Ken Taniguchi interview
Item
Title
eng
Ken Taniguchi interview
Description
eng
Ken Taniguchi talks about being born in Fresno in 1951, attending Roeding Elementary, Cooper Junior High School and Fresno High School, then UC San Diego, UC Davis and then law school. He talks about his siblings, then about his paternal grandparents and how they immigrated from Wakayama Ken in Japan, and where his maternal grandparents were from in Saitama Ken. He further discusses his maternal grandfather's history in the United States, how he worked for Theodore Kearney, and traveled through the Southern US in the era of segregation. He describes how his paternal grandparents married and immigrated to Seattle and how his father and aunts and uncle were born there, how they ran a hotel and how his grandparents ended up separating and his grandfather returned to Japan with the children. He talks about how his father was raised in Japan and lived there during World War II, ending up being in the Japanese Merchant Marine as an officer during the war. He discusses how his mother was also born in the US but raised in Japan and was stuck there during the war, how his father survived two ship sinkings during the war and his mother worked in a munitions factory and how both of them were individually able to return to the United States after the war, meeting and getting together on the trip on the same ship. He talks about how his family members on both sides that remained in the United States were incarcerated in the Granada War Relocation Center and had befriended each other, independently of his parents meeting each other. He describes how his father was sent to grammar school in his 20's to learn English and ended up being kicked out for smoking, then his family's store and how his parents got married with his mother moving to Fresno, when he was born as well as his siblings and how he grew up speaking Japanese as his first language. He talks about his passion for fishing, and how he became a wildlife fisheries lawyer and public defender, and becoming bar president of Fresno County. He discusses the sister cities program and Fresno's sister city, Kochi, Japan and his family members experiences in camp and his passion for baseball.
Creator
eng
Taniguchi, Ken
eng
Tinker, Carlene
Relation
eng
Issei to Gosei Oral History Project
Coverage
eng
Fresno, California
Date
eng
4/29/2019
Identifier
eng
SCMS_igoh_00008
extracted text
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Good morning, Mr. Taniguchi.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Good morning.
>> Carlene Tinker: Welcome to Special Collections. We are at the
Henry Madden Library and Special Collections is a research
center here and we are focusing on an oral history project. And
the name of the project is Issei to Gosei Interview Project. And
I know that's a mouthful and actually it's a condensed version
of a title that we had come up with representing the five
generations of Japanese in the United States. For the viewers,
I'd like to take a little time right now to explain what the
generations are.
>> Ken Taniguchi: [Laughing] Oh, go ahead.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Issei are the first ones who came
probably late 1800s to early 1900s from Japan. So that Issei,
“ichi,” is the first number in Japanese. Their children are
called Nisei. They are born in the United States. Their children
are called Sansei. Sanseis’ children are called Yonsei. And the
Yonseis’ children are called gosei. Which generation are you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I'm Sansei except I'm probably more, I
guess culturally more, like a Nisei.
>> Carlene Tinker: More what? Nisei?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I'm more Nisei, my upbringing, but
generational-wise I'm a Sansei.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. But -- oh, I see. OK. I understand. OK.
So the focus of our project is specifically to gather stories
about people who have grown up in the San Joaquin Valley,
especially Japanese Americans, to find out what their
experiences were like. And I believe our director, Tammy Lau,
had talked to you earlier and she was inspired by your story. So
that is why we are talking to you today.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Alright.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Today is Monday, April 15, 2019. And the
time is 10:03. OK? First of all, let's start with some
identification. What is your full name?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Kenneth Kenichi Taniguchi.
>> Carlene Tinker: What's your middle name?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Kenichi. Kenichi.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. You're going to have to speak up for me
because I'm hard of hearing.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Alright.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] OK. Date of birth?
>> Ken Taniguchi: September 12, 1951.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1951, so you weren't in a camp.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No.
>> Carlene Tinker: No, OK. So your parents had come back to
California at that time? Or is that true?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, my parents were in California, yes.
Coming back to California -- they were not interned so they did
come back to California in the late 1940s.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Well we'll talk about that a little bit
later. They happened to have been in Japan at that time?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Correct.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. OK, but where were you born? You were
born where?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right here in Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: In Fresno. Do you remember what hospital?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Saint Agnes, the old Saint Agnes.
>> Carlene Tinker: The old Saint Agnes over on Glenn Avenue?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, OK. And is that where your family was
living, in that area at the time?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My family was living in West Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Oh, West Fresno. What was the address of
that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know the exact address. It was a
market, a mom and pop grocery store, on the corner of Merced and
C Street.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! OK. So how long did they live there?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I don't know how long they were there. I
know I was there after I was born until I was about five years
old.
>> Carlene Tinker: Until you were five years old. OK. OK. What
schools did you attend?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Roeding Elementary and then Cooper Junior High
School, Fresno High School. Those were locally. Then I went on
to college after that.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Alright. And your educational background
-- as I recall, you went to UC Davis. Is that correct?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Originally UC San Diego.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, that's right. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Transferred to UC Davis. Graduated from UC
Davis and then I also went to the law school.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Yeah, we'll talk more about that in a
minute. Marital status -- are you married?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Single.
>> Carlene Tinker: Single. And family members, do you have any
of your siblings still surviving?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. All of them are still surviving, yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Are they here in Fresno?
>> Ken Taniguchi: One is in Fresno, my sister. And then I have a
brother in the Bay Area, a brother in San Diego, and another
sister in Hawaii.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So there were four of you.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Five, myself included.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK [laughing]. Well, we can't forget you, can
we? OK, so let's go on. I usually like to start with your
grandparents' generation because that is actually the beginning
of your story.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Correct.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. So let's talk about your paternal
side.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Alright.
>> Carlene Tinker: What -- where did they come from? Why did
they come here? Names, etc.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, my grandfather is Kosobro Taniguchi
[phonetic] from Asumi in Wakayama Ken.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: My grandmother, her maiden name was Hana Ono.
My sister likes to make fun of that because she says she's
related to Yoko. She's also from Asumi in Wakayama Ken.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, and where is Wakayama Ken?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Wakayama Ken is located on Honshu, the main
island, and it's -- if you know the shape of Japan, you know it
has the shape of a dragon. The island kind of at the lower -the first island just below Honshu would be Shikoku.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: North of Shikoku would be pretty much where
Wakayama Ken is.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. I think my grandfather on my dad's side
was from there, however he died before I was born so I never got
to find out anything about him. What about your mother's side?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My mother's side is Yoshiyo Hayashis
[phonetic], my grandfather. He's from Saitama Ken.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I believe my grandmother -- I'm trying to
remember her name right now. I can't remember her last name but
let's see -- her first name. My grandmother knew me but she
passed away after I was born. Yoshiyo and -- I've got it written
down but I can't recall her name right now.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, where was she from?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Apparently she was also from the same area,
from Saitama.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: She was pretty much, I guess, a mail order
bride. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Now, locate that place for me. I don't
remember --
>> Ken Taniguchi: Saitama Ken is located pretty much to the
northwest of Tokyo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Northwest of Tokyo, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Maybe west or northwest of Tokyo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. I'm trying to think of my mother's
side, where they're from, but I can't right at the moment. What
kind of occupations did your grandparents have?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I know my mother's side, my grandfather
on my mother's side, he had a much more interesting experience
in this country. I don't know exactly what he did. I know that
he made and lost several fortunes, apparently. He was an early
immigrant to this country before the turn of the 20th century so
in the late 1800s he came here.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: He landed, apparently, in Seattle from what I
understand, migrated his way down south, came all the way down
into the Fresno area. He actually said -- my mother says he
actually worked for Theodore Kearney at one time on the Kearney
plantation or farm out there toward Kerman. My grandfather, I
remember, he described one time Kearney Boulevard back then as
being a long, dusty road with little tiny palm trees about kneehigh all the way down for miles and miles. Which of course now
have got giant palm trees.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, they're very tall.
>> Ken Taniguchi: He was much more of the adventurous type. He
traveled all the way back east. Apparently he went to the
World's Fair in Georgia at sometime in the late 1890s at some
point.
>> Carlene Tinker: Now, which grandfather was this?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My mother's side.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow!
>> Ken Taniguchi: Iyoshiyo Hayashi [phonetic]. He went into the
deep south at the time of, you know, pretty much post-Civil War,
highly segregated. How he would go there and they had never seen
a Japanese person before ->> Carlene Tinker: Oh my gosh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: He said that he saw the signs saying when old
drinking fountains and restrooms were all separated by, you
know, colored or not colored.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: He thought the water would be colored when he
drank out of a colored water or drinking fountain. [Chuckling]
He said he mentioned something about going onto a bus one time
and all the African Americans were at the back of the bus and he
tried to go back there and the caucasians all said, no, no, no,
you're not a colored, you've got to sit up in front. He didn't
understand what was going on but he followed directions.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I know he traveled quite a bit back east. His
favorite city, apparently -- I think he was working in some kind
of Chinese restaurant or something in Cincinnati.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh for heaven's sake.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And Cincinnati was his favorite town. I found
out later when I found out he was a Cincinnati Reds fan. Why did
he like the Cincinnati Reds? Because he had been living in
Cincinnati and you know back then that was the beginning of
major league baseball. He was a Cincinnati Reds fan.
