<Begin Segment 1>

HH: Today is October 23rd, Sunday afternoon, and we are recording this session today in Medford Lees, New Jersey. Good afternoon. What is your full name?

KI: My full name is Ken Roger Inagaki.

HH: And the name of your spouse?

KI: My name of my spouse is Jane Inagaki.

HH: How many siblings, brothers and sisters, do you have?

KI: I have four brothers, no sisters.

HH: And who are they?

KI: My brothers are Warren, Ryan, Douglas and Randall.

HH: Okay. And that family, what's the order of birth as far as you're concerned? Where did you fall in?

KI: I was the oldest. I'm the oldest in the family.

HH: I see. And where were you born?

KI: I was born in Seattle, Washington.

HH: And when were you born? What is your present age?

KI: My present age is fifty-four. I was born January 3, 1940.

HH: 1940, okay. You were born in... what's the name of the town that you were born in?

KI: I was born in Seattle.

HH: Seattle.

KI: Washington, right.

HH: Is that where you lived, too?

KI: We lived there for two years until we were relocated.

HH: Okay. So then you're working, you're living in Seattle, and then you relocated from the city of Seattle to one of the relocation centers.

KI: Right. We relocated to Puyallup, and then from Puyallup we were interned at Minidoka.

HH: As you remember it, what was the city of Seattle like at that time in your life? This is at the outbreak of World War II.

KI: Right. I really don't remember what the city of Seattle was like. My memories are really from the period of time that I was in camp. I really don't even remember the reception center at Puyallup. I have very limited memories, no memories, really, of Puyallup or Seattle.

HH: And you were how old at that time?

KI: Two years old.

HH: Okay. What kind of occupation did members of your family have, your parents have at that time?

KI: My father's occupation was he worked for a bank. I'm not really sure exactly what he did in the bank, I think he may have been like a head teller in the bank. And my mother was at home. She was actually taking care of my father's younger brothers and sisters at the time that they first got married. They lived at home with my mother and father.

HH: So your family was actually larger than just your parents and you.

KI: Yes. It consisted primarily of the younger brothers and sisters, my father's brothers and sisters.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

HH: So as you say, you don't recall a whole lot of Puyallup or Minidoka.

KI: That's correct.

HH: Your memory starts kicking in from sometime after that.

KI: That's right. My memory starts really in camp. I mean, I have some pretty vivid memories of camp life and things that went on in camp.

HH: You do?

KI: Yes. I don't have any bad memories of camp. I can remember the...

HH: Where was Minidoka located?

KI: Minidoka is located in Idaho.

HH: Idaho.

KI: So we were in Idaho, in the southern part of Idaho, in the deserts. So I have a pretty good memory of the camp and my family and the life of the camp. I didn't have any bad memories of camp. Because I was with my parents, so I thought that was a normal way of life for anybody.

HH: If you kind of close your eyes for a second, what would your living area of your family look like?

KI: Well, the place that we lived in was a long wooden barrack. And I remember that each family that lived there, I can remember the chimney coming out of each unit there. And I can remember, I can remember the guys coming along and periodically, when they would clean out the chimneys, the chimney sweeps, I can remember that. And I can remember that everything was in one room. We had a potbelly stove in there that would get very, very hot in the wintertime. I can remember how hot it would be near that stove.

HH: Coal burning stove or wood burning?

KI: I believe it was wood burning. I'm not really sure if it was coal or wood, but it was like a potbelly stove in the middle of the room. And I can remember our beds around the side of the room. And I can remember going to the dining hall for meals. Sometimes my father would bring, or mother would bring a tray back to our apartment to feed my brothers and I if the weather was too severe outside, they wouldn't take us out to the dining hall, they'd bring it back on a tray. I can remember it was a metal tray that we used to eat out of. And I can remember the, I can remember things like the bathrooms, like I remember people always yelling at me because I'd be opening and closing the doors. I think some of the women were resentful of prying eyes, you know. [Laughs] As a child I can... I remember the dining hall very, very well. I can remember the noise in there and all the people in there, and the tables.

HH: What was the weather like, do you remember, in Idaho?

KI: The weather was, I can remember the winter weather. It was very severe, it was cold and windy and I can remember the sandstorms that we used to have in there, and the tumbleweeds, and I can just remember that it was very cold and desolate. Like I remember the sky, and the sky was beautiful. And I can remember seeing the stars at night, it was really vivid stars.

