<Begin Segment 1>

SG: So I'll just first start off asking your name.

GK: My name is George Katagiri.

SG: And tell me when and where you were born?

GK: I was born in Portland, Oregon, way back in 1926, on Southwest Broadway. That's about a half block from Portland State University, and I lived there in a big old house for about five years. And at the end of five years, my mother, I had two older sisters. And at the end of five years, my mother took the three of us to Japan, and I think she was trying to find out whether it would be wise to leave me there to become educated in Japan. But once we got there, I think she quickly found out that I was too Americanized, and I was not suitable for, to be raised in Japan, so we just stayed there four months with my grandmother in Nagano-ken. And the most memorable experience, not a good one, was at my grandmother's house when I went to watch the Japanese kids walk by the house on the road to school, and so I was out standing in front of my grandmother's house. And as the children passed, they pointed to me and said, "American, American, American." It was in a derogatory way. So, and I felt it as a five year old kid, so I developed the feeling that this isn't a place that I like. And so when we got back, it's the kind of feeling I had for all those growing up years that, I just, there's something about Japan that I didn't like. But the second time I went, I went as a soldier in the occupation army. And this time, I was kind of the conqueror. And when I went back to my grandmother's hometown, people would get out of the way when we came down the street. They would actually stand on the side of the road because not too many GIs would visit the country town that I was from, and so it was kind of a different story. And so my attitude changed a little bit that, here, this time as a nineteen year old conqueror, they respected my presence, and so that kind of equalized things. But anyhow, going back to my, the five year old visit, we got back to Portland, and we moved from Southwest Portland to Southeast Portland. And so I started school, elementary school in Southeast Portland at Abernathy Elementary School which is on about Twelfth and Division. And my two older sisters were also there, and so we were the only Japanese family attending Abernathy School. And when they were in the seventh and eighth grades and graduated, I was the only Japanese boy left in the school for about a year. And then finally when I was in the eighth grade, a second Japanese boy enrolled in Abernathy School. But I grew up with mostly Caucasian friends and Italian friends and Chinese friends that occupied most of Ladd's Addition in Southeast Portland.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

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.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

SG: Can you describe what your relationship was like with your parents growing up?

GK: It was an interesting one because I kind of look back at the Nisei generation, that's our second generation, and so our parents were Japanese-speaking immigrants from Japan, and so they knew Japanese, and their parents, their children that went to the public schools learned English very quickly. And because they learned English so quickly, this is the reason why most of the Japanese community started these Japanese schools so that they would be sure that their children would develop Japanese language skills at the same time. But so far as the parent generation and the Nisei generation are concerned, there was a communication barrier there. We could speak to each other and talk about well, how do you feel, what did you do today, and how are you and this kind of thing. But when it came to, well, what do you feel about Japan going to war with the United States, or how do you explain the operation of cylinder engine or anything technical, we never broached those kinds of subjects because neither generation had the vocabulary. And so our conversations were limited to kind of superficial things about our lives. And so I regard the Niseis as being kind of a transitional generation so far as from the old world to the new. And so there are a lot of things that I never knew about my parents because of that.

SG: Do you think it was difficult for your parents as well?

GK: Yeah. I think for the important things, we communicated well. They didn't have to tell me they loved me, you know. I knew they loved me, and I knew they would sacrifice anything for me and their concern with my health and things like that. And so a lot of things didn't have to be said, but, and a lot of things went unsaid, but they were understood. Like growing up, for example, they never told me you had to go to college, but I knew intuitively that my destiny was that I was going to some four-year university or college someplace whether I wanted to or not. And it was something that was communicated by some means, mostly from my mother. [Laughs]

SG: Did you, would you often help your parents out in terms of being the go-between for speaking or translating English?

GK: In those cases, my older sisters usually filled in that role, took that role. My older sister was three years older than I, and the second sister was two years older than I am. So whenever something like that was required, they stepped in. They were the liaison between whatever English they needed to understand.

SG: Did you ever have a chance to meet your grandparents?

GK: Yeah. When I was five, I met my grandmother, and I distinctly remember what she look like. And I also remember that she had a very cranky sister, and, but my grandfather had passed away by then because my father was the youngest of ten children. And so by the time I was born, I met people who were as old as my father who were my cousins rather than my uncles, and it was very confusing for me when I was over there. But I did meet my grandmother and some of her sisters and some of my father's cousins who were older than he was. It was very interesting.

SG: How do you think it might have affected you not having grown up with grandparents, you and maybe other Nisei kids?

GK: Well, not having grown up with them, I didn't miss them. Well, most Nisei kids did not grow up with their grandparents. Their parents were the immigrants that came to the United States, most of them between 1910 and 1930. And it was a rather strong point with the mothers that immigrated because many of them I'm sure immigrated because they knew that if they came to America, there would be no mother-in-laws, and it was a good motivation for them to come and because they did actually come to a very strange place, you know. I don't think they realized how hostile the environment could be. But so long as there were no mother-in-laws, it was motivation enough for them to say, "Sure, I'll go."

SG: What was the, your role of your mother and father in the household?

GK: In my household or in our household, I think my mother was the more dominant figure. She had more education. Most of the Issei men who immigrated may have finished high school, and then they immigrated to the United States. But a lot of the women had a chance to finish high school and take advance training in something. My mother went on and became a midwife, so she worked in the hospital for a couple of years. She served for two years in Manchuria before she immigrated to the United States. And besides, my father was working eight or ten hours a day, six days a week, and we seldom saw him, and we were with our mother most of the time. So she was the one who told us most of the stories and gave us most of the guidance during the growing up years.

SG: What kind of stories did your mom tell you?

GK: Oh, they told us stories of the brave samurai and stories of that type. Usually they had morals to it, and there's certain kinds of moral issues that they emphasized like don't lose, you know. If you try something, do your best and try not to lose. And if you meet with adversity, stick it out, and don't give up. And if there are things that you can't help, grin and bear it, shikata ga nai, and things of that type. Those things were instilled, I think, in most families on to the Nisei generations.

SG: Did your parents ever talk about their feelings about the United States and Japan?

GK: Well, of course the immigrant generation were not allowed to become nationalized citizens of the United States, and so they had no choice but to look to Japan as their homeland. And so I think like my parents, most of the Issei generation accepted Japan as their homeland, and they believed in the emperor, and there's no question in their mind that they had to stick with the emperor. They never tried to instill anything onto us. We did go to some of the community meetings, and you know, somebody got up and said banzai or Tennoheika, banzai. And we thought that was a fun thing to say and do, and so we jumped up and put up our hands and said, Tennoheika, banzai. We didn't know what we were saying, but that was the extent of it. If you asked us to sing the Star Spangled Banner, the Pledge of Allegiance, we can do that at the drop of a dime. And we heard the Japanese anthem quite often. But if you asked us what we were saying, we wouldn't have the slightest idea what the words meant. So it was, but it's funny. Like a few months ago, they were having the Little League World Series down in Florida. And so there was this little league Japanese team that came from Japan, and they were playing off with the Florida team, that's Team U.S.A. And here were these young kids playing baseball for the championship, and I find myself rooting for the Japan team. And I asked myself, well, how come you're doing that, you know. And my answer is, I don't know, but there's something about my legacy that I have sympathy towards things Japanese. Now if the U.S. team were playing Russia or something, I'd be rooting for the United States. But it was odd that I found myself rooting for the Japanese team, which won incidentally.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

SG: Do you think your, the experiences your parents had being the first generation affected what they wanted to give their kids, or how they raised you?

GK: Well, their, I can see now that they're gone. And when I look back that they worked hard, and their opportunities were limited, you know. They didn't have a chance to go to college or, of course, because of the language skills and other reasons. And they worked hard. And most of the reasons why they worked was to give us the opportunity, their children, and so they did their best in that. And of course, when the war came by, those opportunities went down the tube too because no matter how, they could barely eke out a living for themselves. And at least during the war, most of their kids that had to go to school had to do it mostly on their own. And it was a good thing that there was, for me, that there was a GI Bill, and I was able to take advantage of that.

SG: So it, for them it was important for, really, for education, they really instilled that?

GK: Yeah. Of course, a lot of things happened during those years, the war started. The war started, and I'm a sophomore in high school here in Portland, and I'm in a complete dilemma because I knew I had a Japanese face. I was going to high school where most of the students were Caucasian. Nobody said anything to me or made fun of me. But within my own mind, I knew that I was different. And in fact, I knew I was different because many of our friends said less to me than they normally would have. They just didn't know what to say to me. So I dropped out of school after Pearl Harbor and sat at home for about a week, waiting for something to happen, and nothing happened. And I thought to myself, my gosh, this is December and January, and we don't know what's going to happen. If I just sit here at home doing nothing, I'm going to lose my credits. So I reenrolled in high school and finished out the term and was able to get my credits. But it was a very unsettling time, you know.

And then of course, evacuation came along, and we had to get rid of all of our furniture and pot and pans and personal belongings because we could only take what we could carry. And on, in the early May of 1942, we moved into the Portland Assembly Center which was a big building north of, in North Portland. And as a family of five, we were assigned a little cubicle, and the cubicle was large enough for five cots, one for each member of the family, and so that was our home. The cubicle didn't even have a door. It just had a piece of canvas that was the entryway to the cubicle from the hall. And it was a strange life. But I was fifteen at the time and a Boy Scout, and camping was, my forte. I enjoyed camping. And so when we had to sleep on a straw mattress, it didn't bother me. And when I had to sleep on a cot, that didn't bother me. And there was nothing to do in this little cubicle. So in the morning, we just got up and said, "Hi Ma, hi Pa, and hi Sis, good-bye," and I was out of there. And of course I was out of there, and then we, all of our friends got together. And so we got together, and we stayed in line and had breakfast together. And after breakfast, all of the friends went out and played baseball together, and we horsed around together, and we found creative things to do together all day and all evening, and we weren't having such a bad time, you know. Not only that, there's so many young, young girls our own age that we could look at. And so it was not a nice place to live. But for a young fellow, we were, I was having not such a bad time. Until one day, it got pretty hot, and the assembly center is a large building. And when the sun beats down on the roof, it gets like an oven inside. And I thought, well, I'll go outside and cool off in the shade. So I went outside of the building on the north side of the building which is the shady side. And on the north side, there's a street that goes right next to the building. And so I was sitting there on the ground with, leaning against the building and kind of enjoying the shade and the coolness, and somebody hollered, "Hey, George." And I looked up, and there's a car going along the road, and from the back window of the car was my old friend Evan. And Evan and I went to elementary school for eight years together, every single day. And all I had time to say was, "Hi, Evan," and the car had rolled down the road. Then at that instant, my eyes focused on the barbed wire fence between us. And for the first time, this kind of happy-go-lucky kid kind of sobered up and wondered, there's something cockeyed going on here. There's Evan who I grew up with, here's me, and there's that barbed wire fence. Why? And I, for the first time, I started to ask some questions. So the funness kind of went out the window after that instance. And if you ask me now, What did your mother and father do?" I knew what I did, and my answer would be I don't know, you know. I never sat down and asked them. Here, I said, "I played ball all day." What did you do? We never got a chance to ask each other. And even years after following that, I never thought to ask them that question, and now they're gone. And so I'm counting, I'm translating my mother's diaries, and I'm hoping I can find some of those answers there.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

SG: You had mentioned that when your family was forced to evacuate, you could only take what you carried. Do you remember what items you and your family took?