>> Carlene Tinker: So about what years would those be?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, you know, it's very foggy back then. My
mother has never really disclosed all that. I should ask her
more questions about that.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But she's hard of hearing so it's hard to get
answers out of her.
>> Carlene Tinker: Join the crowd [laughing].
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I know he was there probably into the
1920s.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1920s.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Yeah, I bet there weren't very many
Japanese at all at that time ->> Ken Taniguchi: Oh no.
>> Carlene Tinker: In the east, right? Or in the south.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: That's an interesting story that you told
about the colored versus non-colored.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Apparently he had a caucasian girlfriend at
one time back there too that he was strongly considering
marrying and then my mother said he had an epiphany when one day
he was walking with her and he looked into the mirror of the
reflections off of a store and saw him with his girlfriend and
he for some reason he felt this is not going to work. And so he
broke off that relationship. And then he sent back to Japan to
try to find a bride. And that's how my grandmother came to this
country.
>> Carlene Tinker: I see. So that was a picture bride marriage.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So OK. This is your maternal grandfather?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Now what about your paternal grandfather?
Tell us about him. [Laughter]
>> Ken Taniguchi: [Laughing] That's another interesting set of
stories. He came apparently in the early 1900s. So I'm guessing
-- I've got the records. I just can't remember off the top of my
head. I was able to pull up the archival records from the
Japanese National Museum and saw the boat that he arrived in
from Japan into Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: I'll be darned.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I have to -- I'm guessing it was something
like 1910, 11, 12. Somewhere around there, I think.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And then he also had called for a wife from
Japan and that's how my grandmother ended up coming. And they
had known each other apparently in Japan, I believe. So they had
already kind of preset the whole thing. In Seattle he was -- he
and my grandmother apparently were running a hotel or operating
a hotel or managing, I'm not sure. But my grandfather was an
avid fishermen which kind of rubbed off on me, I suppose. So
apparently he had -- my father was, well my aunts were born
there first. My father had two older sisters who were both born
first. My father was the third born and that was in 1924 he was
born in Seattle. So they were all living in Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I know they had a hotel going into the
1920s and almost into the '30s, I believe.
>> Carlene Tinker: Were there a lot of Japanese living up there
at that time?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh yes because that was one of the ports of
entry up there.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: There was probably more -- I think more
Japanese probably came into Seattle, I think, than anywhere
else, from guessing right now because most of the records I've
seen seem to be at ports of entry being Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Most of them were bachelor or single men and
the hotels up there were pretty much -- I'm not sure if they
were room and board or whatever but there were a lot of single
men residing in those hotels up there in the Japantown area of
Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So your grandparents were -- this was
your paternal grandpa.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. And they were running this boarding house
or hotel.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, it was called the Royal Hotel. So ->> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So that's -- and I know where it was at. I
mean, I've had the address. I even tracked down the location of
them when I did some investigating on my own. And of course it's
gone now but it's a rather nice looking highrise office complex
right where it used to be. But it is right in the Japantown area
of Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, OK. So What happened after they ran this
hotel for a while? Didn't your grandpa go fishing a lot?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well yes, he was. Like I said, my grandmother
was left pretty much in charge of the hotel. My grandfather was
more interested in going fishing and apparently my grandmother
had an attraction for one of the tenants over there. So ended up
one thing led to another and next thing you know my grandparents
are being separated. And my grandfather took his kids, my two
aunts, my father, and then there was a younger brother my dad
had. He also went back with Japan with them, back to Asumi.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: My grandmother apparently remained in Seattle
with her new beau and they married. So she became a Kimura
[phonetic].
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And apparently we have to -- you know, this is
one of the family things that's we've come to recognize. That my
dad's younger brother may very well have been fathered by Mr.
Kimura.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Because my grandmother went back to Japan and
brought the young, her young son back to America with her. My
dad and his two sisters stayed in Japan for quite a while.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And my dad was pretty much educated in Japan
from preschool all the way through -- well, through afterwards
as well. He was in Japan throughout the war alone because both
of my aunts had been called back to help their mother in
whatever business they were operating which I believe was a
produce business in Los Angeles by the end of the 1930s.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, these are the Kimuras?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. Kimuras were Massawa Kimura [phonetic] -that was my step-grandfather who was the only grandfather I've
actually known on my father's side.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And my grandmother, Hana. So they were both
living in Compton, I believe.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, Compton. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And so they had brought both my Auntie Yasco
[phonetic] and Auntie Tasco [phonetic] back to the States with
them. Neither of them spoke English so they had to pick up
English. My Auntie Yasco, she ended up -- she was actually
pretty good. She picked up the English language much better. My
Auntie Tasco pretty much spoke Japanese. She never did seem to
pick up English very well. My uncle George, George Kimura -- he
took the name Kimura. He was born Taniguchi but he took the name
Kimura. His entire upbringing pretty much was in the United
States because he was brought back as a toddler. So he didn't
have the same upbringing as my aunts and my father did.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Now, that was your dad. So your dad
stayed in Japan?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My dad was in Japan and he went through
school. He got accepted to the Japanese Merchant Marine Academy
which was a very prestigious organization in -- let's see. I
think it was in Toba, I believe. And he was in -- he was, I
think, first year cadet at the Merchant Marine Academy. First
year or second year, I can't remember. Well, I take that back.
It must have been second year but I think he was -- because he
went into the Merchant Marine Academy, I believe, in early 1941.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So he had pretty much finished his first year
at the academy when World War II broke out. And ->> Carlene Tinker: And of course he stayed in Japan.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, he couldn't come back. I mean, once
you're ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Once the war broke out, there was no way to
get moving back and forth between the two countries. And my
father, who was a US citizen born in Seattle, being at the
Japanese Merchant Marine Academy, the entire merchant fleet was
conscripted into the Japanese Navy.
>> Carlene Tinker: Hmm.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So my father ended up being pretty much a
Japanese Naval Officer.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Even though he was a non-combatant. He was a
merchant seamen.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, right. Now, what about your mom? I
understand that she was raised in Japan. Is that right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: how did that happen?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, my mother was born in 1928 in Los
Angeles.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Because my grandparents apparently had come
all the way back to California by that point and he was -- and I
really don't know what my grandfather was doing in the Los
Angeles area but I should have. I know I have it written down
someplace but I don't have it off the top of my head.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: My mother was actually the second born.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Her oldest sister, unfortunately, had passed
away.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So -- in fact, I'll give you a little story
about that one too. My mother's side of the family has this, I
don't know, this psychic thing going on with them that my mother
always alludes to. But my aunt that passed away, my mother's
oldest sister, had a very odd name. Her name was Sound of a
Thousand Years. It translates as Sound of a Thousand Years. And
my -- and the firstborn child and everything else. So apparently
my grandparents decided to take her back to Japan as an infant
and wanted her to be raised in Japan since the custom was back
then discrimination and the lack of proper education was pretty
noticeable to the Japanese living in this country -- that they
weren't treated as full citizens.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And given a second class education, so to
speak. And those who could afford it would often send their
children back to Japan so they get a good education. So as an
infant, my grandparents took my older sister to Japan and left
her there. And apparently my grandparents were living in this
country and then one night while they were sleeping, they were
awakened that night by just a tremendous noise. They didn't know
what the heck was going on. They thought, you know, that just
whatever it was -- it just roused them out of their sleep. And
they woke up the next morning and they asked everybody in the
building what happened last night and they said, what? They
said, well that huge noise last night. And they said that they
said, there was nothing last night. Nobody heard anything -just my grandparents. And then they got the telegraph from Japan
that their daughter had died.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh wow. Isn't ->> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. And that's one of the stories. The other
story is -- and I'll tell you that there's a [good one?] here.
My sister, my mother and her sister and their younger brother,
as they were born they were all sent back to Japan to relatives
in Saitama and in the Tokyo area for their education. So my
mother was sent to Japan preschool. So she had her entire
education also in Japan.
>> Carlene Tinker: So she was there probably in 1930? You said
she was born in 1928.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So in 1930 she was sent to Japan and she went,
she was all over. She was in high school when World War II broke
out.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, so basically she got stuck there.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And like I said, this was -- this psychic
thing is my grandparents, my mother. And apparently one of my
stories -- two stories -- that we have is I think one. I think
maybe it was my mother or my aunt or somebody met this young
couple who were expecting a child and one of them, they told
them, you know, she's going to have a baby. And he says, whoever
it was -- my mother or my aunt -- just blurted out, no, they're
not. And he said, well, yes, she's having a child. No, no, she's
not. And sure enough, the child was stillborn.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And they were going, this is kind of strange.
And another story from my mother's side is how during the war, I
can't remember who it was but my mother tells the story how one
of her aunts was, her son was off to war. And she was coming
down the street and saw her son walking toward her down the
street and she thought, oh good, my son's come back from the
war. So she ran up to meet him and he just disappeared in front
of her. And then she got the word that her son had died that
day.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my gosh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So this kind of runs in -- [laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! Ooooh. That's kind of eerie [laughing].
