Densho Digital Archive - Art Imagire Interview (denshovh-iart-01-0005)

<Begin Segment 5>

RP: What do you remember growing up in Oakland in terms of your social life? Was it centered mostly on the church or...

AI: Not, not too much. The only thing I remember is I used to have, when I started kindergarten, I had this black girl take me to school and the kids used to tease me about that, having this girl take me to school. And I think maybe that's I got the term, "Little black Sambo," I don't know. But that, you know, that's about all I recall of my childhood. I remember my Christmases, used to get all kinds of nice toys and things I remember. I have some pictures of it and it'd be in, it'd be in the living room in the back of the store. And then we'd have the piano and the Christmas tree, it'd be on top of the piano and the presents would be all lined up around on, on that. Yeah.

RP: Were any traditional Japanese holidays celebrated? Boys Day, Girls Day, or you didn't have any --

AI: Yeah. Boys Day, yeah, my folks had Boys Day dolls and of course they were all burned when December 7th came. We got rid of a lot of, a lot of those artifacts. My brother, my brother was kind of a timid fellow and in order to make my brother more manly, my mother made him take kendo -- if you know what kendo is? It's the sword fighting -- and bought, and bought all that outfit, from the, the headdress and the protective shoulder thing. And that's gone, too, so we got rid of all that. All the Boys Day dolls, they were all gone. The only thing is... and I don't recall how she was able to ever do it, but she, she managed to keep a sword, a Japanese sword. And I later took it to a sword group and the guy valued it for me and said it was forged in the 1600s. He says, "But this is a, they call it a tired blade." And my wife says they had to hone it down so much because my family was so short. But the sword is not very long. So, but anyway, we, that sword showed up and I don't know how she was able to sneak that out.

RP: Oh, interesting.

AI: But you know, we had to give up our cameras.

RP: Right.

AI: Radio. We got 'em, we got 'em back after the war ended. I don't know, about the '50s or something like that and they, when we got the radio back, all the tubes were missing. We did manage to get the old, you know, the old Kodak camera that was the bellows kind. We did get that back and that was still working. Gee, I don't know what happened to that. But that, we had that, I had that for a little while. But anyway...