GK: I haven't the slightest idea. I can't remember. There were some bags and old suitcases and bags, and I know there was a toothbrush in there someplace. But beyond that, there was some bedding that we had to take and some eating utensils, but I can't remember specifically the items that we took. There were shirts and underclothes and things like that.

SG: Do you remember your feelings and feelings maybe of your family at that time?

GK: Well, it was, everybody was in a dilemma, you know. We knew we were going to this strange place. We had no idea what it was going to be like. But once we were there, we adapted, and we didn't know for how long. Or actually, we never answered the question, why, why is this happening to us? And the answer that we kept coming up with, we're American citizens and our rights are guaranteed by the Constitution, and so how can all this happen? And those answers were never clear. They became clear years later when we looked into the reasons why all of these happened. And, but at that time, it was a real dilemma and, especially for the families whose fathers were picked up by the FBI right after Pearl Harbor of the, FBI picked up the fathers of many of the families around town. And I know we were on the telephone most of the day, trying to find out whose father was picked up. But if any time we asked the question, well, why was he picked up, no answer, or where did they take him, they didn't know, or when was he coming back, they didn't know. They just seemed to disappear. And if you think about how the families felt, how the children felt and how the mothers felt, it was a real trying time for many, many families.

I know Pearl Harbor was on a Sunday. And so the day after Pearl Harbor, my dad had to go down to his work in Japantown to his importing/exporting business where his responsibility was the vegetables, the fruits and vegetables, the grocery section. And he called on Monday, and he said, "Well, the FBI are here, and they said that we won't be coming home tonight. We have to sleep in the store." And I thought, oh, gee, that's a rough place to sleep. What are the guys going to eat, apples and bananas and things like that. And we thought, well, it can't be helped. Many of the parents are being picked up and taken away. And then he called the next day and says, "Well, they say we have to stay for another day," and this went on for three days. And finally on the third day, they let him come home, so he came home. He still wasn't sure whether they were going to pick him up later. So once he got home, he grabbed his suitcase, and he threw some of his shirts and clothing in there, and that suitcase was right by the door ready to just pick up and go if they came after him. But he may have been disappointed because they never did come after him. Of course, we were happy because we stayed together as a family unit when we went to the assembly center and to, eventually to the internment camp.

SG: You must have been, you and your family must have been worried and scared.

GK: Well, yeah, mostly because we just didn't know what was going to happen to us. Were they going to shoot us, or are they going to send us all to Japan, and we can't even speak Japanese properly. And all we knew is we're losing all of our inventory, all of the assets that my parents worked for, for twenty years had to be gotten rid of. Most Japanese families didn't own property because the alien land law, and so they had, they couldn't hold onto their property. They just had to take everything that was in their property and dump it someplace or sell it or give it away and take off. So it was really an unsettling time, but it was surprising. We got to the assembly center, and here, we're all living in these trying conditions, this great big building. And all of a sudden, which used to hold horses and sheep and cows, now became a little city of over 3000 people, and they had to feed all 3000 people three times a day. So the assembly center became a little city within a few days. And most of it was under the control of the evacuees, and so everybody chipped in and made the best of it. Again, they stuck it out, did their best, shrugged their shoulders and said it can't be helped. This is the way it is. Right or wrong, this is the way it is. They all pitched in. So when you look at the pictures of the assembly center, you don't find a lot of sadness or despair, you know. People are smiling. People are doing their best at whatever task that they're assigned to. It's amazing. I'm proud of the ethnic group.

SG: What did, how did your parents, what did they do with their property?

GK: Well, my mother was running this grocery store. Of course, she couldn't own the store itself. She just owned the inventory. And as soon as word came out that we had to get rid of the inventory and everything, people came around to the stores, trying to buy it for a penny, and it became very distressing. So we had all these counters as well as the inventory and the coolers and all of that stuff. They finally sold it for a song to one of our best customers rather than sell it to these people who were trying to buy it for nothing. And that's how, then most of our pots and pans and furniture, I think it all went up to the Goodwill or to friends or the garbage. But we managed to get rid of a lot of the things. Some of the things, we had some valuable, for instance, dolls. They had these little Japanese dolls or dolls of samurai on horses and spearing tigers, quite valuable. And we found a place to store them, and they all disappeared during the war. So when we came back, we couldn't retrieve any of them, but that's the way it was.

SG: Was there something of value to yourself that you had to leave behind?

GK: Well, yeah. The year before, I delivered newspapers, the Japanese newspaper for three months and made ten dollars a month. So I ended up the summer with thirty dollars, and I wanted this bicycle so bad that my dad chipped in an additional eight dollars, and I went out and bought a thirty-eight dollar Columbia bicycle, a beautiful bicycle with front wheel brakes and balloon tires. And with that bicycle, for a whole year, I was able to travel from Southeast Portland to Japantown in Northwest Portland in a matter of minutes, and it was the greatest thing I ever owned. So I could go see my friends very easily and quickly with this bicycle. And just after owning it for a year, I had to sell it all of a sudden, and I missed my bicycle. And so eventually, when we got our redress payments of twenty thousand dollars, I think back, and I think well, George, what did you lose? And I think I lost my bicycle, and I got twenty thousand dollars for it. [Laughs]

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

SG: So how long were you in the assembly center?

GK: The assembly center actually operated for over four months, from May through the early part of September because it took them that long for the permanent desert camps to be built. And so most of the people in the assembly center were moved from the assembly center in the early part of September, and most of the people in Portland went from the Portland Assembly Center to Minidoka, Idaho. And I mentioned early on that my mother was a nurse when she was, after she graduated high school in Japan, and she served in Manchuria. And evidently, that was on her record. And so when we got to the assembly center, they needed medical personnel in Tule Lake, and so they picked our family to go to Tule Lake. They picked about four or five families. Out of all the families in the assembly center, they picked four or five families, and it must have been because of her medical record. They needed nurses in Tule Lake. But here's an Issei woman who can't speak English and who's never practiced nursing in the United States, although she was a midwife for several years. And for that reason, we were only in the Portland Assembly Center for over a month, and we were shipped down to Tule Lake. And that must have been the reason because we were housed in the block that housed all of the dentists and the doctors and the nurses in Tule Lake. So there I was, one of the few people from Portland, you know. All my friends remained in the Portland Assembly Center and went on to Minidoka, Idaho. So I end up in Tule Lake not knowing anybody. And eventually, another girl that I happened to know from Portland moved to Tule Lake, and she was the only friend I had in Tule Lake.

And there are a lot... not a lot. Most of the people in Tule Lake came from California, and other groups came from Oregon and Washington. But the California kids were there first, and they had seemed to have a chip on their shoulder. So I get there, and I feel like here I am all by myself, walking around, and here are these California kids. They've got sleeked down hair and wearing jeans, and they're riding around in trucks. And for some unknown reason, they compose these songs, very derogatory songs about any kid from Oregon or Washington, you know. They're going to beat their blocks off or something like that. And so initially, I thought, "What am I getting into?" you know. I want out of this place. And once the high school started, it turned out that most of it was all bark and no bite because when I got into the classes, I could speak English better than most of those kids could. And just the fact that I seemed to be more literate in the English language, I gained respect, and nobody tried to push me around.

But those first few weeks had me concerned. But Tule Lake was not a nice place to... but it was better than the assembly center. It's composed of hundreds of barracks, hundreds of barracks, and they were divided into blocks, and each block had about fourteen barracks, and one larger building for each block was the mess hall, and they had two rows of about seven barracks. And in the center of those rows were extra buildings for the latrine and the showers and the laundry and things of this type. So we moved into, the barracks were approximately 20 feet by 100 feet and divided into four or five or six apartments of different sizes, and we got, our family of five got an end apartment. And so when we moved in there with our belongings, all there was was five army cots, a potbellied stove, and a lightbulb from the ceiling. And if you wanted to sit down, you sat on the floor. And so immediately, they had kept the scrap lumber from building all the barracks in the camp, and we could go to these lumber piles that measured 30, 40 feet high and grab lumber. And they had saws and tools, and so everybody had to build their chairs and tables and bookcases and knickknack shelves and closets and screens to separate the bedroom area from the living room area. And there was no water. So with that one lightbulb, we had to make a lot of adjustments. And of course, it was very inconvenient to use the latrine or the washroom or anything else. And when you keep in mind that most of these camps were in the deserts, the deserts became very cold in the wintertime and very hot in the summertime, and Tule Lake was an old lake bed. And in the summertime, I swear the temperature got up to 120 degrees, and it was 120 degrees in the barrack as well as out of the barrack. And it was very dusty, so there were dust storms frequently. And the dust came in through, the barracks weren't built very nicely. The dust came in through the cracks, around the doors, and around the windows. Everything got covered with dust. And I remember talking to other kids with mud forming around their lips and their eyelids, and you know, it was a little amusing, but it just shows how awful the place was. In the wintertime, it was freezing. You go to the latrine and the showers. And by the time you got back to your apartment, your hair was freezing, you know. It was frozen with icicles, and that's the way it was.