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I have my own experience like that too
which is kind of strange. I was up doing a wine tasting up in
Sonoma County.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I was supposed to spend the weekend up
there and after dinner that night, I just -- something was
telling me I had to get back to Fresno. And I couldn't
understand why I had a strong urge I had to get back to Fresno.
But I said, you know, I got -- I just got to go back to Fresno.
So I canceled the rest of the trip, came back to Fresno. So I
got here that night and that's the night my grandmother passed
away.
>> Carlene Tinker: Who did?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My grandmother.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my gosh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So -- [laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: You guys have this special talent. [laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: It's a little eerie to have to deal with
sometimes but -- and my mother, she keeps using that as for one
reason or another she tells us things are going to happen. And
most of the time nothing happens. But you have to have a little
bit of hmmm, you know? Maybe I ought to just listen to some of
these things sometimes. So ->> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] OK! Whatever you say!
[ Laughter ]
Well, OK. So getting back to your mom and your dad, they didn't
know each other in Japan?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, no. Not at all.
>> Carlene Tinker: However, didn't they meet in Japan somehow?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, no.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, they didn't?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, well now, when did they come back to the
United States? When were they able to?
>> Ken Taniguchi: After the war. My dad survived at least two
sinkings by US submarines during World War II. He worked on the
Merchant Fleet for Japan. And my mother survived. I think she
was in Tokyo when Doolittle came over. She was passed around
from one relative to another during the war because, you know,
before they were getting money from the United States to support
them. But once communications broke off between Japan and the
United States, my mother and her sister and her uncle were
pretty much left as almost, you know, cast-offs and then passed
off from relative to relative.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I mean, they were -- I think they were even
separated out because, you know, they, one, couldn't support
three kids.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You know,
relative. So my mother, you
during the day and she was,
then, they were all sent to
so they were passed from relative to
know, was a high school student
as all the other girls were back
the munitions factory.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So that was the war effort that was going on
in Japan. So both of my parents were somewhat involved in the
war by circumstances -- my father in the Japanese Merchant Fleet
and my mother being conscripted as a schoolgirl to work in
munitions. When the war ended, things were really tough in Japan
by then, you know. The country was devastated.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: My mother was telling me how they had
instructions on which weeds were edible to try to fend for
themselves. But my mother was fortunate because she was a US
citizen and when the occupational troops came in and they
brought their families with the occupational troops, especially
with the staff, the upper military staff, they were looking for
domestic help. And they were fearful of, you know, Japanese.
They would, you know, they weren't -- they were very distrustful
of them. But the fact that my mother was a US citizen, she was
able to find employment. So she was one of the lucky ones that
was able to get work post World War II in Japan. [Inaudible] The
opportunity to repatriate back to the United States arose little
by little after World War II. And I'm not sure what year it was.
It's got to be '46-47, somewhere around there, that they were,
both my parents were able to get a ride back to the States
because they were US citizens and the Japanese, they'd get
repatriated.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, right. So did they meet during the
time that they were coming back? Or when did they meet? I kind
of remember there was something about being on a boat together.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. The USS Swallow.
>> Carlene Tinker: What was that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: The boat's name was the USS Swallow.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh [laughing].
>> Ken Taniguchi: In fact, I've got a picture of it and
everything else too. It was a converted US military transport
vessel that they were using to bring people back across.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And they were, they happened to be on the same
boat coming back to the United States.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: The men and women were segregated in the
course, you know, where the bunks where and whatnot. My father
was bunked with my mother's brother. So my uncle, they didn't -nobody knew each other but he happened to be my Uncle Leo was
bunked with my father.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And through my Uncle Leo, he Uncle Leo,
introduced my father to both my mother and my aunt. And my
aunt's name is Naomi.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So they were -- my mother's name is Marie. So
they were both introduced by my Uncle Leo to them. And it's a
long trip coming back from Japan back then.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] Long enough.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It's -- you know, I guess it's close to a
month-long journey maybe.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, that long! [Laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, it's several weeks, a couple weeks at
least. So anyway, they were, you know, they hit it off and
everybody on the boat, the ship, was saying, oh those two, they
got something going on here, you know. So they were the kind of
the ->> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] Long enough for them to become
interested in each other.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, yes. So apparently that's what happened
on the ship coming balance across from Japan.
>> Carlene Tinker: And that was the US Swallow?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, the USS Swallow.
>> Carlene Tinker: did you say you have a picture of it?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh yeah. I've got pictures of quite a bit of
things I've got in here. This is on my iPad but ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, just let me know when you want to
introduce a picture.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, let me log this thing on so I've got it
on here. Let's see. See, I think I -- oh. Oops. I think I'll let
it load. You know, I'll let it load up first.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, well we'll come back to that. So they had
this romance that budded on the US Swallow and then did they get
married after that or what happened after they landed in the
United States?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, it was kind of funny because, like I
said, they didn't know each other at all.
>> Carlene Tinker: Who didn't know each other?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My parents. Before they had been on the boat,
they didn't know each other at all. So the ship ended up -Going up, ending up in San Francisco. That's where the vessel
ended up.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Finally disembarking. And you know, the ship
pulls in and pulled up next to the wharf and whatnot and they
looked down there. And they're looking for their parents. And
there's my father's -- my uncle, my grandfather, and my
grandmother from my dad's side. And there's my grandfather and
grandmother on my mother's side, and they're next to each other
at the dock.
>> Carlene Tinker: They're standing each other, coincidentally.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, they were with each other. Yeah. And so
they get off the boat not knowing that both my grandparents who
didn't know that their children were hooking up on this ship
coming back knew each other because they were been in Amache.
>> Carlene Tinker: Who was ->> Ken Taniguchi: During camp.
>> Carlene Tinker: Who was in Amache?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Both my grandparents on my father's side and
my mother's side.
>> Carlene Tinker: And your mother's. So that would be the
Taniguchis and the Kimuras.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, that would be the Taniguchis and the
Hayashiss.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, Hayashis, excuse me.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, well it's actually it would be the
Kimuras and Hayashis because my grandmother remarried Mr.
Kimura.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, OK. Thank you.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So the Kimuras and the Hayashiss were both at
the dock to greet their children who were coming back, not
knowing that their children had hooked up during the trip coming
back from Japan. [Laughter] In fact, they had known each other
so well that they were both in Los Angeles, I believe, at the
time. Or -- I know they knew each other. But they had both
carpooled to greet them up in San Francisco.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: That's an amazing story.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. It was bizarre coincidence. Bizarre.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] But then -- well then did your
mother and father continue their relationship or did they
separate at that point or --?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well my father went with my Kimura
grandparents and they resettled in Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: Ok.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Where my grandfather, Kimura, was operating a
grocery store. My mother went with her parents back down to Los
Angeles. So they were separated because now my father's in
Fresno, my mother's in Los Angeles. But apparently the
relationship was enough that my father would take the time to
drive from Fresno to Los Angeles to go out with my mother which
is, you know, quite an endeavor considering the distance back
then. It wasn't a quick trip from Fresno to Los Angeles at all.
I mean, it probably took easily half a day to get down there. So
->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. So your mom went to L.A.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. And your dad was staying here.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Again, what did your dad do?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well [laughs], initially my father had to
learn English.
>> Carlene Tinker: He what?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Had to learn English.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! OK. Well both of them probably.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. Pretty much both of them.
was, you know, he was in his 20s at that point. So
to grammar school with a bunch of other -- what do
We know the Japanese Americans who are educated in
known as Kibei.
My father
he got sent
[inaudible].
Japan are
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So both my parents are Kibei. And my father
and for several other Kibei in the Fresno area, they were all
rounded up and sent to grammar school in Fresno to learn
English. But my dad was kicked out.
>> Carlene Tinker: What school was this? Was it one of the
public schools or --?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, it was one of the public schools.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: But I can't remember the name of the school.
I'll have to look it up. He was in -- went to one of the public
schools in Fresno but he was booted out.
>> Carlene Tinker: Huh! Why was he booted out?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Smoking.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
[ Laughter ]
But he was also an adult at that time, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, he was. He was. Yeah. They were all -all these Kibei young men who were sent to this grammar school
were all basically men. They weren't, they weren't children. But
they ->> Carlene Tinker: Was that on the west side, do you think?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Ah, you know, I've got the name of the school
somewhere in my records. I can't remember where it is. But in
fact I should try to get -- I guess if I could get this thing to
open up I've got pictures of him and his buddies in front of the
school and they look like a bunch of, I don't know -- I guess
you could call them like gang members hanging out [laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: I was going to suggest that but I resisted,
but you -- [laughing].
>> Ken Taniguchi: It looks like a bunch of young, little punks.
They're all, you know, hanging together there. And I can see
these guys smoking and getting in trouble because they're -- you
know, they're young men. They're not kids.
