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KL: Backing up a little bit before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entering the war, you mentioned a bull in Placer County that you walked by and stuff. For those of us who are too young to have been there or haven't read much about that part of the state, what was Placer County like, what kind of work did people do who lived there?

SK: Okay, well, Placer County... let's see. There were Portuguese families that I know of, and, of course, the white population. I don't know where they came from originally. So it was rural of course, orchards, pears, plums, peaches. At one time, Placer County was 30 acres of pears and orchards, not any more. It's being, you know, apparently the economics, college teacher said that this is going to be a bedroom community one of these days, that was in Auburn. Well, that's coming true. But it is kind of reviving itself. The mandarins are good from there, mandarin orchards. But my brother took us by the ranch, 20 acre ranch we lived on, our orchard, and we had pears and plums and oranges, not commercial, for home use, and persimmons, again, for home use, although it became commercial. But anyway, all that is gone, all of it is gone, and they're building million dollar homes and they're making it a gated community. And the only thing they couldn't get rid of -- and I chortled about this -- is a bamboo patch. They attempted to get rid of it, but it's coming back. And I saw that and I said, "Good." [Laughs]

KL: Was that your family's?

SK: Oh, I remember that bamboo because I remember having to go and get the bamboo. Oh, yeah, I remember that.

KL: What was it for?

SK: The bamboo patch? Well, you know, you could eat bamboo shoots. And we had bamboo shoots in sukiyaki, rice or whatever, you know. In fact, my brother has some bamboo, so this trip, I was up there recently, and he gave me some bamboo. In fact, we're having it tonight.

KL: That's night.

SK: Fresh bamboo.

KL: Oh, that's really neat. I've never eaten it, I'll have to try it sometime.

SK: You've never eaten bamboo period? Oh, that's interesting.

KL: No, I think of it as like a hedge or decorative or division. So were your folks then working that orchard, that's what they were doing for work there?

SK: Uh-huh, tenant farmers, of course, because they weren't allowed to own land. That's when the war broke out, we went from there to Arboga first and then from there to Tule Lake.

KL: What caused the move to Newcastle?

SK: Who knows? Because we moved from Red Bluff to Newcastle.

KL: Okay. So Newcastle is where you had the orchard, where you were working on the orchard and stuff.

SK: Right, right.

KL: Okay. And you mentioned there were Portuguese people and maybe sort of longer term white families who were living there?

SK: Right.

KL: Did people, was it a pretty integrated community or was there a lot of racism?

SK: It's one of the most racist and the most conservative communities in California.

KL: What form did that take for you as a kid or for your parents as adults?

SK: Well, of course we didn't... you know, these, in Japantowns and so forth springing up, it became a matter of necessity because they couldn't shop in these stores because they weren't accepted. And so they had to create their own stores or things like that. So at one point there were about forty Japantowns up and down the coast, and now there's only four. One was created recently in Sawtelle, Los Angeles, but the four being San Francisco, San Jose, and two in Los Angeles.

KL: So there was a little Japantown where you were living that had...

SK: Uh-huh, Penryn.

KL: Could you describe it? What was there?

SK: There was one short street, and then it depends on what area you came in. But anyway, there was a Buddhist church, and a hall, and then there were a barber. And these two grocery stores, Gotos and Mikawa, and... what else was there? That's pretty much what existed. Maybe there was a third grocery store, but my father used to go there, he did the driving, of course, and get his groceries at Gotos. And oh, and in those days, there was this family, a couple who had Japanese movies, and they'd go church to church to show it. And my mother used to get so excited about that. So that was one of the social outlets at the time. And we lived out in the country, so it was hard for us to get in, but we didn't get into town very often. And for us to go, in those days to go to Sacramento was a big treat, you know. And we'd go up to Auburn from where we were.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.