And we formed a high school there, and everything had to be organized. In Tule Lake, we named it the Tri-State High School naturally because we had kids from Oregon, Washington, and California. And it started out in, a couple of blocks were set aside for the high school, but there were no desks, no textbooks to start with, and, but everybody chipped in and did the best they could, and I really respected the teachers. Many of the teachers came from the internees. The engineers became your physics instructor or your math instructor. And there were a lot of internees that had completed a year of college English, and so they taught English and composition and so on. And there were a lot of volunteers from outside, the Caucasians. And these are the people I really respected because they came from someplace, and they had a special place to live right on the outskirts of the camp. But still, they had to live, next to the camp for a year or whatever it was, and many of them came from the Friends Church. And so I think many of us since then had very warm feelings toward people who were members of the Friends Church because we know that they, they showed by their actions, their feelings toward the Japanese Americans.

But it was not the best place. But if you wanted to see the good parts of the camp, you could. You can get up early in the morning and see the sunrise, and it's beautiful, just beautiful, the cold morning sunrise with the pink tinge on the clouds. Then a few miles away were the Tule Lake beds that housed millions of migrating birds. And when the hunters were out there, you can see this black cloud rise from the horizon of just millions of birds. That was a very beautiful sight. And Tule Lake, we had next to Tule Lake was a Castle Mountain or Castle Rock. And in the wintertime, I don't know where but somebody got a hold of a toboggan. So a bunch of us went out there, and we had more fun sliding down Castle Rock on this toboggan. Then on the opposite side of Castle Rock was this Abalone Mountain, and it was appropriately named Abalone because it look just like an abalone. And so, there are good things about the camp. We, I remember going out and picking potatoes for the ranchers nearby, and we made extra money by doing that. So again, camp life, played a lot of touch football and a lot of baseball. And again, camp turned out to be what you made it. And as I read the diaries of some of the Isseis, once again, I think many of the diaries of the women were quite positive, and they were adjusting well. But when you read the diaries of the men, I read the diary of one man, and he always started out the entry of each day by saying, today, the weather was, sunny or cold or rainy or whatever, or, and then he'd say, well, it's just like the weather back home. In one or two sentences, he'd talk about the weather. And then the next sentence, he would say, "Another boring day," and that's the entry, day after day, "another boring day." And I think this kind of sums it up how many of the Issei men who were used to working so hard how they reacted to internment.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

GK: But there's this whole other chapter that came along at that time. Like right after Pearl Harbor... well, yeah. Right after Pearl Harbor, there were a lot of young kids, Nisei kids, seventeen years old that had to register for the draft. And those that registered for the draft, if they were physically fit, they were classified as 1-A, and if their lottery number came up, they went into the army. They wouldn't let them into the navy or the marine corps or the air force. But a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, they got their notices saying, "You're no longer 1-A, you're 4-C," and this meant that they were "enemy aliens." 4-C is the classification for "enemy aliens." So here all these young kids that are regarded as "enemy aliens," they're the enemy, and they're wondering, "What's going on here? I'm the enemy. They won't let me serve in the armed forces." Okay. That's after Pearl Harbor, December, January, 1942. Then by the following fall, they're all in the internment camps. And in the early part of 1943, they get a notice saying, well, Uncle Sam would like you to volunteer for the U.S. Army, and we're going to change your designation from "enemy aliens" to 1-A again, and you can imagine how most of the young guys felt. "My gosh, they got our families in this dump with the barbed wires around us. They want us to volunteer." Well, it's a miracle, but thousands of them volunteered from the camps. And, but they had to find out, by that time, the authorities had decided, "There's really no point in holding all these people in the camps. We should let them go or push them out and let the young kids go to college and let the young men join the service and let the adults find jobs back east." But they decided, well, before we can let them go and do these things, we have to be assured of their loyalty. And so some bright lawyer in the government decided to come up with a questionnaire, the "loyalty questionnaire," and it contained forty-something questions, and two questions determined loyalty, question 27 and 28. Question 27 asked, "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces?" Well, my dad I'm sure said he doesn't care. He's fifty years old. If they want to have him in the armed services of the United States, they can have him. But it's yes or no. And then the question 28 was, "Are you willing to disavow any allegiance to the emperor?" And then my dad was saying, "My gosh, I can't be a citizen of the United States. If I disavow allegiance to the emperor, I'd have no country," and so it was a crazy questionnaire. The young Niseis were saying, "Are you willing to disavow allegiance to the emperor? I never had allegiance to the emperor." They said it's a trick question, you know. Don't answer it. And so there was this confusion over this dumb questionnaire that tried to determine loyalty. But those... so everyone answered it "yes-yes," or "no-no," or "yes-no," or "no-yes." And this is where the term the "no-no" comes. And so the young boys that respond "no-no," were called the "no-no boys" and they were the "disloyals." It didn't matter for what reason, you know. Some of the "no-nos" were disloyal because they wanted to go back to Japan, and others were disloyal, weren't disloyal. They said, "We will serve. You just let our families out of here, and we'll be glad to serve in the army. But so long as they're in this place, we're going to say no." And so there were different reasons for the "no-no boys." But anyhow, about ten percent of the people that were in the ten camps completed the questionnaire as "no-nos." So they decided to take everyone who wanted to go back to Japan or who disavowed, who, didn't want to serve in the army and put them in Tule Lake, and then ninety percent of them could remain in the camps that they were in.

So here I am in Tule Lake, and here all these people are coming that were "no-no" people. And in my mind, a lot of them were troublemakers, you know. They were physically trying to get everybody to sign it "no-no" to the point where they beat up people and called them names and things of this type. And I was only sixteen at the time, but I thought, gosh, I don't want to stay here. It's time for me to get out, and I was just a junior in high school. And at that time, I thought, well now, let's see, next year, I'm going to be a senior, then I'm going to a college. And if I try to enroll in a college with a high school diploma from Tri-State High School, no college is going to recognize it. It's not, wouldn't be an accredited high school. So I thought, well, I'm going to get out and go to a regular high school and get an accredited diploma and then enroll in college. That was a given. So that's when, in the fall of 1943, I, my mother sewed eighty dollars in my watch pocket, so I wouldn't lose it. I don't know where she got eighty dollars. But she got eighty dollars, put it in my watch pocket, sewed it up. And two of us, I can't even remember who I went with, another high school kid. But two of us got on a train someplace and sat there for three days and finally ended up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I got a job as a houseboy. I figured it's the cheapest way to get through high school would be to become a houseboy, get my room and board. And so I got this job with this family as a houseboy, and I enrolled at West High in Minneapolis. And the principal there said, looked at my transcripts and said, "You have to attend school for a full year." At first she said, "You have enough credits to graduate now. You don't have to go on and finish your senior year." And I just told her, "I just need a diploma to get into college." And she said, "Oh, you have enough credits in your transcripts. You don't need to go for another full year." And I says, "Well, that's where I stand." And so lo and behold, she went to the school board of Minneapolis Public Schools and pled my case, and they says, "Give him a diploma after one semester." So they made an exception, and I was able to graduate after one semester, and I took all these rinky dink courses of aeronautics and health and art, and I was able to graduate and eventually enroll at the University of Minnesota.

SG: When you were back at the camps, what did you miss about home?

GK: Well, I never thought about it. That was my home. That was my home. I didn't think of any other home or, I just knew we had no home to go back to, no business to go back to, and I just had to make the best of whatever situation we were in and no turning back. So I missed my friends, you know. We had a good drum and bugle corps, the Boy Scouts did, and they brought all their instruments to Minidoka. But there I was in Tule Lake, all by myself. I kind of missed that, mostly all my friends.

SG: Do you, was the relocation a complete surprise to Japanese Americans, or do you think there were people who were seeing something like that coming?

GK: I don't think anybody saw it coming, but we were in for a lot of surprises. For example, even before we went to the main camps, there were agencies and organizations who were encouraging Nisei students to relocate and enroll in eastern colleges. And these people found the colleges, they made the contacts, and they made the arrangements. So a lot of students got into this relocation program, hundreds of them. And historically, as I look back, it was a very successful program. And these Niseis who benefitted from that program, so many of them became so successful in their adult life that they're continuing the program today. Only the recipients are not Nikkei people, people of Japanese ancestry, they're students of Southeast Asians. And so this year, Portland was asked to administer the program, and they identified a number of Southeast Asians, and they're backing the program, the Niseis are.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

SG: You had mentioned that after, and you went, you decided to go to University of Minnesota?

GK: Yes.

SG: And you worked as a houseboy?

GK: Houseboy.

SG: What was that like?

GK: Oh, okay. I would not let my children do what I did. [Laughs] It's just no fun. I was working for a rather nice family, decent family. My primary responsibility was to take care of a nine year old and a twelve year old boys, and they didn't need taking care of, you know. They were smart kids, and, but someone, they wanted someone to be there when they got home from school, and that was an easy job. So in addition to that, I had to clean the house. I had to shampoo the rugs. I had to do all the yard work. I had to tar the garage roof. And they were business people, and the part I didn't like was they equated every hour that I worked, they gave me thirty-five cents an hour for every hour I worked. So I had to keep track of every minute I worked, you know. And when they ran out of work, the mother wanted me to start the shampooing over again of the rugs. So here I was shampooing this darn rug over and over again just to put in my hours. And if I worked over so many hours, then I'd get spending money, so that wasn't bad. And I didn't eat with the family, and I did the dishes, you know. I just didn't feel like I was part of the family. But it worked out. I survived, I survived, and I didn't have too bad a time.

But later on, I got another job as a houseboy. This is after I was in the service, and that was quite different. I went to the University of Minnesota. So I was working as a houseboy. And then doing all of my studies, I was able to complete two quarters, and then Uncle Sam came after me. "We want you to be in the armed service." So, I said, "Okay. Let me finish the semester, and I'll join up." And so I joined up, and I went into the service in Saint Louis along with a lot of other boys from the Midwestern states, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri and all that. And we were sent to Fort Livingston, Louisiana, and I think there must have been a half dozen Nisei boys in the company, all doing well, and we got along fine. And basic training was as bad as everyone says, but the Niseis got through it probably better than most. We were in pretty good shape to begin with. And then after basic training, the question is, to me was, "Where do you want to go? Do you want to go to the, with the 442nd in Europe, become a replacement, or would you want to go to Military Intelligence Service in Minneapolis or in Saint Paul?" Well, that's where I was drafted from, and my girlfriend was there, so I didn't have trouble deciding that, well, I want to go to Minneapolis. So I was assigned to Fort Snelling, Saint Paul, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I enrolled in the six month language training program. And so I had a good time in Saint Paul with my girlfriend and learning how to speak Japanese.