>> Carlene Tinker: Well obviously he didn't last very long. When
-- so his English didn't take off right away?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, and you know, his English never did fully
develop. I mean, he spoke business English pretty much and the
things he needed to know to operate a business. So you know, my
mother ended up picking up English a lot better than my father
did.
>> Carlene Tinker: Well now, what kind of -- well, he went into
business. What kind of business did he do?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, he was -- he started apparently working
with my grandparents Kimura at their market. And then when I was
born, I was like I said, living in the back of a mom and pop
grocery store. So that was their store.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: The Columbia Market was my parents were
operating it.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, you said on Merced Street.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Merced and C Street, yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It was across from the old Columbia Elementary
School.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Because I remember -- I can remember
living there and you know, you look out the front door you're
looking straight across the street at an elementary school.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. OK, so they were separated after they got
off the boat and corresponded for a while, right? How long did
it take for them to get married?
>> Ken Taniguchi: It must have been about -- I'm guessing it was
about two or three years.
>> Carlene Tinker: Two or three years?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, because they were married in 1950.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1950, OK. So they came back probably '46-47?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So they get married and then Mom comes
from L.A. She stays here with your dad, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Once they married, yeah. They settled in
Fresno and that's where I was born.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. Are you having trouble getting on
[trying to use IPad]?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, I need to get onto the WiFi system here
it looks like.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I see one so it looks like a public access.
I'll see if I can load that on. I guess Bulldogs is the ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, I don't know how to do that.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It says I'm -- it looks like I'm logged in
now. [Lots of notification alarms] Oh yes. Oh yeah [laughing].
It looks like my [inaudible] definitely. I think I'm on here.
OK. OK, let's see if this is going to let me open this up now.
I'll see what happens.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. I had trouble
with my phone, too, getting on. OK. So you were the first one
born. What was your date of birth again?
>> Ken Taniguchi: September 12, 1951.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1951. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. In fact, my middle name Kenichi -- Kenichi -- in Japanese characters, the kanji character for ken is
the same character you use for important documents like on a
constitution or a treaty because that was when the final peace
treaty was ratified with Japan. So my mother used that character
for my middle name.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So that's the derivation. I like that. So
you were the first one born.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: And you have two sisters.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: And the brother.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Two brothers.
>> Carlene Tinker: No, two brothers. Yeah. OK. What was I going
to say about that? Now, because your parents were Kibeis and
their English was not very fluent, I assume that they were
speaking mostly Japanese at home.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Exactly. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, so you kids were speaking Japanese only,
probably.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Me.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, just you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think just primarily myself. My sister was
one year behind me. It's boy, girl, boy -- it's boy, girl, boy,
girl, boy.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: OK, so we're flip-flop-flip-flop. When I was
born, yeah, that's pretty much all we spoke was Japanese. I was
-- my grandparents as well. They spoke Japanese to me and my
parents spoke Japanese to me. My first language was Japanese. My
mother still has -- I have them still. There's a vinyl recording
of me talking and singing in Japanese. Just a little side story
there. Back then, a lot of these mom and pop grocery stores, it
was all cash or some kind of bar system going on in these
stores. And one of the things they had, when somebody owed them
money they gave them a record-making machine. So that's how I
ended up my voice getting on vinyl. And I'm speaking Japanese a
mile a minute and singing Japanese. And I can't understand
myself anymore. [Laughter] And it's me speaking. It's kind of
bizarre.
>> Carlene Tinker: Do you still speak Japanese?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Some. I never really kept it up. So my speech
pattern and my vocabulary kind of died when I entered -- well,
it was locked during that period when I entered public
education.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But so I do have a fundamental grasp of the
Japanese language and sometimes I'll rattle off a sentence
without even thinking about it. And then someone from Japan will
think I'm speaking fluent and they'll start talking back at me
and all of a sudden I hit a stone wall. [Laughter] And I have to
tell them, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
>> Carlene Tinker: I'm sure, however, if you stayed there a
while, you'd be back in business.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I notice that when I go back to Japan
sometimes all of a sudden I'll start thinking in Japanese and ->> Carlene Tinker: I know, isn't that interesting?!
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, so I start thinking Japanese and I've
even -- I take these delegations to Japan once in a while. And
it was kind of bizarre. I got so involved in something one time
that somebody said something in English and I started answering
in Japanese. They looked at -- wait, wait. Oh, excuse me. I just
push back again.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] Yeah, I'm not very good at other
languages but I had a little experience with trying to learn
Spanish. And after being in Mexico for a while it took a little
while but after about three weeks then I started thinking in
Spanish rather than English. Well, getting back to your not
being able to speak English right away, that gave you a rough
start in school.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, it was extremely bad. When I was growing
up in west Fresno, west Fresno back then -- we're talking in the
early '50s -- was still a melting pot of immigrants. It wasn't
primarily any particular ethnicity over there. You know,
Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, African Americans, as well as
Armenians, as well as Italians, just about any ethnic group you
could think of when they first immigrated to the or moved into
the Fresno area seemed to end up in west Fresno. So we -everybody got along. And I didn't have any -- I didn't realize,
you know, anything special. The next-door neighbors were the
Ranterias [phonetic] and so, you know, I was speaking a little
bit of Spanish. But most of the time it was Japanese. And you
know, my mother was taking me to the Buddhist church and so
everything was hunky dory until my father decided to move us out
of west Fresno and he bought a house in what was back then
northwest Fresno which is the area of Dakota and Shields.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Dakota, Shields, West Avenue, that area right
there.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Roeding Elementary is on the corner of Dakota
and West Avenue so that's the exact -- that's we were one block
from the school.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But when I moved into that area, it was
suburbia, pretty much a new suburban area. The houses were all
built post World War II. And the kids there were all caucasian.
I mean, I was the only Japanese kid. I think I might have been
the only -- well, other than some Jewish families and some
Armenian families, everything else was pretty much straight
caucasian. A lot of people from, you know, who had come here
during the Depression from Oklahoma. So I knew there were -- so
that's the group I ended up falling into and they had not seen
anyone Japanese other than the war movies and the fathers having
been through World War II. So I ran into a lot of racial
hostility.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. So what kinds of experiences did you
have? Did the kids tease you, bully you, harass you? What kind?
Did they -- of course, you weren't speaking English yet.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, it was ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, you were struggling with that.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think in the group that I was going -- my
own age group, you know, we're all kindergarteners, first grade.
I went from first grade all the way up through sixth grade in
Roeding Elementary. The biggest prejudice I seemed to be getting
was from those kids in the older grades.
>> Carlene Tinker: They were what?
>> Ken Taniguchi: The older grades. You know? The ->> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You know, the kids that were -- you know, four
or five years ahead of me.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Of course, those kids were born, you know, end
of World War II.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: They were 1946-47. Their fathers are just come
out of the military. So the fact that I was Japanese and I had,
you know, coke bottle glasses and I had pretty much a butch
haircut -- Buddha head haircut -- boy, I was like stereotypic of
what they'd been trained to hate.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So the older kids were the ones that I got
most of the grief from. And yeah, I would be chased down by
groups of boys coming home from school and there was an open
field just past between the grammar school and my house which
was a block away. There was an open field. There was still a lot
of agriculture -- there was a cow across the street from our
house. That's how it was back then. [Laughter] And I remember
being ambushed by these boys sometimes coming home from school.
And I'd be in the middle of a dirt field. Just, man, they'd be
throwing dirt clods and rocks at me and I'd be trying to fight
myself off of these kids coming at me.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my gosh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: I got pretty good at throwing things, you
know?
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah!
>> Ken Taniguchi: I was pretty good.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] Well, were you walking by yourself
or were you with any of your ->> Ken Taniguchi: No, I was by myself.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: But now, I assume it didn't last the whole
time you were in elementary school because as you, as time
passed, those kids graduated and they went on. And then you
learned English. OK, of course, that helped, right? So what were
your experiences like as you went on to junior high and high
school?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, it definitely got better as the other
kids graduated out or moved on. And you know, when you start
getting into high school and junior high school you're dealing
with a lot shorter age groups. There's three-year chunks,
basically, right? Because junior high school was 7th, 8th, and
9th, and high school was 10, 11, and 12. So you know, now you're
dealing with a much smaller group of kids and you're dealing
with kids -- as you move forward, you know, you got three years
coming in behind you. So my sister was one year behind me. And
my brother is about three years behind me. Three, four -- yeah,
three years behind me. So my sister got some of the same grief
that I did. But she had a different way of having to cope with
it. She was a girl so she had to cope with it a different way.
But as I got toward the end of grammar school, things got much
easier. And then by the time I had gotten to junior high school,
then I'm just basically with my own gang or my own group anymore
and as a matter of fact, one of my oldest friends is we went to
kindergarten together. And most of my buddies here in Fresno, we
all went through, you know, that whole era, the time period from
elementary school through junior high school through high school
together. We all went through Boy Scouts together. We all went
through Explorer Scouts together. So the bond with my gang, as
we call ourselves the wolf pack, is, you know, engrained in that
period of time when we all bonded. So yeah. It got -- by the
time I got into junior high school I didn't run into that
problem nearly as much as I did before. In high school, the same
thing. And of course as the larger schools you went to, the more
kids you got, we started drawing from other areas. So now there
were other Japanese American kids, a lot more other ethnic mixes
in there -- you know, Chinese and one of my other oldest best
friends is Mexican American. And he came into my elementary
school in the fifth grade and he's been a lifelong friend as
well. And ->> Carlene Tinker: I'm trying to think of what years these were,
Ken, when you were in elementary school and high school.
