<Begin Segment 4>

HH: So did you live in New York City for a while?

KI: We lived in New York City for, I guess, about a total of about six months or so. Short time we lived a couple months in a hostel, maybe about four months in an apartment in Manhattan, up near Columbia University.

HH: Morningside Heights?

KI: Well, no, it wasn't Morningside Heights, it was over on, near Riverside Drive on Amsterdam Avenue and West 109th Street. And from there we moved to New Jersey, and that was an exciting time of our lives.

HH: What do you mean by "exciting"? What happened in New Jersey?

KI: Well, when we moved to New Jersey, first of all the war was still going on, it was at the end of the war. And many communities in New Jersey would not allow Japanese to even come into the town, it was exclusion. So my father had a hard time find a place, first of all, to move to, he did finally find a place in a small town in northern New Jersey called Bergenfield that was a blue collar town. And that's where we moved, and I can remember the first day that we moved into the house, we were all excited about moving into our own house instead of living in an apartment. And all the people in the neighborhood were lined up around house, in front of our house and across the street, and they were not very happy to see us moving in. Of course, we were little kids, we didn't understand why they were so bitter about us coming in and yelling things at us. But we did move in and that's where we grew up, in Bergenfield.

HH: Was it a rough time living in that area?

KI: Yeah, because we were the only Japanese Americans living in Bergenfield. There was only one other Japanese family in that part of the state, it was, Bergen County was a family, the Takagi family in Englewood, and they were the only other Japanese American family in that area. And it was... I don't know how they survived because it was very, very difficult for us. Of course, they had been there for a long time and were very well-established in the church.

HH: How was the hostility expressed by these people who didn't want you around their neighborhood?

KI: Well, it was expressed in a number of different ways. I can remember they would do things like at Halloween time, they would put a firebomb on our front porch and I remember that happening one year. And generally speaking, my mother and father, they had a very difficult time because they really had no friends. There was no friends, there was no church supporting them. The only people that supported us up until that time were people over in, the Friends over in New York. Of course, once we left New York, we were on our own. And in north Jersey, we were still going back to New York, to the Buddhist Temple in New York. So my father decided that the only way for him to integrate his family, get our family assimilated into the society there, would be for us to join a local church. So that's what he did, he took us to a Christian church, Presbyterian church. We went to Presbyterian church for a while, and then there was a group that start up a Methodist church. And so we got together with this group, small group of people who were starting this Methodist church, and one of the people who was supporting the starting of this church was this Mr. Takagi. So that's how we got to know the Takagi family, and they kind of took us under their wing and helped us. They had a very influential friend by the name of Mr. Charles Parland, who was very influential in the Methodist church, and he is the individual who probably was our prime sponsor for many years, even up until the time, until well after my father died. He helped and he kind of assisted our family. And he was really a very nice, nice man. He was a nice man to our family, wonderful to the Takagis.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.