And I guess I should say fortunately, before we graduated, the war with Japan ended, and, whereas, we would have been prepared to go to the Pacific anyplace where we were assigned, we went right into Tokyo. And when we got to Tokyo, we got rumors that gee, our graduating class is going to be shipped to the Philippines. And I thought, my gosh, I don't want to go to the Philippines. And then I bumped into this lieutenant who I took basic training with, you know. We were both buck privates in the training program. I says, "Al," he was a lieutenant. He went to OCS while I went to MIS. And I said, "Al, if you can get me a job, get me a job." And he had a job where he traveled around Tokyo in a jeep, and he already had an interpreter, a Japanese interpreter. And he got me another job, so he had two interpreters, one American interpreter and one Japanese interpreter. So I spent my, I didn't go to the Philippines with the rest of the group. I was able to stay in Tokyo and meet all my family, my relatives and families. And that was an experience because I was just in Tokyo for a couple days, and a GI from Seattle came in and said, "Are you George Katagiri from Portland?" And I said, "Yeah." And he says, "I met your cousin." And I says, "Where?" And he says, "On the black market." Well, everything was done on the black market at that time. I says, "You know where he lives?" And he says, "Yeah." I says, "Take me to him." So immediately, I was in touch with all my relatives, well, you meet one cousin, you know where all your relatives are. So I had a good time interacting with my cousins in Tokyo. And of course, I had the cigarettes and I had the soap and I had the candy and things of this type. And my parents had a favorite nephew in the country in Nagano-ken, and I kept them up on what was happening. And they said, "Well, find out how Ichiro is doing." So I wrote to my aunt and uncle in Nagano-ken. And they wrote back, and they says, "Well, Ichiro has been in Manchuria for the past so many years and the last we heard, he was trying to escape from the Russians." And I thought, "Oh, gosh. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. But next week, I'll be back, and I'll have some days off, so I'll come out to see you." And the following week, I went out there, and who's standing there but Ichiro. He'd come home that week, and he was telling me, "George, I came back last Wednesday. And when I going back to the village, I hid in the woods. And when it got dark, I snuck home." So he was ashamed to come home alive, and so he hid in the woods until he could sneak home at night. And immediately I got, beginning to understand the Japanese soldier and all that. So here he was all skin and bones, but he made it. And eventually, I met all my relatives, and I was the conduit through which the soaps and the cigarettes and the candies were sent by my folks. By that time, they were in Chicago. And they worshipped my parents for helping them through these lean years because they were starving because I had nephews who spent their time on the upper branches of trees picking out the new buds and ate them right there on the tree because they were so hungry. And so they were praising my parents for all this. And later on, I was thinking, my gosh, my parents just got out of the internment camps. They have no funds, you know. They were sending them everything they had, and that's the way it was.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

SG: What, were you still in touch with your girlfriend back in --

GK: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was a good letter writer. We were sending letters back every day. So some days, I'd get four letters, and the next three days, I'd get none. And we eventually got married. But I kept up that correspondence.

SG: Was she Caucasian?

GK: No, no, no. I took her kid sister out in Tule Lake, so I have to say that I married Betty's older sister. [Laughs] But I was only in Japan for four months because I was really not needed. And so I came back, and now my continue, my story continues about this houseboy thing. I got back to Minneapolis, and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to re-enroll at the University of Minnesota. Where am I going to stay? So I'm at the YMCA. And I happened to know the name of the ironing lady that used to come to, the first place that I was a houseboy at, and her name was Mrs. Peterson. I said, "Mrs. Peterson, I'm back in town. Do you know if anyone who's looking for a houseboy?" And she says, by the way, she says, "Yes." She says, "I just happened to know that there's a doctor who's looking for a houseboy." I says, "Oh, could I have his name and his address and phone number?" And so I called him from the YMCA. And I said, "Well, Doctor Ward, I understand you're looking for a houseboy, and I'm so and so." And he said, "Where are you?" And I said, "Oh, I'm at the YMCA." He said, "I'll be there in twenty minutes." I thought, wow, boy, this was easy. So he comes driving up in twenty minutes. And with my one little duffle bag, I'm in his car, and we go out to his nice home way out at the outskirts of Minneapolis. And as we go in the kitchen, there's a man in there. And he says to the man, "Okay. You can leave now." And I thought to myself, "What's going on?" And the man didn't argue or anything. I think he was happy to leave. [Laughs] But it took him about three minutes to grab his clothes and his bag, and he was out of there. And the minute he stepped out of the kitchen door, Doctor Ward went up to the silver chest and counted the silver. And I thought to myself, "What am I getting into?" you know. We haven't even talked about what I'm supposed to do. Well, okay. Evidently, he was unhappy with the guy that was there, so he hired me without any interview or anything.

And so I moved in, and I learned that I had to do all the cooking now, cooking, all the cleaning, all the yard work, and I had to wash the car every morning. And he was a doctor; he wanted a clean car. This is in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And he said, "The only time you don't have to wash the car is when the sponge freezes to the car." Then I didn't have to wash it. Well, that's a nice break. But it was the cooking part that stymied me. I told him, "Well, I've never cooked in my life." He says, "Don't worry about it," you know. And so there I was, studying chemistry for one hour and studying how to cook for three hours. But, and this was in September. Here comes October and November, and I thought, well, Thanksgiving, he's a bachelor doctor, kind of prominent doctor and surely somebody will invite him out for Thanksgiving. And he comes home, and he says, "George, I've invited a family of five for Thanksgiving dinner." And I said, "Oh." [Laughs] And so there I was studying for weeks before Thanksgiving how to roast a turkey and how to bake a pie and all this stuff. The Thanksgiving comes and I bake this turkey and I bake this turkey and I bake this turkey, and by gosh, this turkey is going to be cooked, you know. So I cooked it and I cooked it, and finally one leg's dropped. I thought to myself, "This turkey is done." And as it turned out, a well done turkey tastes about as good as a medium done turkey. And it turned out all right, you know. The pie was a little uneven. The crust was, part of the crust was thicker than the other part. But okay, I survived. And then here comes, then here comes January. And Doctor Ward said, "Well, every year in January, I go to Arizona to a dude ranch for a full month." And I was, to myself, I was just, elated, whoopee. Boy, I'm going to get rid of this guy for a full month. So come January, he takes off. He's gone for a full month. And he comes back, and the first thing he does is look through the grocery list. And he says, "George, you didn't eat this last month." And I says, "Well, I was by myself, and there's no point in doing a lot of cooking." What he didn't know I was eating all the frozen filet mignons that were in the freezer. So I lived on filet mignons, steaks for a month, and I survived quite well, you know. But, it was not an enjoyable experience. I hated just about every minute of it, but he paid well. On top of my GI Bill, he paid an additional, I think, fifty dollars a month, and that's what I was getting from the GI Bill and get my room and board. So financially, I was doing quite well.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

SG: George, I think we left off with the filet mignon. I was hoping just to go back a little bit to hear more about how being an American soldier in Japan impacted you. What were your thoughts and feelings while you were there and then after you got back?

GK: Of course, the uniform made all the difference in the world. So long as you were wearing your American uniform, no matter where your work went, you were identified very quickly as an American GI, the conqueror. But it was kind of amusing because in the country towns where there aren't too many GIs walking around, if you took your hat off, you're just wearing your khakis, and a lot of Japanese men just wear khakis. And so if you had a Japanese face like I did, it would confuse them. And someone tried to tell them, "Well, this guy's an American GI," people would doubt it. They said, "Oh, you're just kidding me." But generally, we always had our little caps on. So no matter where we went, we were the conquering Americans, and we were treated with respect. It made a difference. It was interesting because when I, once, when I went out to visit my cousin in the country in Nagano-ken, my cousin asked me, "Well, do you want to take a bath, George?" And I said, "Sure." And my concept of a bath is to go someplace where there is a tub, and you fill it with water, hot water, and you take a bath. But in this case in this country community, he rolls out this barrel into a part of the house with a dirt floor, then he builds a fire under the barrel and fills it with water, and the water heats up, and that's going to be your bath. But in the meantime, the community, kids in the community find out that there's an American GI in that house. And so while I'm in the tub there, here comes a group of kids, and they're sitting around this tub while the water is getting hotter and hotter, looking at this head that's sticking out the top of the tub that looks just like their big brother. And I'm not sure what they were thinking, but this is what an American GI look like, just like their big brother. It turned out to be one of the longest baths that I took because I had to wait for those kids to leave. But I remember that well.

A lot of funny things happened because I was at my cousin's house, and of course, I went to see him, and I was introduced to his wife and maybe one sister, and we had a nice time talking, and he served dinner and so on. Well, years later, I went back, and I find that he's got two or three sisters, younger sisters. And so I asked him, "Well, I don't remember you having so many sisters." And he was saying, "Well, when you came as a GI, they were so frightened that they hid outside the house and were peeking around the corners, looking at you." So I thought, well, that's interesting. So I never did meet his younger sisters until years later when they had enough courage to come out and be introduced. There were other instances where I walked with my cousin, and we walked down the road, and we walked by a factory. And it was during the noon hour, so everybody was sitting out there in the sunshine eating their lunch. So I came into view with my cousin, the two of us down the road, and they were, at first, they were very noisy talking to each other. And all of a sudden, it became very quiet, and I could tell that everybody was staring at me. But probably the most significant thing that I understood is that, as a result of being in an internment camp and being kicked around and having our civil rights taken away from us, I thought at one time that, gosh, if anything like this happened again, I can always go to Japan. And that was not a logical train of thought because when you're in Japan, even though you're of Japanese ancestry, they'll never accept you as a Japanese. You'll always be a foreigner. And even to my relatives, I'm their foreigner cousin, you know. I was never one of them. And so the thought of ever going back there never entered my mind after that.