>> Ken Taniguchi: 1956 would have been when I started
kindergarten.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, '56. OK. Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, so I was only about five years old then.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And then so then, you know, you got
kindergarten then seven years after that, so 1960 -- let's see,
'63 would be junior high school because I was in seventh grade
when Kennedy was assassinated.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And then high school was '66 through '69.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Yeah, I'm trying to remember what the
geographic distribution of Japanese were and other ethnic groups
during this time. As I recall, the railroad tracks were a
dividing line for a lot of them. I mean, segregation. I'm
surprised that you were actually over in the northwest side of
Fresno.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, that's my father's doing. My father
wanted to move us into what he felt would be a better
neighborhood, better environment. You know, trying to look after
his kids. He thought, you know, going into suburbia would be
better than dealing with what he thought was a degrading
neighborhood in west Fresno. So he moved us to the northwest
Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. OK. And then as I recall, you told me
earlier about not being a very good student.
[ Laughter ]
In grammar school. And I think that was a result of, you know,
your inability to speak English fluently and there was some
correlation between that. And I think at one point didn't your
mom want to hold you back? Or was there an issue like that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. It was -- I had a very rough start. In
kindergarten I didn't speak English. It was -- if it wasn't for
television which, you know, one of the new things that came out,
black and white television. Probably one of the -- I guess one
of the tools that people used to start learning the language.
And my mother, she saw the hassles I was going through. She
decided that it wasn't going to happen to the rest of her kids.
So she started forcing herself to use English rather than
Japanese at home. We hardly ever saw my father. He was working
all the time. So you know, and I started school, basically
trying to catch up just with the language. So I was a terrible
student first grade, second grade, third grade, you know, all
the way through elementary school. But I guess I did stand out
because I was a troublemaker. I was a class clown, goof-off,
whatever. A funny story on one of my first trials as an
attorney. I wasn't even looking at the jurors that were coming
in that day but the judge asks the jury panel, you know, do you
know any of the parties. And this lady said, I believe I know
Mr. Taniguchi and I looked up. And I go, oh my gosh. It was my
first grade teacher.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! [laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: She had remembered me. [Laughing] But yeah,
all the way through elementary school I was pretty bad. By the
third -- I was basically, you know, C-D student.
>> Carlene Tinker: Whoa!
>> Ken Taniguchi: Terrible. By the third grade, I was below
grade level. You know ->> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: By then they test you to see if you're keeping
up with the rest of your classmates. One of my good friends,
Milo Lukovic [phonetic] and I were pretty much in the same
situation and he was also below grade level. So they kept Milo
back a year. Back then, if a student wasn't keeping up with his
classmates, they'd make him retake that grade over again. So
Milo got held back and it has a stigma to it. You know, we were
good friends when I was, you know, all the way up until that
point and then when he got held back, all of a sudden, you know,
he was no longer part of the gang anymore. You know? So I
completely lost contact with Milo. My mother was worried about
me so she told my fourth grade teacher -- because I got through
third and went to fourth and in fourth grade I was again in
trouble and whatnot, messing up. And my mother asked my fourth
grade teacher to hold me back. And I know her name, Mrs. Dudley.
She told my mother no. She said, you know, he's not stupid. He
just needs to catch up. You know? And she thought it would be
detrimental to hold me back, making me -- in a way, teachers
need to be aware of these types of things, you know. The selfesteem of a person is important and [inaudible] to their
educational track. So she said no, make him struggle. Make him
earn it. So my mother followed her advice and let me continue.
And I was pretty much still struggling all the way through
seventh grade. And then all of a sudden, eighth grade, I guess
everything just finally came into place. And all of a sudden
from becoming a barely passing D and C student, I started
getting As and Bs. And it took off from there.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. And then when you got to high school, I
think, you got good enough grades that you were winning a
scholarship to university.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I got a Cal State scholarship, yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Which one was it?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Cal State.
>> Carlene Tinker: Cal State?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, California State scholarship. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. And so then high school was just the
opposite of grammar school.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: For you. You found your niche. You were able
to speak English well. And as I recall, you felt very
comfortable in high school. You found your friends and you
started some clubs, didn't you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I did a -- I got involved in more things
than just, you know, being a goofball. I was involved in clubs.
I ran for class office. All the things that, you know, you need
to do to get into college, all of a sudden I was doing all those
things. And so yeah --
>> Carlene Tinker: Mrs. Dudley did a good thing.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, she did.
>> Carlene Tinker: She knew what she was doing.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, smart teacher.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. And I'm glad your mother didn't
capitulate.
[ Laughter ]
So then you successfully graduated, I think from Fresno High.
And then where did you go to school? Where did you go to
college?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I was the first of my siblings or pretty
much most of my family to actually get into university. I didn't
know what I was doing. I just knew that I wanted to go to
college. My parents thought I should go to City College. But you
know, I was pretty much full of myself. I figured I could do
anything, you know. So I said, I'm going to apply to UC. They
said, well you know, it's kind of hard to afford that. I said,
well, I'll apply for the scholarship. So they said, OK, fine.
You know. So you try it. So I did. And I didn't know one college
from another. I just knew UC was probably, you know, for a
university was probably the most inexpensive. So I applied. But
I didn't know where to apply to. I had no idea which, what
colleges -- how they're configured, what's the difference
between the, you know, colleges. Especially the University of
California has different colleges within the university. You
know, so San Diego there was Muir College, Third College,
Revelle College. I knew Scripps Institute of Oceanography was
down there. I wanted to be -- I was interested in fisheries and
fish and whatnot. So I think, I want to be an oceanographer. I
didn't realize Scripps Institute was a graduate program. I just
knew that it was there. So I applied and they were asking which
college and I'm going, well, I'll pick Revelle, you know. So I
pick Revelle, not knowing that I had probably selected probably
the most difficult college in the University of California
system. No wonder there weren't a whole lot of applicants going
there. It was people who had any, who knew the system knew that
was not where you wanted to go to. But I applied there and of
course they accepted me. And with a Cal State scholarship, so
off I went to UC San Diego.
>> Carlene Tinker: And what was your experience like in Revelle
College?
>> Ken Taniguchi: That was ->> Carlene Tinker: A learning experience?
>> Ken Taniguchi: It was a very learning experience. I got in
the first -- it was on a quarter system back then. First
quarter, I ended up with an A, a B, a D, and an F.
>> Carlene Tinker: Whoa!
>> Ken Taniguchi: For a C average. OK.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, so you were able to stay in.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So, I'm OK. Second quarter, I fell below a C
average.
>> Carlene Tinker: Whoa.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I'm getting in trouble now.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And so they put you on probation.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Which means that you're on the verge of
getting expelled if you keep this up. And of course this was
back in 1969-70. And for those who don't know it, back then the
Vietnam War was going on. We were all raised for the draft. You
could avoid the draft if you were a full time college student.
It was called a student deferment. If you got kicked out of
college, now you're in line to get shipped off to Vietnam.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So you know, there was a lot more at stake
than just an education.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You know, the fact that you may get yourself
killed if you don't continue your education. So here comes the
spring quarter of 1970 and I'm in big trouble. I was taking a
full time student so with all my classes and I think I was only
passing maybe one or two of them. And the rest of them I was
pretty much headed right out the door. And then Kent State
happened. And for those who don't know Kent State, that was a
student protest at Kent State University and the National Guard
opened up gunfire on unarmed protesters and gunned them down. So
the death of those college students caused tremendous turmoil in
the university system. The UC system went into pretty much a
giant protest on every campus of the UC system and they shut
down the university. The university was shut down for about a
week, almost two weeks, it seems like. The university got shut
down. When we came out of that shutdown period, the chancellors
said it's not fair to have you guys try to continue this quarter
having lost this much time. You can drop any classes you want,
as long as you have some class you can still remain a full time
student.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: That was my opportunity. I dumped every class
I was failing or getting below grade. And I was able to -- I
think I only carried two classes for that end of that spring
quarter which was enough because those were my best classes. And
I was able to pull myself out of probation because of the Kent
State situation. So by the end of the first year, I was back
onto an even keel so to speak.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, you were OK at that point.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. And then after that, I got wise to how
to study, how to be a good university student. So the second
year I went back to the classes that I was having trouble with
and retook them and I excelled in those. That little extra time
to get up to speed. So by the end of the second year of
university at UC San Diego, I was not on probation. I was on the
dean's list. And now on the dean's list, I said, I've got to get
out of this place. This place is too hard. So I tried to find
someplace. Now I understood the system and I realized where I
wanted to be was UC Davis which had a fisheries program. So I
transferred to UC Davis.
