999), he's laying in his death bed, and I know he's not going to last too much longer. He says, "You know, my deepest regret is that I didn't go do that work." That made me cry. It was very sad to think that all this time, he could have done that work, and he could have gone on, you know, and made a lot more money, but he was stuck in this draftsman job at this railroad company. It was very sad. And especially to tell me that on his death bed.

KL: You were close to your parents.

JO: Yes, well, I was especially fond of my father; he was so kind to me.

<Begin Segment 7>

KL: I didn't say this on the first one, but I should have. This is tape two of a continuing interview with Joyce Okazaki on June 20, 2012. So I wanted to ask you, we left off talking about your dad, but I wanted to ask you about the Maryknoll community, too, and how you became involved in Maryknoll, and what your school was like.

JO: Well, I went to Maryknoll from first grade, and just part of second grade, because, of course, World War II started and we had to leave. I really don't know why I was going to Maryknoll, but I understood from my mother that she would tell the bus driver -- because the bus would pick me up in the morning to go to school, otherwise I would have had to walk to school -- so the bus picked me up in the morning, and in the afternoon, she would tell the bus driver whether I was to be dropped off back at home or to be dropped off at the store, because the store was on Main Street, very close to Little Tokyo, very close to where Maryknoll was. But I didn't know that then, I had no idea where things were. So that was the only reason, I think, why I went. But also I know that they taught Japanese there, so I had my first lessons in Japanese. That was in first grade and then part of second grade.

KL: That was just part of the curriculum, the daily lessons was in Japanese?

JO: Yes, at Maryknoll. And in those days, if the children went to public school, they usually had to go to Japanese school either after school or on the weekends. And so I didn't do that, I just went to Maryknoll. I have a feeling that that's one of the reasons why my mom sent me there, but the other reason was for the convenience of the bus.

KL: Was it a separate language class, or was it just some instruction in English and some in Japanese?

JO: Well, it was a separate Japanese class. The main, all the classes, all the school day was in English except for one period, I guess, or half hour or whatever, when we learned Japanese, how to write and how to read.

KL: Do you remember your classrooms there?

JO: Not really, it was so long ago. But like I said, I only remember this one boy. He came to the class in second grade, and he didn't know any English, and so I was assigned to be one of his tutors in reading, and we would rotate. And so I did that. Go to Manzanar, and who is in my class in third grade? The same kid. This was third grade, you know, we left second grade. I didn't finish second grade, I wanted to move on to third grade, but there he was. Okay, I had to... then we go on from Manzanar.