But it was a bad time when we were there. This was a number of months after the war ended, and they haven't recovered yet. So the railroad station in the center of Tokyo was still bombed out. It didn't have a roof on it. The trains were moving, and there were crowds in the stations, and everybody was carrying something, huge bundles on their backs, and I found out later that most of it was charcoal for, to heat and to cook with. But there was a lot of commuting going on. A lot of the trading was done on the black market. There were homeless people trying to sleep on the edges of the station. There was one instance when I met a young man about my age, a Japanese man, and he was sitting in a park by himself looking very dejected. So I asked him what was wrong. And he told me that he lived in town, and he took some valuables out to the country to trade for food, and... or, no. He took some valuables to sell, and he sold them. But while he was sleeping, someone stole his money. And so I asked him, "Well, how much did you lose?" I can't recall, but it was couple hundred yen or thereabouts or two thousand yen or something like that. And I had just happened to have that, and so I don't know whether he was telling me a lie or not, but I gave him the money, and I felt good about it even though he may have cheated me out of my last two thousand yen. But things like that were occurring every place. When you walked across Tokyo, there were acres and acres and acres of rubble, and the whole area was just flat. And every once in a while, you'd come across a piece of corrugated tin that would be moving a little bit, and someone would be sleeping under the corrugated tin. So it was not the best time to go and to be there. But for the GI, of course, we were well fed, and we had plenty of entertainment. And on one, they had dances at night at the basements of some of the billets. And I went down there once, and I can tell that this one Japanese girl was having trouble with a GI that was drunk and trying to hang all over her. And I don't know what was wrong with me, but I thought I'd be a good Samaritan. And so I cut in and, just to get her away from her drunk friend, and that's all I did. When the dance was over, I said, "Well, thank you, very much," and I left. And the next day over the loudspeaker, someone calls me, and they said, "George Katagiri, you have a visitor downstairs." And I thought, well, who knows me in Tokyo? And I went down there, and here's this girl and her mother. And I thought, oh my gosh, what am I getting into? They had handkerchiefs that they wanted to give me and little presents. And I said, "Well, thank you, very much. But you know, I'm very busy, and I have to go." Well, they kept coming back for two, three times, and I finally had to tell, "Well, I'm engaged to a girl in Minneapolis," and I don't think they took no for an answer. They kept it up until I felt very uncomfortable, and I just had to be very rude. And later on, I just wasn't there anymore, but that happened.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

SG: Did you have any contact with the Japanese soldiers who had served?

GK: The only soldiers I knew were my relatives. All my relatives were either widows or veterans of the Japanese army and navy. And I thought before I met them that, gee, how are they going to regard me. And because I knew that there was some families that did not accept their Nisei relatives as GIs, and this kind of worried me. But all of my relatives quickly made it clear that, "We realize that, you were born in America and educated in America, and you had your duties to be an American soldier." So that never became a problem in my case. But I did meet one cousin. He was a naval officer, and we have to keep in mind that this was right after the war. Many of them had just returned from their overseas posts. And I heard after I got back to the United States that he had shot himself, committed suicide. And my guess was that he committed suicide because he felt that there was no hope in the future of Japan. And of course at that time, he was, Japan was, at least the average citizen was, didn't have much to go on, so he committed suicide. Everybody else was just trying to dig up whatever they could and survive, and it was a bad time. My parents sent me a bag of lemon drops once, and I went to visit some relatives in Chiba-ken which is outside of Tokyo. And when I got there, they were living in an anti-aircraft, underground shelter, and it was like a potato cellar. It was just underground. And my cousin, my female cousin, was tilling the garden outside, and she was carrying her, oh, two year old boy on her back or something like that. And so I went up there, and the first thing I did is I opened this bag of lemon drops, and I gave the two year old boy one of the lemon drops, and he put it in his mouth. And a few seconds later, his eyes just popped opened, and he couldn't believe what he was tasting. And my cousin was saying this is the first sugar that he's ever had in his life, and he's two years old. And you just don't even think about things like that when you have so many lemon drops on your side. And then a little later, we went down into the cellar. This is where they lived. I brought them a can of beer too, and they had never seen a can of beer, always a bottle of beer. And so they examined the can of beer, and they put it up on their shelf. And I bet to this day, it's still on that shelf, you know. They treasured it so much. But I got in there, and they wanted me to stay for dinner, and I knew in my heart that no, in no way should I stay for dinner. These people don't have enough to eat, but they insisted, so I finally gave in. And for dinner, I had a bowl of kind of gooey brown rice, and that was it. And I thought, oh, gosh, this is what the conditions are in Japan. So that encouraged me to do what I can to pass on as many goods as I can to my relatives. The years later, they really expressed their appreciation saying things like they couldn't have done it without their American relatives.

SG: Did you have any conflicting feelings of being the occupation force and being an American and seeing what the American forces did, and having your own relatives and the land of your parents?

GK: No. I just accepted what had happened. I knew about the atom bomb. Of course, I didn't have a chance to get down to Hiroshima or Nagasaki to see the damage, see the outcomes. I did come across several of their patients who were hospitalized in some of the hospitals in Tokyo. But I just accepted the war as it happened and didn't give it too much thought or worry too much about all the bad things that happened to everybody during the war. Because in the hospital, I found out that the nurses lived in the same room as their patients and nothing was sanitized. There was dust all over. The nurses' bedding was under the bed of the patients. So at night, they just pulled out the bedding from under the bed, and that's where the nurses slept. And I thought, my gosh, how can anybody get well under these conditions? But that was the best they can do at the time. It was a bad situation. I was, I felt very fortunate that I was an American and had my uniform on.

SG: Well, is there anything else you would like to, or you remember from that time?

GK: No. The GIs had it real good, you know. We had plenty to eat. We were there, I was there at the time when we all had weekend passes, and transportation was free, so we can get on a train and go any place, any time. In fact, they had special cars for us, so, whereas, the regular cars often were just crowded with people. There were special cars for GIs that were almost empty, and it was a luxurious way to travel. I felt real lucky of my military experience, you know. I was just too young to get into the combat areas, and I went over just at the right time and really enjoyed my service. And it all added up to my GI Bill, and I was able to complete my college with that money.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

SG: So after Japan, you went back to Minnesota and studied?

GK: Yeah. I went to, this is in 1946, and in nineteen, two years later, my fiance graduated from nurse's training, so she was able to work full time. So I was still at the University of Oregon. I must have been a junior at the time, and we got married in Chicago, and that was in '48. In 1949, we had our first son, and we lived in the University Village which was kind of a luxury apartment for GI families. We lived in a Quonset hut or a barrack. Only this time, the barracks had separate rooms. It had a kitchen and it had the bedroom and it had a bath, and so it wasn't like the internment camps at all. So we were living in luxury there at the University Village. In 1950, I graduated, and I had a degree in, with credentials to teach science in the secondary schools. And so I applied to school districts all over the United States, in Denver and Salt Lake and the towns in Northern Minnesota, and I knew that I had to mention that I was of Japanese ancestry because you didn't want to surprise anybody if they hired you, and I didn't get a single acceptance. And I don't know how many letters I wrote, but I just figured they were not hiring minority teachers at that time. This is 1950. And so I enrolled into graduate school at the University of Minnesota and started my graduate work. And during that quarter, the assistant superintendent from the Portland Public Schools was circulating among the universities and interviewing some of the graduates. And he stopped at the University of Minnesota, and I had an interview. And he said, "George, if you would come to Portland and go through a special program to get your elementary teaching credentials, we have a job for you." And I thought to myself and I says, "Well, I don't have much choice. I'm supposed to be a high school science teacher, but I'll convert to being an elementary school teacher."

And so in 1950, we drove out to Portland. I went through this special transition program, and I was enjoying it. And here comes the fall of 1950, and I get my first assignment, and it's at the very school I went to for eight years as a kid. And so there I was at Abernathy School again and very familiar with the building. And three of my old teachers were still there, and they looked at me and said, "Georgie's come back to us." So I had a delightful time. I taught all different kinds of subjects over a period of six years from third graders through the eighth graders and was thoroughly enjoying my experience. And finally in the fifth year at the, the principal of Cleveland High School, which was the nearest high school, came down and said that, "We'd like to have you become a social studies teacher at Cleveland High School and coach basketball." And that was a big joke because, I had no experience in coaching let alone basketball. So I told the principal, "Well, I really appreciate, I'm flattered by the invitation, but I'm teaching social studies now in the elementary grades. I'm really enjoying it. And if I'm going to change, I just want to change into my strong suit." And she said, "Thank you," and she left. Well, the following year, the next principal who was a Doctor Malo came down. I don't know where they got my name, but they were after me. And they, he said, "Well, George, we have a science position open for you. It's a chemistry position." And I said, "Gee, I'm really flattered, but my strong suit is biology. And if I'm going to make a change, I'd rather change into my strong suit." And he says, "Well, we don't have any biology positions open." And a couple weeks later, he came back. And he said, "George, you can have your damn biology." And I thought, whoopee, this is what I trained for. Here I was having a delightful time teaching elementary kids, and then I get this invitation to teach biology in high school. So that fall, I went up there. And what I find out is that he made the department chairman, the science department chairman, move from biology to chemistry so that I could come and teach the biology, and I didn't know this. And so when I got there, the department chairman looked at me and says, "So, you're the guy that's causing all this trouble in my department." And as it turned out, we became the best of friends, and our science department in a year or two became one of the leading departments in the city, and I was just having a great time teaching biology at the high school level.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

GK: So I start teaching biology in 1956. Well, in 1958, Russia sends up Sputnik, and the whole country is up in arms because the Russians are ahead of the United States in their space program, and so Congress wants to do something about it. And so they want every single state in the United States to put on a science specialist at the state level. And so they started to interview people, and I was one who was considered, and I was the only one that had elementary and secondary credentials and experience at both levels. And so for the State of Oregon, the State Department of Education in Salem hired me as the science specialist for the State of Oregon. And so I started a new career at the state level. Well, so far my educational experience has been great, you know. I love teaching elementary; I love teaching high school. And so I get up at the state level, and there's, no one has ever held this position before, and nobody knew what this person was supposed to do, so we're sitting there. We had new people in science, in math, and in foreign languages, so we're all sitting there. Well, what do you do at the state level, you know. Our one objective is to improve education in our field, and so we kind of fumbled around.

