Densho Digital Archive - George Katagiri Interview (denshovh-kgeorge

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SG: Were your parents, when did your parents come to the United States?

GK: My father originally came in about 1915, and he was a bachelor at the time. And he came, and he worked on the farm, and he was a houseboy. And there's a Katagiri store in New York, and he eventually found a job there. So during World War I, he spent about five years in New York working for the Katagiri store. In 1921, he returned to Japan and married my mother. And they came, both came to Portland, back to Portland in 1921, and this is where they started their life together.

SG: Do you know what brought, why he decided to come to Portland?

GK: It's interesting because most of the original immigrants from Japan were bachelors like my father was, and their intent was to come here and work a couple years and save a lot of money and become rich and then return to Japan. But as it turned out, even though there were a lot of discriminatory laws here in Oregon and in the United States, there was something about living in the United States that was different. I think they recognized that so far as the children are concerned, there are opportunities here. They weren't quite sure what they were, but they kind of sensed that, and so they decided to stay here and raise a family. And actually, they sacrificed a lot so that the children or the Nisei generation could have as many opportunities as they could.

SG: What kind of work did your father do?

GK: Eventually, my father was a salesman for the importing and exporting stores. Originally, he worked for the S-Bon Store in, that was located in Japantown in Northwest Portland, and they went bankrupt in 1923. And so after that, he went to work for the M Furuya Company which is headquartered in Seattle, but they had a branch store in Portland, and he worked there for the rest of the time that he lived in Oregon. My mother, on the other hand, started a small grocery store on the east side of Portland, and she ran that all by herself through all those years up until the war started.

SG: Did she, was it mostly Japanese things that she sold?

GK: No. The only place where there was a concentration of Japanese families was in Japantown or Northwest Portland, and most of the other families were scattered throughout the city, and there may have been two or three other Japanese families in the neighborhood. But the custom, and most of those families ran cleaners, laundries, grocery stores, barber shops, and most of their customers were the neighborhood Caucasian people.

SG: Did you help out at the store?

GK: I remember helping out when I became of age. It was a small grocery store, so the inventory didn't move that quickly. But when I got home, I'd take my wagon and go down the wholesale house and buy a dozen cans of Campbell's chicken soup and load up and restock the store with my little wagon, and I assume I was helpful that way. One of the uniquenesses about growing up in Portland was that we went to school every day to the public school, and the public school would end about three-thirty in the afternoon. And whether it was raining or shining, we had, I had to walk from Southeast Portland all the way down to the Hawthorne Bridge and walk across the Hawthorne Bridge to the Japanese school that was located on about First and Market Street. And rain or shine, we made this walk, and I developed strong legs along the way. And my first objective of going to Japanese school was not to learn Japanese, it was mostly to be with my friends and socialize. But we did learn to read and write Japanese and speak it a little bit. And on Saturdays, we had lessons in brush painting or calligraphy, and so it did some good, and I did that for eight years. And with that background, later on, it qualified me to get into the special Military Language Intelligence School as a soldier because of that background.

SG: So you were going to both English and Japanese school five days a week?

GK: Five days a week and Saturday morning, and this continued on through the high school years. So I still lived in Portland for two years before the war started, and I was attending Washington High School by that time. So you find that most of the Nisei kids who went to public school didn't get a chance to go out for sports or intermural or extracurricular activities because they had to go to Japanese school. So, but the Japanese community was close-knit. And in spite of the fact that most of my friends were, were Caucasian in the public school and we sat next to each other and played together all day long, the friends that we cherished most were those that we met in Japanese school because it was with those friends that we formed our basketball league and our Boy Scout troops and our judo, our judo training program and so on. And as it turned out, those are the ones that we had most of our lifetime friendships with.

SG: Did you ever have a difficult time going to the public schools in terms of discrimination from both the students and the teachers?

GK: I know some of my friends did. At one time or another, they'd be called a "Jap" or they'd be told to, "Go back where you came from," and things like that. But at the school I went to, I never encountered that either in the elementary school or in the high school. Maybe it was just my, I may have had, looked like a fighter or something like that, but no one bothered me in that respect.