>> Carlene Tinker: So how did you get involved with fisheries?
Were you like your grandfather, liked to fish, or is that ->> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. That's pretty much it. That's my -- see,
I was a problem child. And one of the things that I had was a
very bad temper. And I'm one of these kids that would get so
angry and throw a temper tantrum to the point that I'd hold my
breath and pass out.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So my grandfather Kimura said he needs
something to, you know, compensate for this thing. So they said,
teach him how to fish. Fishing teaches you patience. You know?
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, it sure does.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, because fish aren't going to bite all
the time.
>> Carlene Tinker: No.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And it's not ->> Carlene Tinker: [waiting for a fish to bite] for hours.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Like I tell people, fishing is fishing. It's
not catching. It's fishing. It's an actual activity that has
elements of meditation in it and concentration. So they told me,
you know, you've got to learn how to fish and then you can't get
mad at the fish because if you get mad at the fish you're not
going to catch them. So you have to learn how to calm down. And
so I got involved with fishing and it's -- you know, that's been
pretty much me my whole entire life. [laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, I know it continues to be a very
important part of your life. So then you found Davis as a likely
place to transfer to?
>> Ken Taniguchi: So much simpler. It felt like going back to
high school. That's how much easier it was academically than UC
San Diego Revelle College. Like I said, I found out later I had
gone into the hellhole of all colleges in the UC system, not
realizing it was being run by a bunch of Cal Tech alums who
wanted to create the new renaissance man. I mean, the campus had
-- you had no real academic freedom to pick classes for the
first two years practically. The first two years were pretty
much regimented that you had to take a set course of social
sciences and set course of science. And they wanted you to have
not only a major but a noncontiguous minor. So in other words,
if you're a science major you have to have a -- you had to have
a non-science minor. And you had to go and pass a language
proficiency of a second language.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So it was crazy.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. So you felt as though you moved to
heaven. [laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, it was so much simpler. It was so much
simpler.
>> Carlene Tinker: So you then pursued the wildlife fisheries
major and graduated in that major as I understand.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: And then -- but I know that you've become a
lawyer.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Or you became a lawyer.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: How did that happen? I mean, wildlife
fisheries, law. It doesn't seem to connect.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, it goes back to UC San Diego again. UC
San Diego, because you had to take the social science classes,
one of the classes was a humanities class on law and society.
>> Carlene Tinker: Law and society. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, and it was taught by a US magistrate. A
US magistrate is like a judge. He's not a life appointment like
you have with a US judge but they work as judges in the US court
system. And he taught that class. And I aced the class. And he
came up to me, you know, at the conclusion of the class and
said, you need to go to law school. And I said, I'm not a -- I'm
a science major. He goes -- but he told me, you have the
aptitude to be an attorney. You have the legal mind. You should
be an attorney. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. Heaven forbid.
I'm a scientist. I'm not a lawyer. You know. So but it was in
the back of my mind. So I went -- when I graduated as a
fisheries biologist, I tried to get a job as a biologist. And I
got picked up a couple of times by the California Fish and Game
as a seasonal aide biologist. So I worked on two different
projects. One was the Bay Delta Striper Project and one was the
Herring Assay in the San Francisco Bay. And they were both -you know, one was a summer job. One was a winter job. But I
couldn't get picked up full time. You know, I kept applying and
US Fish and Wildlife Service. But the job opportunities just
weren't there for a fisheries biologist. And so I was doing odd
jobs. I did everything from I went to bartenders school so I
bartended. My photography, which I picked up in junior high
school and high school, also paid bonuses. I became a -- I was a
stringer newspaper photographer up in Davis for one of the
newspapers up there. All the time, all my fishing down in as a
youth and also when I was at UC San Diego during the summertime,
I was deckhanding on fishing boats. I accrued enough time to
take the captains license to become a captain. I failed the
first time so I went to nautical school in San Francisco and
then I took the exam again and I passed. So I became a licensed
sportsfishing captain. So I was doing that as well. And but it
got to the point where I'm going, you know, I really wanted to
be a fisheries biologist. That's not happening. I could be a
sportsfishing captain for the rest of my life but it -- you
know, all through it I felt guilty. It didn't seem like work. It
feels more like play when I'm running a boat. But it's also very
stressful when you're dealing with a boatload of people whose
lives depend on you to keep them out of harm's way.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And especially running boats out of San
Francisco. That water is ->> Carlene Tinker: Oh yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, it is -- it was one of the ->> Carlene Tinker: Unpredictable.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, that and the dangers up there. There
were two types of captains up there -- ones that are extremely
obese from eating all the time and those that are extremely
skinny and emaciated looking because all they were doing was
drinking coffee and smoking all the time because that's what the
job entailed, having to pay attention to not only trying to
catch fish but watching out for other small boats, watching out
for sea conditions. And then in and around San Francisco,
especially, with all the heavy ship traffic going by. You had to
keep your eyes open for freighters and other things coming your
way. There were days when I had tremendous nervous tension built
up because I'm sitting there trying to watch a sonar screen, a
radar, the deck, and visually keeping my eye out in a zero-zero
fog so I don't hit anything.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So you know, it was a high stress job. You
know, on beautiful days it was great. But on those marginal days
it was extremely stressful.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So this was probably about 1977 or so. I
graduated in '73. So about '77. After about four years of
knocking around trying to, you know, find another occupation, I
thought, you know, let me take the LSAT which is the law school
entrance exam. Let's see how I do. I scored pretty good. So I
applied and I was -- I wanted to get into another UC system
again because of the cost. And I got accepted by about two
California law schools but the UCs I was on the waiting list.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I was on the waiting list at UCLA. I was on
the waiting list, I believe, at UC Davis. I can't remember if
Berkeley had me on the waiting list at all. But I know I was on
two of the UC campuses waiting lists. So I turned down the ones
that accepted me and tried to hold out to see if I could get in
in the UC system but it never happened. So the first year I
applied went to waste. So I said, well, maybe if I take the LSAT
again and try to boost up my score, maybe it would help. So I
took the LSAT again. I think I scored about the same, really.
And I guess maybe that was the stigma because I applied again
and you know I couldn't seem to get on anybody's UC system
waiting list this time but the other schools kept, you know,
offering me positions. So at the last minute I decided to take
Southwestern University Law School all the way down in Los
Angeles which is the fifth largest law school in the country. I
accepted to take their invitation and said, OK, I'll start over
there. So that's where I went to law school.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. And then how long was law school? Three
years?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Law school was full time. It was three years.
>> Carlene Tinker: Three years.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And everybody told me how -- what a, you know,
how difficult law school is. So I was steeling myself for a hard
go and I found out it wasn't hard [laughing]. For me, it wasn't
hard. I guess that U.S. magistrate was right. I just fit right
in. So ->> Carlene Tinker: Well, that's great.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I went through the first year and I
figured it was going to be difficult but I did -- I think I
might have overdone it, overanalyzed too much. I mean, I ended
up with a good, you know -- I ended up in probably the top, I'm
guessing, I don't know, the upper half of the law school class
final exam scores that year. I might have been higher than that.
But I know that I tutored two of the people who won top scores
in a couple of the classes. I was actually tutoring them
[laughing] and they excelled me. But at that point I realized
law school was not going to be that hard for me. I just needed
to get it done, so I did.
>> Carlene Tinker: Good.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: So then did you practice law down there or
did you come back to Fresno to -- where were your first jobs as
a lawyer?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well -[ Chuckles ]
I was -- law school. The bar exam is in June. I took the bar
exam. My intent was if I passed it, great, but I wasn't going to
take it more than once.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: If I failed it, I'm going to go back to the
fishing boats again. So I was running fishing boats waiting for
the bar results to come out.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It paid pretty good money too, by the way, so
I mean it's not -- you know, it's a very good occupation if you
want to do that. But then I passed the bar. And then so now I've
got to figure out what I'm going to do with this. So I started
applying. And I had worked in Los Angeles and interned -student intern -- with the Los Angeles District Attorneys
Office. I was supposed to work for Lance Ito, Judge Ito. He was
a DA back then but he was working the Gang Task Force Unit with
the Los Angeles District Attorney at the time and I was living
in East L.A. which was the middle of the gang territory. So when
he offered me the job, I said, I don't think I can work for you
because the guys you're prosecuting, I'm living in there. And I
don't think I want to be in that situation [laughing]. So I
mean, you know, he was kind of upset with me. He said, it
doesn't matter. Come on! I said, no, it's OK. So I ended up
working in the Consumer and Environmental Protection Division.