And after a few weeks, I came up with the idea that, gee, going around to school by school, you're not going to make much headway. And so I thought, gosh, maybe I can teach teachers how to teach science on television, and so I arranged that through the public broadcasting. And so in Oregon, way back in the early 1960s, I was one of the first educational television teachers. And up till that point, when you taught on television, you got in front of the camera, and you talked and talked and talked and talked. And I thought, well, I don't want to do that. And since I was teaching elementary teachers how to teach science, I could perform little tiny experiments on television, that should make it interesting. So I came up with a course of ten or twelve programs. It became a hit, and a lot of teachers around the State of Oregon were watching this program with this strange man teaching how to teach elementary science. I would go to these meetings, and some teachers would come up and point at me and said, "You're the guy," you know. Here, you don't know who they are, but they know who you are, and I suspect that many of them were disappointed because I was so short. [Laughs] But that's the way it went, and they ran that program, that series for several years, and it was a good experience for me. And after that, I had a whole bag of tricks in my back pocket of how to approach teachers, and I came up with a canned in-service program and a couple of lectures. And so I started to go around the different school districts and give these lectures and put on these demonstrations, and it became quite a hit especially when I was providing a service that the school district didn't have to pay for. Usually, when they have a college person come out, they have to pay honorary and things like this. But here comes a guy from the state department, and he puts on this dog and pony show. It's very entertaining, and the teachers like it, and they're inspired, and it's all for nothing. And so you hit one district, and you put on the show, and then the three districts around that first district find out about it. They want you to come out. And gosh, in a matter of a year or two, I was hitting just about every school district in this state, traveling in Eastern Oregon in the wintertime and in the springtime and fall, and it was a very effective program. In fact, it was so effective by 1969, I had covered most of the state and knew most of the superintendents of schools in the different districts. And somebody started a campaign to nominate me for the state employee of the year, not educator of the year, state employee of the year, and you can imagine how many state employees there are in the state of Oregon. Well, these volumes of recommendations came in. In 1969, I got this State Employee of the Year award from Governor McCall, and I had this beautiful big plaque, carved in the shape of the state of Oregon with Governor McCall's name in it. And that's probably the biggest little prize that I ever earned.

But then those were the years when the National Science Foundation poured millions of dollars into improving science education. So the different universities and the scientists and the professors got together, and they developed new curricular for the elementary school and for the high schools. And every time one of the new curriculum was developed, who should be the first to be invited but the state science supervisors, not the college professor but the state science supervisors. So we had a national organization, the Council of State Science Supervisors, and we went to all of these national meetings all over the United States. And over a period of time, I think I hit just about every state in the union. Not only that, I was invited out to see Apollo 7 go up in a spaceship. And so we were there at Cape Kennedy, and we're in this viewing stand for the VIPs, and I saw all these astronauts and World War I heroes, and we saw Apollo 7 go up. And it was a once in a lifetime experience especially when they took you into this huge building that went up for umpteen stories where they put the spaceship together. And then they had these huge doors on the side of the building and this platform on which this spaceship rolled out. And then they had this special road that the spaceship was moved to the launching pad. And so we saw all of that firsthand, and it was really a thrill. What I didn't realize is that during the countdown, during the countdown, they go 10, 9, 8, 7 and so on, and you think that they start the ignition when it gets down to 0, but they don't. Liftoff is at 0, but the ignition starts at about 4 or 5. And so it's coming down 6, 5, 4, and here's this blast down on the pad, and you know, I got all excited. My gosh, this thing's are going to blow up. It's too soon. And it just takes those two or three seconds before the liftoff actually takes place. And even once it gets going, you hear this big roar, and you can feel the vibrations through the air even though you're three miles away. And for some reason, I'm sitting there taking pictures, and I'm waiting for the spaceship to blow up. It's, I don't know what everybody else was thinking, but I thought, this can't happen perfectly, you know. But Apollo 7 went up without a hitch. And as the state science supervisor, we had these kinds of experiences. We went to the national meetings every year. I was the president of the organization for one year. It was a great experience for me. So my experience at the state education level was just as good as teaching high school or elementary school. I was blessed with choosing the right profession, you know.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

GK: Then finally after eleven years as the science specialist, I was offered a job with some school districts as a curriculum director or something, and the state superintendent, in fact, I signed a letter of intent with Multnomah County saying that I'd become their curriculum director which would have been a promotion, and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction said, "You're not leaving us," you know. And I says, "But I signed the letter of intent." And he went and contacted the superintendent of the Multnomah County Education Service District and says, "Blah, blah, blah. You're not getting George." And so I was released from my letter of intent, and the superintendent promoted me to conduct a, direct a research project at the state level. And so I left my science position, and I became the Director of Dissemination. If you ask, "Well, what's that?" you know. It doesn't sound too nice. But at that time, it must have been 1971 or thereabouts, there was a lot of education, educational research was being conducted in all the universities throughout the United States, and they weren't being used. They were being conducted and filed away. And so this is when they started to put together all the research studies into a computerized format, and they started what they called the Eric program, E-R-I-C program. And so this Eric program contained hundreds of thousands of research articles in every aspect of education, but it wasn't being used. And so we, three states were selected to come up with a system whereby we can get all of this research into the hands of classroom teachers so that they would change their teaching styles and improve their teaching strategies. And so North Carolina, Utah, and Oregon were the three states that were selected for this experimental study. And so we worked on this for three years and developed computerized retrieval systems, and we had developed an extension service-type system to get these extension agents out to teachers and classrooms to help them locate articles that would solve whatever problems that they were encountering.

And so we started the system, and that was very interesting. What was more interesting is that not only were people interested in this system in the United States, but they were also interested in it in Europe. And so there came a time when they were going to hold this big meeting in a 13th century abbey, 35 kilometers outside of Paris, and so who was invited to go? I was invited to go to this meeting, and people from Norway and France and Great Britain and a number of countries were represented there. And we were isolated in this, really the ruins, castle ruins. Half of it was in ruins. The other half, we had our conference, and that was just fascinating to be in a foreign country like that and in that setting because in the library, they still have books on book stands that were written by hand. And for our dinners, we had about three or four wine glasses out there. And the way they do it is they have one kind of wine at one time of the meal. And as you get through the meal, you have different kinds of wines, and they serve coffee in soup bowls. So you had to pick up the bowl, and that's how you drank coffee. But it was, it was an experience. And that conference, I can't recall how many days it went for, but I thought here we are, stuck in France, and this meeting's going to be held for so many days, what's everyone going to do after the conference is over? I wanted to tour Europe because I was there, so I was asking around. I couldn't find anybody who was staying after the conference. They're coming right back to the United States. And I thought, gee, how ridiculous. Until I came across this Mormon guy from Salt Lake, and I said, "Werner," I says, "Are you going to stay after the conference?" He says, "Yeah." He says, "I have a car. I got it all rented. I have to make one stop in Brussels. Otherwise, I'm free." I says, "Can we team up together and kind of make a little swing around, down the Rhine and around France?" And he said, "Sure." And so here, we're on our way from this, France and up through the countryside into the Brussels, into Holland and over to Cologne, Germany, and down the Rhine. But on the way, it was kind of warm, and we're getting thirsty, and we wanted something to drink, and so we stopped in some kind of a tavern, and Werner is a Mormon, you know. He's not supposed to have any alcohol. And so far as I'm concerned, I says, "I'll have a beer." And so my beer came right away. And he says, "Well, do you have any lemon juice or lemonade?" And the guy is saying, "lemon juice, lemonade?" He finally said, "citron." And I says, "Yeah, citron, order some citron, whatever it is." It sounded like it was lemon or lime or something like that. And so he says, "Oh, I'll have a citron." And it didn't come, and it didn't come. And finally when the waiter came by with this tray, he grabbed a beer off the tray, and he drank it, and so that's how he quenched his thirst. And that night we went to, or one of the nights, we went to this old tavern, and it was so old that the beams across the ceiling, you can see the axe marks on the beams. That's how old it was. And it was just fascinating to just be in a place like that, having your cheese and fruit and your wine. And I said, "Gosh, I have to get a picture of this." And so I said, "Werner, sit there, you know. We'll take a picture of our eating here." And he sat down, and he saw that wine, that bottle of wine. He moved the bottle of wine out of the picture, and so we have a picture of our eating in a tavern without the wine showing. But we had a great time.

When we got down to Heidelberg, we stayed with some friends of mine who, he was a doctor in the army, and so we had to sleep on the couch in the living room. He had two couches, and so we went to sleep. And the next morning, I got up, and there's no Werner, and I thought, gee, where did he go? And so I got dressed. I went outside, and he's walking up and down the sidewalk. And I says, "How come you're out here walking?" He says, "Well, I got up early, and I didn't want to awaken you, so I came out here, and I thought I would go for a walk." Okay. We let it go at that. But years later, he came to visit me in Salem, and he says, "George, do you remember the time when we stayed in Heidelberg and I was walking on the sidewalk outside?" I says, "Yeah." And he says, "Well, that night, you were snoring so badly that I couldn't sleep that I had to get out of there." Poor guy. Instead of telling me to be quiet or turn over or something, he let me snore, but I didn't know a thing about it until years later, but that goes to show what good a friend he was.

But, so that was one of the fringe benefits of working with the state agency. Eventually, the funding of the dissemination project was cut off, and so I started working with instructional technology. Computers were just coming into style for the schools. So, and then we wanted to improve the library programs, and so I took over coordinating that program. That, all of these assignments were very interesting. And in the final years, I coordinated some of the federal programs. We were still getting federal programs into the state. And I retired officially in 1984, at the end of 1984. What happened was I wasn't planning to retire, but I had worked in Portland for nine years. And when I left Portland, at that time, the retirement program in Portland was different from the state retirement program. And so when I left Portland, I had to take out my retirement credits, so I lost my nine years of credit that I had accumulated in Portland. And I was with the state for twenty-five years, and so retirement was the furthest thing in my mind, you know. I still had to go for some years. Then I got up one morning, and in that one day, the state legislature had passed a law that made it legal for those of us who had worked in Portland and who had lost our retirement from Portland to buy it back. And so overnight instead of just twenty-five years of retirement, I had thirty-seven, thirty-four years of retirement, and that meant that I could retire tomorrow, you know. And so at the end of 1984, I retired officially from the department with full retirement benefits. They offered me a part-time job to stay on with the department to work six hundred hours a year or something just on my own, and I wouldn't have to attend any staff meetings, or I could choose the days that I wanted to work. I can take the days off that I wanted to take off and go on trips. I thought, well, I can't have it any better than that. So I worked for the department for about eight years after I had officially retired. And it got to the point where I thought, well, what's the use of driving down to Salem from Portland, all that distance. So I finally gave it up completely in about 1992.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

GK: And then, in the meantime, my wife and I had gone on several elder hostel programs and trips, and we were kind of enjoying our retirement even though I was working part time, but we were very comfortable financially. And when I retired completely, it wasn't, in a month later, I got this call from Los Angeles, and they were saying, "Well, George, this is the Japanese American National Museum, and we want to put together an exhibit in cooperation with the Oregon Historical Society about the Isseis in Oregon. And we, it's been recommended that you would be a good person to handle this project." And I thought, my gosh, a California outfit coming up to Oregon putting together an exhibit on Oregon Nisei. They'd take all of our photographs and artifacts, and I wanted nothing to do with it, so I turned them down, and I told them why. And they says, "No, no, no. You have the wrong impression. We will not take anything out of the state. We will only take photographs of photographs and photographs of your artifacts, and we'll keep those in our files, but nothing will be removed from Oregon." And I thought, well, if that's the case, that makes sense. And then I said, "But I don't know anything about the Nikkei history, or I don't know anything about Issei history." All my life was in education, and all my contacts was with the Caucasian community. And they says, "Well, we'd still like to have you handle it." So I accepted and worked on that for a year. The National Museum poured a quarter of a million dollars of resources into this project. We worked very closely with the Oregon Historical Society, and we came up with this traveling exhibit, and it was a major accomplishment. I got a lot of recognition. And in fact, it was one of the most popular exhibits ever held at the Oregon Historical Society up to that time, and then it was a traveling exhibit.

