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BS: And then, I guess, what are some of these, like, your fondest memories of your home life with Cherry, with your mom?

KK: Oh, I think it was a lot about work. But again, she was pretty nurturing. And in hindsight, I just can't imagine how she did it all. You read about today, the working woman and how do they have it all, family and all that. She managed to do it. I mean, she would work at her job until 5:30, and sometimes in the summer for babysitting, I'd go to the downtown YMCA day camp, and she'd pick me up, take the Metro bus home to South Beacon Hill, and then immediately start cooking dinner. And my dad, because, you know, he worked pretty hard, he didn't get off till six at his shop. Then we came home and ate dinner around 6:30 or 7:00. And it was only 'til I grew up much later to say that normal people back then kind of eat around five o'clock. So she did that, she made a home. And, once in a while, they were still trying to save up to keep my dad's business afloat, we would go on vacations not that often. I remember the biggest trip in the world was going to Disneyland when I was twelve. And that was really it in terms of... the first time I ever saw on a plane was when we went through Chicago in 1970. So anyway, she was one who just took care of things and took care of us. So, those were kind of my memories of Mom, and I'm pretty sure that was true with a lot of Nisei, so anyway.

Maybe one more story, I'll tell about my mom that sort of completes something. I was gonna say this early, and I'll just share the screen. When she was interviewed later about why it was that she was so dedicated... this, by the way, is a PowerPoint slide that I use because -- I think you might be asking about this later -- one of my side jobs is that I am an instructor in University of Washington Bothell Principal Preparation Program. In other words, I train principals for their job. And in talking about leadership, I talk about the fact that you really have to... 'cause it's a hard job -- and you have to take stands. And a lot of times you have to take stands in support of doing the right thing for kids. You have to really understand what you're, what you are about as a person, you'd have to be able to reach back and talk about what was it about your family and your upbringing that gave you the courage and the stamina to do that job, and I used my mom's story as an example. So, I think that this is a picture from her annual, Lincoln High School. And you can tell she was class of 1941. She graduated in June of 1941. You can tell she was an all-American Girl, and this was kind of the Lincoln Lynx Girls Club. And she tells a story about that time and talks a little bit about her aspirations. The boys in the family, my two uncles, they had aspirations to go to college. And of course, our family was really poor. I mean, the dry-cleaning business that they had in Green Lake barely kept the family afloat. So, they were able to earn money because back then you could sign up and get a job in the Alaska canneries. Go up to Alaska for the summer and earn money. You couldn't do that if you were a girl. So, she thought and thought and thought because she wanted to go to the University of Washington in the worst way. So she went to a counselor, the story goes, and said, "I have an idea." And she said, "What I will do is after high school, I'll go to secretary school, get some secretary skills, and get a job and earn money for tuition." So the counselor, I'm sure was patient and kind, and he said, "Well, Cherry, you can do that. But the reality is that no one is going to hire a Japanese girl to do secretarial work." And I imagine that that was just something that she never forgot, first of all.

And then later, here's a picture of her in camp. Joy, you mentioned the fact that she worked for the camp newspaper. The camp being kind of a small town of 10,000, they had their own newspaper. And that's her right there with the newspaper staff. That's also her right there. She's sitting next to a Nisei war hero, Ben Kuroki, who wasn't in the 442. Interestingly enough, he was in army air force, and he was a tail gunner in B-24 bombers and became a hero that way. But the story goes, that she tells at Densho, is that she was put in charge of writing these kinds of women's columns. It was called "Feminidoka," I guess it was. And she said she'd write dumb stories about how you kept your hairdo intact in all the dust that was blowing around and stuff like that. She relates that one day, she was sitting in front of the typewriter and kind of a wave of emotion went over her thinking about how completely unjust this was and how she ended up here. And she didn't write a feminine column that time, she wrote a reminiscence that ended something to the words she said... couldn't quite remember. But she ended the article and said, "We're nothing but birds in a cage." Describing how they felt being in prison. So, in any case, I can't help but think that after all that she went through in redress, and all that she went through thinking about incarceration, and then attaining victory, why else would you at age sixty decide to go back to the University of Washington as a student and get your BA in sociology, which she did? Cum Laude. I mean, I thought to myself, if I was that old, I don't know if I'd want to go back to school and do that. But she did, because, again, that was part of her dream. Not only was she going to get justice, she, by god, was going to get that college degree that she had tried to get 1941. So anyway, so that's about my mom.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.