Again, my biology background, I had some help there. And the
fact that our family had run grocery stores, I had some
commercial experience too. So you know, my other life experience
would fit right into that division. So I started applying to
DA's offices, figuring that the fact that I had interned in the
DA's office would help. So I applied with Fresno and I applied
to Sacramento and a few other places. And I also applied to the
Public Defenders Office in Fresno. But meanwhile the fact that
I'm a captain and one of my friends in law school's wife was a
lieutenant commander of the United States Navy, told the US Navy
to recruit me. And the US Navy did come after me. And they
wanted me to be a JAG officer. So they were recruiting me pretty
hot and heavy [laughing]. They came after me. They said, you
know, we'll offer you this, we'll offer you that. You're the
perfect guy for this job. You know, they knew exactly were they
wanted to put me. They wanted to put me on shipboard duty,
knowing that I'm, you know, I can handle the ocean. I'm not -- I
don't have a problem with seasickness or anything like that. So
they were giving me all kinds of incentives to join the US Navy.
So I was tempted even though back during the Kent State and
everything else I was pretty much involved in the anti-war
activism down there. Little side note, I got in trouble with my
brother because of that because you know back then anybody
involved with the anti-war movement, even though I may not be a
face of the anti-war movement, if the fact that you're involved
in the anti-war movement drew the attention of the FBI. So I
didn't know it but the FBI apparently had a file on me. So when
my brother, who was -- my brother Brian which is the third child
born. He is the one that really excelled in school. He ended up
going to Stanford and he graduated cum laude Stanford. And he
wanted a job with a government agency and they turned him down
because of me.
>> Carlene Tinker: Is that right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: He asked them, how come I can't get the job?
Well, we've got a security issue with your brother.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So he told me, what the heck did you do with
San Diego? [Laughing] And I said, I just helped out these guys.
I was kind of like a courier. I just, you know, passed
information.
>> Carlene Tinker: Isn't that something that they would do that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. And that's how pervasive some of these
government activities are that you don't realize until
[inaudible] impacts you.
>> Carlene Tinker: Not just the person but the relative.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Well, they figured that there was
something going on. I don't know if they thought maybe -- I
don't know. I doubt it was anti-Japanese sentiment, but you know
there was something in the fact that I had helped out with the
Peace March in San Diego, the fact that I had confronted a
security guard at the naval base where I tried to enter the base
to attend the court marshall preceding that was being held at
the time. And the court marshal is supposed to be open to the
public but the base commander closed the base to the public. It
was one of those, you know, one of the tricky things they can
pull off there. Oh, it's a public court marshal. But the base is
closed. So we ended up confronting the guard at the gate, you
know. And apparently I got noted down as being an agitator or
whatever. Anyway, so I had applied to all these places on the
verge of being in the US Navy. Something that I was kind of
leery of since I had gotten this stuff with the, you know, in
the past with the military. And then I had gone through the
physical, all the paperwork. All I had to do was sign on the
dotted line and I was headed for officers candidate school when
I got a phone call from Ed Sarkisian who's Judge Sarkisian.
>> Carlene Tinker: Here in Fresno.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Here in Fresno. He was running the public
defenders office at the time and he said, you know, we got an
opening here for an extra help position. We think you'd fit in.
I know you -- it looks like you're a DA and maybe you are better
for the DA's office but you know, you're a west Fresno boy.
You've been in the environment. You know the clientele. They're
some of the people that you know how to deal with. You can
handle them as customers and whatnot. So we think you'd do well
here. So if you want it, you've got it. So I said, maybe for
this low paying job here in Fresno I'll go stay with Fresno. So
I turned down the Navy and I started working as extra help. And
my career took off from there.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. And basically define what a public
defender is.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, the public defender is your right to
counsel. You know, you have a right to counsel at any time your
liberty is at stake. So you don't get a right to an attorney if
you're being sued by somebody. But if you're going to be locked
up and your liberty is at stake, then you have a right [for
representation, even if you have no money to hire an attorney].
It's a constitutional right. Now, various -- the right was
established by Gideon versus Wainwright which happened back in
the early '60s. And this was Clarence Earl Gideon. It was a case
out of Florida which this man was charged with a burglary which
was going to put him in the state prison for several years. And
Florida had a rule back then that if it was not a capital case - in other words a murder case where they could put you to death
-- that you had no right to an attorney. Well, Mr. Gideon had to
defend himself in the trial. There's a very good movie out, a
made for TV movie starring Henry Fonda as Clarence Earl Gideon.
He had to defend himself and of course he lost because he was
somewhat of an uneducated man. He probably had a, you know,
secondary education, about it. He had to defend himself against
a seasoned prosecutor and of course he lost. So he wrote a
petition of [inaudible] to the US Supreme Court. And he had no
access to any kind of resources. So he had to do this whole
thing in pencil by hand. And he sent this request into the US
Supreme Court because all the other appeal courts had turned him
down. And the US Supreme Court heard his case. And that was the
case that ruled that yes, one of your fundamental rights in the
United States is your right to freedom. If your freedom is at
stake, you have a right to an attorney and if you cannot afford
one, one should be appointed for them. And the government should
pay for it. That forced all the states to have to come up with a
way to have to provide attorneys. Now, some of them did it
piecemeal. Some of them, say they'd you know hire a -- they'd
take a private attorney and they'd appoint them to them and pay
them whatever rate they want to set up. Other agencies started
to go with what's called a public defender which is the office
paid for by the government to take care of all of those people.
And California is the leader in that.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Farrah Shortridge Fultz is the mother of
public defenders. She is a first -- I believe she is the first
female attorney in California and she started setting up this
whole idea back in the early 20th century. In fact, the
courthouse in Los Angeles is named after here. So she started
the whole idea. And public defenders took off probably -- the
idea took off in the 1950s pretty much. People don't even
realize it but, you know, public defenders were held in pretty
high esteem back in the '50s. There was a TV show called The
Public Defender back then.
>> Carlene Tinker: Called what?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Public Defender.
>> Carlene Tinker: I don't remember that.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, but if you Google it and if you look for
it, you'll find it.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And they were -- it's like Dragnet.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: They would take true stories and then they
would make a play out of it. You know, a video play out of it
and they would present it every week as a 30-minute show of a
story of a public defender's case. And so Fresno decided as it
got larger and became to the point where they needed a full
staff as opposed to just piecemeal of appointing attorneys, in
1967 I believe it was they created the public defenders office.
And so that office had been in existence for you know 15 years
or so by the time I started working over there.
>> Carlene Tinker: So you became a public defender. You weren't
the only one, of course.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No.
>> Carlene Tinker: And then did you ultimately become the head
of the department?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, I -- well, when I first started, it was
like, so, like 1982.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And -- because I passed the bar in 1981. After
that one year period where I was trying to figure out which way
I wanted to go. I did a little stuff in between there.
Surprisingly and so many of my friends all decided to hold off
on their divorces until I passed the bar. The next thing you
know, all these friends are saying, you need to file divorces
for me. Oh my goodness! [Laughing] What do I have to do. So I
was doing divorces and wills for about a year. And I wasn't
really charging people for that. I was just doing it for my
friends. And then so I started in 1982 as an extra help. I was
probably getting paid less than the custodian. My mentor back
then was Hugo Cazato. And Hugo Cazato was one of the original
public defenders for Fresno County. He was deputy public
defender for Fresno County.
>> Carlene Tinker: What was the name again?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Cazato. Hugo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So he was my mentor. And you know, he
was the one that showed me the ropes, so to speak. So I was
there as an extra help for only about I would say two or three
months. And they said, you know, you're doing well. We've got a
full time position for you. We want to offer you a full time
position. So I started as a deputy one. And I, you know, worked
my way right up through the ranks. There's several levels -- you
know, attorney one, attorney two, attorney three, attorney four,
and then an attorney five which is called a senior. And above
that is management. So I worked my way right up through the
ranks doing every kind of case you could think of at the public
defenders office -- everything from petty thefts to homicide. I
defended all the people for about every kind of crime you can
think of pretty much. I had to -- I was defending people. And by
the time I -- by the 1990s, I was now spending more time as an
instructor than anything else. I had -- I guess I was good at
it. The new attorneys they would pass off to me for me to mentor
them. So what Hugo taught me, I became Hugo and I was teaching
these young attorneys how to be a public defender. And I think I
did a pretty good job because apparently my reputation was held
in pretty good regard by the entire court system. The DAs knew I
was not a trickster. I was a straight shooter. And so I had, you
know, good rapport with the district attorneys. I had good
rapport with the courts. And when the public defender
unfortunately passed away from cancer in 2006, a vacancy
occurred and so I applied. And in 2007 I was appointed public
defender.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I leapfrogged, actually. I leapfrogged from
being a senior attorney, senior defense attorney. I leaped right
past the management level of a chiefs or assistant public
defender and went straight to the top.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, straight to the top.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Now in that role did you ever face any
racism and/or discrimination? Or I wouldn't think you would.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, I wouldn't. You know, I'm always -- you
know, it's a sore spot for me still. You know, I mean, every
once in a while I run into somebody that does something or says
something that will get me riled up. And so but I try to stem
that saying, you know, I shouldn't be paranoid about it and
start thinking that every time something goes against me it's
because of racism. But you know, sometimes I wonder. You know,
sometimes some of the animosity I face, is it because of what
I'm standing for? Or is it something because of who I am as a
Japanese American?