HH: Were the summers hot?

KI: I don't remember how hot the summers were. I guess the summers really didn't bother me too much. I do remember that there was a stream or an irrigation ditch that was located near the camp. I think it was just outside the camp because I remember, I believe it was one of my uncles took me over there to the irrigation ditch, I guess that's what it was, or a stream, river, I'm not really sure. But the water was very cold because he let me stick my hand in the water, it was very cold, and there was a fast, rushing water.

HH: Came off from the thawing of the snow.

KI: Probably.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

HH: Do you recall the day you moved out of Minidoka to leave camp, and where did you go?

KI: Yes. We left... my father left first. He left in 1943, and he left for New York. And he was given some help by a Catholic priest that was in the camp, who bought him a ticket, gave him a box lunch, and my dad said he gave him five dollars and told him to go to New York and see a priest in New York who would help him find a job. Well, he got to New York and picked up the paper, and he found himself a job. And he worked for a clothing company, Jewish owned clothing company, it was a chain store as a bookkeeper, he got a job as a bookkeeper. And when he got enough money, he sent back to camp for us to come out of camp, and that's how we left camp. My mother brought us myself and two of my brothers, one of my brothers who had been born in camp, and brought us out of camp. We went first to Chicago by train, left from Chicago to Cincinnati. And I have some interesting memories of the train ride to Cincinnati because they had a prisoner of war, German prisoner of war on the train, and I can remember they brought him into the car that we were sitting in. And just before we got into the Cincinnati train station, they marched this guy into our car and they were getting ready to jump off. And one of my younger brothers and I, we ran up to the prisoner. We didn't know who he was, and we would just tell him, three MPs there, and this other man, he had chains on his feet, chains on his hand, and he was shackled up. He was carrying some candy, caramel candy, and I can remember the caramel candy. Because he asked the guards if he could give us the candy, pieces of candy. He brought out the candy, it was little round caramel candy and it had little swastikas on it. And so I can remember that. I didn't know what a swastika was at the time, but later on as I grew up, of course, I learned what that was. So I have memories of that.

But going back to my days in camp, I did have some interesting memories there. Because one of my birthdays, an aunt who lived in a different compound had a friend who worked in the kitchen would bake a cake. So another aunt took me to the compound gate. And my other aunt in the other compound brought this cake over and they'd send it through the guard, I can remember that, I must have been three years old. Because I remember the guard taking his bayonet out and he cut the cake. And I thought he was just going to take a piece of my birthday cake for himself, so I thought that was nice that he would want to share my cake with me. He hacked the cake up, so I can remember him chopping the cake up, and I was really very upset. I can remember as a little kid being upset about that because I thought he was just going to take a piece of cake to eat, and instead he just hacked the cake up. So what was, to me, a really beautiful cake, turned out to be all cut up. So I have memories of that. Also I have memories of my mother being in the camp infirmary for a period of time, quite a period of time. And, of course, one of my brothers was born in camp, but I think she had some illness, too, and so she was in the hospital there for quite a while, maybe six months. So she was in there a long time. So my dad took care of us and our aunts who were in the camp, they took care of us until my mother got out. When my mother got out, that was the time my father left to come to New York. And eventually, after living in Cincinnati for a couple of months, he sent for us out of Cincinnati. And we went to New York, my uncle who lived in Cincinnati, he put us on a train to New York. So my mother with three little kids traveled all the way to New York City by ourselves. And my father met us at the train station in New York and took us to a motel or hotel that he was staying in. I can remember walking up the stairs to the hotel, and I can remember we had two rooms, and my mother said that the place was really, was like a flophouse. And she says that at night there was bugs all over the place, she was telling me how she and my father stayed up all night killing the damn bugs crawling all up the bed. And they had three of us little kids in one bed and they slept in another bed. Then eventually from there we moved into a hostel in Brooklyn, and from Brooklyn we moved to an apartment in Manhattan.

HH: What kind of household was that? A Japanese-run household?

KI: No, it was a Quaker-run hospital, it was run by the Friends. So the Friends helped us in New York, they gave us the first place to stay, and I have memories of playing with the kids in the hostel there, and neighbor kids, and none of us could understand. My brother and I could not understand what other kids were saying, they were speaking a foreign language. And we didn't realize at the time that they were speaking English and we were speaking Japanese. [Laughs] So today it's the other way around.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<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.