So it was there a good five or six months, and then it traveled to places like Medford, Boise, Salem, and a number of other places. And then we get a call from Hood River saying they want the exhibit there. And we thought, oh my gosh, what are we going to do, because the exhibit contains, part of the exhibit contains what happened in Hood River right after the war, and it does not put Hood River in a good light. We have the newspaper spreads from Hood River that where the citizens of Hood River saying, "We don't want the Japs back here. Please sell your property to the whites," and blah, blah, blah, with their signatures on the newspapers, dozens and dozens of the prominent citizens. And then we had statements from the Hood River American Legion damning the Japanese, and they spear headed the campaign to, for the community not to sell any goods to the Japanese as they were returning. And I thought, well, what's going on happen if this exhibit goes up to Hood River? Then I ask, "Oh, where's it going to be held?" They said, "In the American Legion Hall." I thought, oh my gosh. And I said, "Does everybody know what has happened in the past?" And they did. Of course, this is happening in 1994, and all the negative stuff happened way back in 1946. And, but still in my mind, it was something that happened up there in the American Legion Hall. But we made the arrangements. We took the exhibit up there, and whose picture should be on the walls but the leader of the American Legion who was active at the time, and all the other leaders were up there. And we finally got the exhibit up. And someone said, "Hey, George, the son of that man is looking, is in the exhibit now looking at the exhibit." And I said, "Who, which was is he?" And so they pointed him out, and here's a big young man, and he was very carefully going through the exhibit, not saying anything. And of course, by this time, the American Legion had completely changed, and a lot of the people who were active in it were Nikkei people. But still, the remnants of the old American Legion was still there. But it went off, it went off very well, and I thought, well, it was worth it. We've gotten over the hump. Things have changed for good, so be it. So that happened.

And by the time this exhibit was pulled together and by the time, I traveled all over this state picking up artifacts. We went through the Yasui barn with Homer and looked at all the artifacts that his dad had saved and went through all the clothing that were now rat infested with all the mice droppings in it, and it was fascinating. Then we went up into other farms and picked up the mochi usu and the kine, what they used to pound mochi in. We brought those back. We picked up, for some reason, the people in Hood River seemed to have most of the artifacts. Maybe it was because they owned their own property, and before the alien land law took place. And so when they came back, they were able to save all the things that they had accumulated. But they had screens that their fathers had made in the camps, and they were loaning all of these things to us. So it was, I became interested in a year, a few years in about the Issei of Oregon and was building up my knowledge of what happened among the Isseis. And one thing became apparent, here it's in the '90s. Most of these or many of them were no longer living, and they were, the few remaining were dying. And then we found out that the Nisei were taking their diaries and throwing them away because they couldn't read them, and a lot of the documents were being destroyed. We thought, oh my gosh, we need to put a stop to this.

So the concept of a legacy center began to develop. It was very clear that we needed a place where we can collect these things before they all disappeared. And so the idea of the legacy center started, and a group got together, and it kind of steam rolled, and it developed into the program that we see today. And we could see, so we've collected the history of all of these things at the legacy center, and we can also see the big picture of what's happening because for a while there, I thought, well, we're interested in the history of the Issei, but they're gone, and we're interested in the background of the Nisei, and they're leaving us quite rapidly. And once the Nisei are gone, who cares about the Nikkei. And then we looked around and we said, well, the Nikkei, the ethnicity of the Nikkei is disappearing, you know. Half my grandkids are hapas. They're half, half Caucasian and half Japanese, and I don't know how interested they are in their legacy. And I thought, well, it's, what good is it going to do to develop a good viable legacy program if the group is disappearing? And it's, then I ran into a couple of situations where I was taking my two sons who are pure Japanese, and my grandson who is half Japanese, and the four of us were headed down for Tule Lake, and I wanted to show them Tule Lake and explain the camp to them and go on down to Lake Tahoe and a place called Bodie, a ghost town called Bodie and Yosemite and come home. And on the way down, we went into a family restaurant in Klamath Falls. So the four of us walked into the restaurant, and we were guided to a booth, on the side of the restaurant, and we could tell that most of the patrons in the restaurant stopped eating and were kind of staring at us as we walked across the restaurant. Nothing was said, and we ordered a regular lunch and we had lunch and we left. But on the way down the highway, my grandson said, "I never want to come back to this town again." He picked up something, about, just eating at that restaurant in Klamath Falls that he didn't like. And here, he looks Caucasian. He can get by, all of his friends are Caucasians, and still for him to pick this up, I thought was very significant. And it seems to me that he needs to know what his legacy is. In fact, he already knows quite a bit of his legacy, and that's why he picked up whatever ambiance he picked up. And a couple years later, this same kid, he's a senior in high school, and I said, Nick, I said, "How come you never had a girlfriend when you're in high school?" He went on several dates, and each date the girl had to ask him to go on a date. And he said, he says, "I don't know." He says, "If I ever find a girlfriend, I'd like to find one like me." And that told me a lot. That told me a lot. And so I think what the legacy center is doing, collecting all these things and carrying on these educational programs, is important even if the Issei and the Nisei are leaving us. We need to continue that program so that the young people know what their legacy is, and I'm sure things like this are happening to all families, and...

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

SG: I was curious if your years of living and working in Oregon if you, yourself, ever experienced prejudice or discrimination?

GK: Yeah. I did not experience it when I was a little elementary kid even though I was the only Japanese kid in the school. Nobody ever bothered me or called me names. I was one of the kids out there playing soccer and marbles and everything else. And then I lived in Minneapolis for seven years. I went there to go to school, and I went in the military service while I was in Minneapolis. And in the service, I was mostly with Caucasian soldiers, and they never bothered me. But when I came back to Portland looking for, coming to my first job, after living in Minnesota for seven years, I needed an apartment for the family. And so I looked in the newspaper, and there was an apartment open in Westmoreland. And so I called the number, and I says, "I'm interested in renting an apartment. Is it open?" She said, "Yes." And I said, "I'll be there in ten minutes." So I was there in ten minutes. And I went up to the door, and I says, "Well, I just called you about the apartment that's available here." She looked at me and says, "Oh, it was just rented." And my knees buckled, you know. I wasn't expecting it. If I were expecting it, I would have said something not very nice and just left. But since I wasn't expecting it, my knees buckled, and I couldn't say a thing, and then I left. Of course, thereafter, every time I called, I identify myself as being Japanese American and so on. But that was the most striking remembrance that I have of being discriminated against.

Oh, there are other occasions like when I first came to Portland. I had this job at this elementary school. And you won't believe it, but back in 1950, my annual salary was 2900 dollars a year, and I thought, gee, I don't think I can get through the year on that salary. I needed to find other things, other income. And I dreamed of the time when one of these days, I'll be making five thousand dollars a year. I dreamed about that. But to supplement my salary, I, some of my teacher friends found jobs at Sears Roebuck as clerks. I says, "Gee, I'd like to do that." And they wouldn't hire me, you know. And so for a long time, I wouldn't buy anything from Sears. [Laughs] For a long time, I mean for years and years, I would not buy anything from Sears. But to supplement my salary, the kindergarten teacher at our school had some friends who were building houses, and they, I says, "Well, can they use some help on the weekends or the evenings?" He said, "Fine." And so they were building these two houses up there by the medical school or OHSU, and I would help them put on siding or sand or paint or anything that anyone could do. And one day, I was sanding the floorboards on the floor, and the lady builder who was contracting said, "Hey George, why don't you buy this house?" I says, "I just have a few hundred dollars in the bank. I can't afford to buy a house." And she says, "No problem." She said, "You get a GI Bill, and you can pay for this house." And the house wouldn't qualify under the GI Bill. And so she said, well, she'll carry a second mortgage for me. So I buy it under the GI Bill and pay her a little extra each month, and so that's the house we bought. And did she make me sign a paper? No. I mean, I never signed a paper. I could have stopped payment on the second month and called it quits there, but that's the kind of friends or people we got to know. And not only that, I was paid so much an hour sanding the boards and painting the boards, and so I had a little supplementary income there.

