<Begin Segment 7>

HH: What, if any interesting circumstances regarding meeting your wife and then eventually getting married to her?

KI: Well, I guess you might say it was interesting from a standpoint that up until I was about sixteen years of age, of course, there was no Japanese girls in the school except for, I had a younger cousin, and there was one other Japanese family and they had younger kids in the school system, but I was the first one through the school system. And my brother and I, my brother Warren, the one that became an Air Force officer, he and I played football together on a high school football team. And I guess I was a sophomore in high school, and he and I decided we were going to go out. He was a freshman and I was a sophomore, so we joined the football team, and there was a lot of problems about our joining the football team. First of all, there had been no Asian kids playing football in North Jersey, and we were the first ones. And I knew a lot of the guys who were on the football team because we were in Scouts together. We all came from the same Boy Scout troop, so we were all friends. And they encouraged me to come out for football, so that's what I did. I guess I was one of the smaller guys on the team, but I played, I started varsity when I was a junior in high school, started at tackle. I was probably about a hundred and forty-two pounds, but I played against guys who were pretty big, because they were Polish and German stock, and they were a good hundred pounds more than what I weighed. But I played, my brother played, he started as a safety when he was a sophomore, so he did very well. He was a very good football player.

HH: What kind of hardships did they give you about joining the football team because you were Asian?

KI: Well, when we'd go out and play other teams, they'd gang up on us, my brother and I, and spit on us, and of course, we'd spit right back at 'em. And they'd try to hurt you when you were playing, and the other coaches on the other teams would get the guys to gang up on us and try to hurt us to get us out. And as a matter of fact, I can remember one game that we played in, and that was the coach and the other team specifically tried to hurt us, get us hurt. And I can remember I was really infuriated because they hurt my brother and they had to take my brother out of the game. And so they really infuriated me. I think that was the worst thing they did, because the guys that I played against on the opposite side of the line, because I was a lineman, I really hurt them bad. I mean, I really felt bad after the game because I can remember both of these fellows that I played against, they had faces like raw meat. And surprising that three years later, I met one of the fellows, and he came up and he apologized to me for what happened in the game, he says, because they were told to come after us and hurt us. He said, "But boy, you really gave us a good thumping," he says, "that was really great." But he did apologize to me, and I was really surprised that somebody would come years after I graduated from high school. "Remember that one specific game that my brother and I started?" and apologized to us for what they did to us or tried to do to us.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.