<Begin Segment 5>

HH: So you grew up in Bergenfield and went to high school in Bergenfield?

KI: Right. We were the first Japanese kids to go through the school, I was the first one in the school, and the school was, it was a mixed school. We had, it was all blue collar, primarily blue collar people, but they mixed Italians and Germans and Irish and Polish, Jewish, and Spanish, and Black, and one Asian. That was me, I was the first one into the school. So it was kind of like a constant battle through school. The kids that were into school would always test you. Didn't matter who it was, everybody tested me. And even the teachers, they resented the fact that they had Japanese in the class. Of course, that was through grammar school, and then by the time I reached junior high school, the Korean War was raging, and so it just started all over again with, didn't matter whether you were a Korean, Japanese, Chinese or whatever. A "gook" is a "gook," and that's what I was. And so I got it from people on the way to school, they used to yell at me and tell me not to walk on their sidewalk, walk on the other side of the street. Walk on the other side of the street and people would say the same thing back. People would yell all kinds of foul terms at me, they'd spit at me. Kids would throw rocks at me as I was going to school, because they didn't want me to come near their property. And, of course, I'd do the same thing back to them, I'd throw rocks back at them. And if I got close enough to them, I guess you would say that I was known as the neighborhood bad boy, because I got into a fight, I think just about every day. Every day I went to school, I was in a fight. And I was considered a troublemaker in school, and I was considered a troublemaker in the neighborhood, but, I mean, it was a matter of survival.

HH: Were you alone? Did you have any friends at all?

KI: Sure. I had one friend, German friend. In fact, he was the first friend that I had when I moved into the new neighborhood, and took us a little while before I learned to speak, I guess, enough English that I understood what he was saying. But he and I today are still the best of friends. And we used to fight each other, and he used to fight with me. We got into a fight, if things weren't even, he'd jump in and he'd always side with me. So he was a good friend. But he and I used to get into it almost every day, I'd be into a fight with somebody. And it was either in school or outside of school, didn't seem to matter where it was. It was pretty constant. And I can remember my mother being upset and crying when I get home, because I'd come home while beaten up, clothes torn, and constantly had a black eye, cut.

HH: During this time, your father was still working in New York City?

KI: Working in New York City.

HH: He would commute across the river?

KI: Yes, he would. Every day he'd go out early in the morning, you'd leave at six forty-five in the morning, I can remember. He wouldn't get home until past seven o'clock at night, and we didn't have a car, so he had to do everything by bus, I think. He'd go back to work on Saturdays, and he used to work half a day on Saturdays. So we didn't see too much of him.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

HH: Obviously you didn't spend the rest of your life at Bergenfield. What happened, what are the events that eventually took you out of there?

KI: Well, I went to school for a while down in Virginia after I graduated from high school, that was the same year that my dad died. He died just shortly after I graduated from high school. And at first I wasn't going to go on to school, I was going to stay at home and work, but my mother and my uncle said, "No, you've got to go to college and you've got to get an education. That's what your father wanted." I said, "Well, what are we going to live on?" There was no income, my father had a limited amount of insurance, and that was it. I think my mother got some social security benefits, but that's about all she had. "Oh, we'll get along fine." So I went away to school for a while, and sure enough, I'd come home or find out, gee, there's food.

HH: What school did you go to?

KI: Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. So I was down there for a year, I didn't do too well down there. And I came back and I told my mother that I was going to get a job and work and take care of the family needs and go to night school. And brother who was just under me, younger, he was graduating from high school, and so he went on the Air Force Academy. And I think he was maybe the, he may have been like the second Japanese American in the Air Force Academy at the time. There was one other fellow from Hawaii there, and so he was appointed to the Air Force Academy.

HH: Did it take a lot of work to get in there?

KI: Yeah, but we had a lot of help. We had help from Mr. Parland, and New Jersey Senator Case helped. That's where my brother got his appointment, and he just recently retired five years ago, six years ago, as a full colonel, was stationed at the Pentagon. So he had a pretty good military career. And I got married. I married a girl that I had met when I was just about a year out of high school, I had met her, she was from the next town over. That took me to East Orange, New Jersey, and then eventually my job took me to Long Island. And from Long Island, we moved down to South Jersey, and that's where we've been since 1972.

HH: In South Jersey?

KI: In South Jersey.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<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.

<Begin Segment 8>

HH: What kind of career are you involved in today?