And to supplement my 2900 dollar annual salary, I got a job as a projectionist at a local theater, and I went down and answered the ad. And they says, "Well, what experience have you had?" And I says, "Well, I run the 16 millimeter projectors at school." There's no comparison between a 16 millimeter and an old fashioned 35 millimeter machine. And evidently, they didn't have too many applicants, and so I got this job. It was at this old theater that I think about ten patrons came in every night. But the machines were so old that they were lit by carbon rods. And so they had two carbon rods that when you lit it, you had to bring them together, and they would light, and then they would separate, you'd separate it for part of an inch, and then they would gradually burn out, burn back, and the machines would keep them the same distance theoretically. And if the theory didn't work, the light went out. And there were two machines, and so that was a time when you had to watch the picture and the little tiny numbers came up in the corner, and, but by the time the films got to our place, they had been worn so much that they've been spliced, and some of the numbers were missing. But the numbers were there, then you would sick, turn on one machine and started going and then turn off the next machine, and the audience wouldn't know the difference. But when they're not synchronized, there's a jump in there or a word missing or something like that. Then that's only running the machines, but you have to work the curtains too. So while you're doing all this, you have to run around the machine and press the button to start the curtain to come down, to close or to open up. But anyhow, it was a riot. Finally, the place, one day, one day, there was a Bob Hope film, and so I put it on like I do always. These are great big 35 millimeter rolls, and the image on the screen was upside down, and there's no sound. And I thought, well, it's a Bob Hope film. [Laughs] Maybe it's supposed to be that way. And so I waited a few seconds, and I finally came to the conclusion that some person that wasn't very intelligent put the, rewound the film backwards and twisted it or something. And so there you had a dozen people in the audience pounding their feet on the floor, and I finally had to shut everything down and take the reels out. And rather than trying, I couldn't possibly rewind it then without taking a lot of time, so I just stuck on the second feature and fouled up the features for the evening, but nobody complained. But anyhow, that was the way that I got through the first years of teaching, supplementing my income. Things got better after that, thank goodness.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

SG: What was your, what was your home life like back then?

GK: Well, we had three kids, three kids, and I have to really admire my wife because she was, became the head nurse of the neonatal intensive care unit at the medical school at the time, and she pioneered the development of the nursery as it developed from a one or two nurse operation to a, twenty-four, thirty nurse operation later on. And of course, the new buildings were built, and she was always instrumental in designing the new buildings. But here, she's developing her own profession at the medical school and raising three kids at the same time. And these are the years when I'm on the road in Eastern Oregon or New York or someplace like that, and so she's doing all of these things. And she really made a name for herself so far as her nursing career is concerned. In fact, when they built the latest nursing, the ward for the premature babies, they named the nurse's quarters the Helen Katagiri Memorial Room, or they named the room after her, and her picture is on the wall today. So, but during the years, all the three sons were boys, and I guess I'm biased, but I enjoyed raising boys. And while they were growing up, I was working for the state mostly.

Well, when I was teaching school, they, I took advantage of all of the holidays. When we celebrated Thanksgiving at the elementary school, we made our pilgrim's hats and all those things. So I brought them home, and they were wearing pilgrim's hats and having a good time. When we recorded, made recordings, actually cut recordings at school, I brought home the machine, and we made recordings at home. So I took advantage of a lot of the activities that we were enjoying in school. When I was working for the state, I was invited quite often to the State of Alaska or to the State of Colorado to teach a course or to conduct in-service programs, and so we took the whole family to Alaska. And while I was teaching in Fairbanks, they were out there trying to kill as many mosquitoes as they could or watch the foxes run up and down the road right in front of the house. So I always tried to mix pleasure with my work, and it worked out. And we spent a summer in Colorado, and they played ball and rode horses. I should ask them how they felt about growing up because they had a good time. Oh, I took them to Boston. We drove to Boston, in fact, because I was invited to join one of the study groups to create an elementary science curriculum. So we drove all the way to Boston from Portland, and that was a long ride, and that was an experience. Boston is a different kind of community than Portland. We moved into this old house. We rented this old house which was supposed to be an all-electric house. And when we there, by the electric house, it means that you have an electric refrigerator and a stove with four burners which only three burners work, and that becomes an electric house, so we rented that. The house was, had to be over a hundred years old because the foundation was made up of boulders, and some boulders were three feet across and other boulders were two feet across, but that's what made up the foundation. And when you walk down the hallway in the second floor, you had all these doors on each side of the hallway. And when you walk down the hallway at night, it was spooky because you didn't know what was behind those hallways. And when we got there, there were all these bedrooms upstairs. So I thought, oh good, the boys could have their own bedrooms this summer because usually they're crammed into one or two bedrooms at home. Our house is small. And so they started out in different bedrooms. And when we saw them in the morning, they all were in one bedroom, the front of the house, and that's where they stayed for a full month.

And then the funniest thing happened. I went to work, to work with some professors and teachers at a school and the family stayed home. And when I got home, my middle son was fighting with a neighborhood kid, and my middle son was sitting on top of this other kid. So all I said was, "Hi boys," and walked into the house. I guess the neighborhood kids had to find out who's boss around here. And they were a novelty because I don't think the neighborhood kids had ever seen an Asian before. And, but they figured out their pecking order, and everything went fine for the rest of the summer. But there was a second family from Portland, and they came over to see us one day, and they have three kids. And so when they got out of the car, the neighborhood kids saw this other family from Oregon, and they were saying, "How come they don't have black hair?" They had gotten the impression that everyone from Oregon had black hair. But this is the kind of experiences they had. We had a delightful time in Boston for months, six weeks and the Freedom Trail and all the historical places in downtown Boston. So there were a lot of advantages. We had a lot of good times with the boys growing up.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

SG: Is there anything else you would like to talk about in terms of your time in Oregon with your family, with work?

GK: Well, Oregon is the place that I know. I'll always brag about Oregon, you know. It's... I'm biased. It's a good place for me. We can ski here. We can enjoy the beach, and we love the desert. And we love things like scorpions and rattlesnakes, and we've encountered them, you know. We used to go hunting for scorpions. And we had one experience where we would remove the rocks, and there would be a scorpion, and you'd just put your hand down on the ground, and it backs into your jar for you. You close the jar; you have a scorpion. We brought three of them home and put them in an aquarium with a lid on the top. And the next day, evidently, they were all female scorpions because we had about, oh, thirty or forty scorpions, you know. And the baby scorpions are exactly like the adults, but they climb on the adult's back when they're first born. And they, that's kind of exciting for little kids to grow up with. The other animal that we liked was the rubber boa. Most people don't know what rubber boas are, but they're in the boa constrictor family, and they're indigenous to Portland. The thing is they're brown snakes that are round at both ends with tiny eyes, tiny beady eyes that crawl next to the dirt, so this is why you never see them. They're not fast, and we had several of them during the days the boys were growing up and feeding them was a problem. And somehow, we got little tiny unborn mice that we froze, and we fed it to the boa every once in a while, and you can see the bulge in the snake, and, or sometimes we tried to stuff hamburger down their throat. That didn't work too well. But these were things that I think added, the boys remember, they remember well.

And one day or one time, we went down to the Steam's Mountain. And this is when the kids were in high school, and I had two of the boys with me, and so we all went fishing. And I wasn't doing too well, but the other two, I told them I'm going back to camp. And the other two said, "Well, we'll stay and we'll fish a while." And the one boy said that, "If I run across a rattlesnake, I'm going to bring it back, and we'll cook it for dinner," and he was serious. And I was hoping he wasn't serious, but he was serious. So I went back camp and was getting ready for dinner, the campfire and everything. I see them coming up the trail, and I looked at them through the binoculars. One boy is holding something in both hands. And as they got closer, they had some fish in one hand, and this guy, my middle son had a rattlesnake in the other hand. And so he comes back, and he's real proud. He got his rattlesnake. I says, "Well, how did you get it?" He says, "I stepped over this rock. I heard it rattle, so I took the pellet gun, and I shot it in the head, and the head just fell over, and so I just grabbed it by the neck, and I'm carrying it home." I says, "Well, you still going cook it and eat it?" He says, "Sure." And here all the while, he's carrying it. He could feel the muscles of the snake, in his hands, in his grip. And of course, the first thing he did was cut the head off and bury it, and he wanted the skin to put around his cowboy hat. He had a beautiful cowboy hat, and so he cut the head off, he slit the snake down the belly, and he took the meat out. And he could still feel the muscles moving in his hand. And by that time, he finally decided, well, maybe he won't eat it. [Laughs] He won't cook it and eat it, so we never did have rattlesnake meat. But he did go ahead and keep the skin. And today, he's got a beautiful rattlesnake skin around his cowboy hat with nine rattles sticking out to one side. But they, we did a lot of things like this. They went to Camp Calarmo. This is the OMSI camp in Central Oregon to look for fossils. We did a lot of skiing when they were in high school, so we had a lot of good times together. They kept telling me, when I took them skiing, they'd go out to the slope and ski, and I would stay in the lodge and read or something like that. And they kept saying, "Well, Dad, why don't you get out there and take a couple of lessons?" And you're sitting in the lodge, you know. You look around the lodge, watching all these young skiers there, beautiful skiers with their beautiful clothes on, and here I am an old fat stocky man. I thought, oh, that's not for me. This is for beautiful young people. And finally one day, I says, "Oh, to heck with it. I'll go out there and take a lesson." So I went out there and took a lesson. And all the old fogies are out there skiing, and all the beautiful people are in the lodge, looking at each other. So I learned to ski. And from that time on, we all had a good time except on the last run. On the last run, I had to drive the car all the way down to the, this town at the lower part of the ski run. And they were able to take this trail, Glade Trail, all the way down to the place. So Dad did the dirty work, and everybody else had the most fun. We had good times together, and we had a good life, and I wonder why the kids won't leave home, but they still come back today. One of the boys lives out of town, but he makes sure that he gets back on weekends to get a good meal. One boy moved in next door. [Laughs] Things were so great.

SG: That sounds like you've had a very interesting and memorable life.

GK: Well, yeah. It was an interesting and memorable and active. I have no regrets. Of course, my wife died in 1993, and you just wonder, well, what happens now. You're in your late sixties. But you have a couple daughter-in-laws that are bending over backwards to make sure that you always have something to eat or someplace to go. And that's nice, but it's something you can't rely on. And then I was, I had no plans or no aspirations or anything. And finally in '94, I met Michiko. And it's just, I don't know what I did to deserve the good things that have come my way, but they've come my way. Things are great. We've lived three or four lifetimes in the span of nine years. We're still enjoying it.

SG: That's wonderful. Is there anything else you would like to add?

GK: No. It's been a long life. I'm ready to go anytime. I'm, every day is a blessing. Every day is a blessing. My health is going downhill, but I've got prostate cancer, and we're fighting it all along the way. And so far, I'm on top of everything, but this is why every day is a blessing. I'm grateful for every day we have.

SG: Is there any message you would like to give to the next generations to come?

GK: Well, my favorite one is a saying that's hanging up over that, hung up over the office of my friend in Port Townsend. And it says, "Reach for the stars. And if you don't make it, fall back to the moon and rejoice."

SG: It's a nice saying. Well, thank you, Mr. Katagiri.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.