KI: Well, I have my own business today. I have a safety and health consulting business, and I operate throughout the country. And I have a number of people who work for me, it's a small company, but I have about eight people working for me on a full-time basis. And it's something that I've done really all my adult working life has been involved in safety and health issues. Even my wife today, of course, is a leading environmentalist in the state of New Jersey. Probably one of the foremost environmentalists in the state, I think, of New Jersey.

HH: And this company that you have, this is something you started on your own?

KI: Yes.

HH: From scratch?

KI: From scratch, scratch business.

HH: Is there something that might be mentioned here, as to some experience you've had in starting something, a company like this from nothing?

KI: Well, it's something that I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to have my own business, and I've always felt that the best way for an individual like myself to really get ahead was to have my own business. I wanted to be independent, I wanted to be able to do the types of things that I didn't feel that were afforded to me working for a corporation. And so I started out on my own, and I've continued now for almost ten years. It's been a lot of fun, I've really enjoyed it, and I think that developed a lot of good business friends and associates, and it's been very rewarding.

HH: And you have two children.

KI: I have two children.

HH: And their gender and how old are they?

KI: Well, I have two daughters. My oldest daughter is twenty-six years old, so she's finishing her master's studies at Stanford University. I think that she'll probably stay out in California or maybe go to Hawaii or Japan, I doubt she'll come back east. But her major is Japanese language, and at present, her major of study is really in the Ainu culture of northern Japan, and so she's doing some translations of Ainu literature that had been translated from Ainu, the Ainu language, to Japanese, and now she's translating it from Japanese to English. And so she should graduate this January, but I think she's going to stay on for some postgraduate work and, I don't know, maybe go on for a PhD out there. My second daughter is going to Rutgers University, and she's a physics major, she's twenty-four years old. Hopefully she will finish school this year. She promised me that she'll be finished in May with her undergraduate studies, and so I'm very happy about that, I just hope that she'll go out and get a job and be self-supporting.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

HH: How would you describe your regard of yourself as a Japanese American? You've been through some hard times because you've been a Japanese American. And so from that, you may have developed some very strong feelings regarding your ethnicity.

KI: I do have some very strong feelings about it. Primarily, I'm very proud to be a Japanese American person. And I think the emphasis on the American part rather than the Japanese part. And I'm glad that the things that I've experienced and gone through in my life, it happened to me rather than to happen to somebody else. Hopefully it won't happen to some of these other people, that they have to go through life with the same kind of problems. And I think that it's made a better person out of me, because it's made me, I think, more understanding of other people, and has put me in a position where I think I've been able to help others who have similar experiences, and have a difficult time adjusting to it.

HH: Although you may not have been a "quiet American," as often Asians are described, do you think that generally speaking, that that's an accurate label for Asian Americans and Japanese in particular.

KI: I think so. I think so. I think that in many ways, it's been good, and I think it's been to our distinct advantage that we had been the "quiet Americans," but I think in many respects, it's also been a detriment to us. And I think that now is an opportune time for Japanese Americans to probably stand up a little bit and talk a little bit about their past and the history so that others have a better understanding of what we're all about. I think the big thing is that people should understand that we do have feelings like everybody else, which I think people don't think we have because we are so quiet and stoic as a group.

HH: You've also heard the expression the "model minority" as regarding not only Japanese Americans but Asian Americans in general. How do you feel about that label?

KI: I think that's the label, again, that's probably because I think the older generation, Asians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, I think that they had been "quiet Americans," they have not gotten themselves in trouble with the law. They generally state themselves, and they really haven't assimilated into the population. So I think that people look upon us as being "model Americans" because we don't really get involved with a lot of other things, and I don't know that that's really good. I think that we do have to become more involved, we should be more involved, we have opportunities to do things that other groups really don't have a chance of doing. And I believe very strongly that we should pay back.

HH: And the last question, Roger, is, your children are, as far as race is concerned, they're mixed.

KI: Yes.

HH: Okay. And how do they feel about their Japanese background?

KI: I think they feel very strongly about their Japanese heritage. My oldest daughter, of course, is probably more Japanese than I have ever been or will be. And my younger daughter is probably more mainstream, assimilated person than the older daughter. But I think they both have a very keen feeling for their Japanese American heritage.

HH: Thank you very much.

KI: You're quite welcome.

HH: You were very generous and helpful for this interview.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.