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's something we're
going to be plagued with all our lives.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh yes, I think so. I can't -- it's just one
of those things, so.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Now, in the public defender role -just an aside -- I guess you deal mostly with blacks and Latinos
or is that true? Or is that --
>> Ken Taniguchi: It is. It is. And it's a sad thing, too,
because I can definitely see the racism involved there. You
know, the demographics of Fresno County -- really the majority
here is Hispanic. The caucasian or the whites would be number
two. Number three is Asian.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh really? Oh yeah, Asians now.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And African Americans are four.
>> Carlene Tinker: And what?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Are the fourth. And yet the, I would say most
of the clientele, at least the public defender's office gets
appointed on, are primarily Hispanic or African American which
tells me something is askew here. Why are there so many African
Americans being prosecuted ->> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: When they are only the fourth as far as the
population density of the area.
>> Carlene Tinker: What have you come up with? What explanation
do you have?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, a lot of it does have to do with racial
profiling and racial bias and the fact that people ->> Carlene Tinker: I'm afraid that's true. Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And you know, when you look at it you'd
expect, OK, so Asians are the third. But they are below them.
You know? I would think -- especially if you look at the jail
population. If you're looking at the jail, you're going to find,
I think, primarily Hispanics which is natural considering the
population.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, the most populated.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And then the disproportionately large amount
of African Americans ->> Carlene Tinker: That is ->> Ken Taniguchi: Incarcerated compared to the whites. And then
the Asians are on the low end.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, that is amazing because in my
experiences as I worked in Fresno Unified as a counselor and as
a teacher. Well, not as a -- an administrator. And we had a lot
of dealings with Asians, southeast Asians. And I'm surprised
that they're below the African Americans.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, in juvenile hall -- because we represent
juveniles as well, or did. [Laughing] I'm retired now. I keep
thinking of myself as if I'm still there. I did notice an uptick
as -- you know, remember, I started back in the '80s.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I just started to notice an increase in the
southeast Asian juvenile problem as far as those that are the
delinquency courts are being -- the population in the
delinquency court. And I could see a lot of it had to do with
these kids being with parents not able to figure out how to deal
with this society and the kids becoming enamored by the gang
life. And they started adopting that. And I can see that the
families themselves -- I don't see where they're dysfunctional
but they just lack the resources to know how to deal with this.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. Particularly if they're immigrants,
right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: The parents, yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. And the kids are -- you know, maybe
they want to be accepted by other people. You know, that's an
easy way. I don't know how they're [inaudible] but that's
another ->> Ken Taniguchi: They're seeking identity and sometimes the
easiest thing for them to do is to adopt an identity that is
given to them.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, right. OK but you're not working
anymore. You retired ->> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: I think about how many years ago?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Let's see. I retired in 2013 so it's getting >> Carlene Tinker: So, it's already six years.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: So what do you do now for entertainment?
[laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, besides fishing?
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: You go fishing. I see your shirt there -Taniguchi, Incorporated. Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It happened to be a company in San Diego that
when I was working as a deckhand I used to buy supplies from
them. It turned out they had the same last name.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! [Laughing] I thought you were in -- I
thought it was your company.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, they had the same last name. And
apparently came from the same part of Japan as well, as I was
talking to -- that company now is owned by their son who is Norm
Taniguchi. But I knew his mother and I don't remember if I met
his father or not. But way back then, when I first started
working down in there, I was talking to them. And we were like,
oh yeah, it must be in our blood. We come from fishing villages
on the coast and [laughing] -- we're still doing the same thing.
So yeah, that's how that got on there. So I do fishing. I'm
still involved with the Bar Association.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, are you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I was the past president of the Fresno
County Bar.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It's a nice distinction because I think I was
the first Asian bar president of Fresno county.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I was able to do that. And I'm still
involved with some legal things like next month is Law Day
coming up and I've been involved with their law day public -I'm not sure if it's an informational day at the court house
every year since they started this whole thing. I'm involved
with the Asian Pacific American Central California Asian Pacific
American Bar Association. I started that as well.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh wow!
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I wanted to make sure that, you know, there
were ethnic bars for -- just by everybody. I'm a member of the
Japanese American Bar Association. That's down in, based in Los
Angeles, although it's pretty much a national organization. Most
are members of the National Asian Pacific American Bar
Association which is a nationwide organization covering all
Asian ethnicities. But Fresno now has an Asian bar, an African
American bar, and naturally of course a Mexican American bar.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: I know also you do a lot with the JACL, don't
you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I do. JACL -- back in the past I used to be a
member of the Board of Governors.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Locally. I kind of let that membership lapse
for a while. The internal politics were driving me crazy. But
I'm just basically a general member right now.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: of the Fresno chapter of the JACL. Judge Ikeda
-- he's been involved in a lot of projects here for the Japanese
Americans so I've been involved with some of his projects. Most
recently was the museum at the Fresno Fairgrounds.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, which is awesome.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So I was involved in that project and in
fact I have a -- we did a big map of what used to be Japantown
which is Chinatown, which was pretty much renamed Chinatown
after or during World War II. But it used to be Japantown.
There's a map of it that we posted up there which I was -- I
helped put that whole thing together. That's drawn from west
Fresno. That was my old haunts.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I figured that was a perfect fit for me. So
I helped with that. There are some of the objects that are on
display in the display cases I donated over there as well. And
then I have been involved with the Sister Cities program with
Kochi, Japan. Kochi, Japan is the longest continuous sister city
relationship Fresno has.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, really?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So it's over 50 years old now.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Initially it got started pretty much in 1964,
although it's not officially looked at as a sister city until
1965.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But -- That tie with Japan has been probably
the strongest sister city connection Fresno has had.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, I recall that when I was at Bullard
High School there was a group from Tenaya [Middle School] that
went over to Japan and then they hosted a group coming back
over.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: That was probably in '80-something.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I've got all the records at home.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I can probably pull it up for you.
[Laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: There used to be a lot more stuff than that
going on than now. Initially it started with Holland Elementary
School which is right behind the Fashion Fair.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right behind.
>> Ken Taniguchi: One of the -- the sister cities program in
Fresno is, again, how it came together is interesting. Fresno
had two people who had made connections in Kochi. One was, I
believe it's Eddie Kubota. It was stationed in Kochi after World
War II as part of the occupational troops. And he is pretty much
Japanese speaking Nisei. So he had a connection over there from
having been over there as part of the occupational troops
stationed in Kochi. Kochi, by the way, is both a city and a
prefecture. So when I say Kochi, I don't know exactly if it was
in the city or was somewhere else. The other one was a professor
who apparently taught over there for a while back in the -- I'm
guessing it was the 1950s. So you know, he told them about
Fresno and everything else. And he was -- then he came back over
here to Fresno, Fresno State, I believe. So back then in 1950s
President Eisenhower decided to set up the Sister Cities
Program. President Eisenhower felt that part of the problems of
global tension or whatnot were based upon the fact that people
didn't know people. And he felt that rather than diplomats
talking, you know, like diplomats, it should be citizens talking
to citizens and getting to know each other on a much more
personal level. So he wanted to set up citizen diplomacy. So he
set up the Sister Cities Program. And so Fresno had two other
sister cities before Fresno came into existence.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: One was in Pakistan and the other was in
Burma. Both of those have disappeared. They are -- they didn't
last as long. Kochi would be the third city that became a sister
city with Fresno but the way Kochi got set up, again, it has to
do with culture and language barriers. Kochi wanted to set up a
sister city and they approached Fresno first. They sent letters
to the Fresno City asking if they'd be interested. For some
reason they wrote it all in Japanese and they sent it. And of
course the people at City Hall get this letter from Japan and
it's all written in Japanese. They go, what the heck is this
thing? And they just threw it away. So they never heard any
response back from Fresno. So then in 1964 or so, right around
there, Mr. Otsubo who was from Kochi was on a business trip to
the United States and he decided to swing into Fresno to see
what was going on. So he shows up in Fresno unannounced, goes up
to the city hall, and wants to talk to them. And he doesn't
speak English very well. So city hall is going, who is this guy?
So they got ahold of the local Japanese American community and
they got ahold of a couple guys who could speak Japanese and
they called him and, who is this guy? So they talked to him and
he -- in fact, he thought these guys that came in to talk to him
were Filipinos at first [laughter] because they were, you know,
working the fields and whatnot around here. You get pretty dark.
And when he realized that they were, you know, Japanese
Americans, then they told him who was there. So when they found
out that he was from Kochi and that he was here and he was
trying to set, they put him up. They paid for a room at what was
then the Dell Web Townhouse for a week. So the city of Fresno
picked up the tab and housed him as a guest for a week in
Fresno. And so he got to walk, run around, and see Fresno and
talk to city councilmen and whatnot. And Fresno City said, you
know, yeah. OK. I think we should -- we'll set up the sister
city. [Laughter] So it was one man's effort to come to Fresno
and the local Japanese American community coming to the rescue
of the city of Fresno to set up the Sister Cities Program.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] That's a wonderful story. Well, I
know that you are hosting a group this July.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: And next year you'll probably send a group
over there, right? Is that ->> Ken Taniguchi: Right. That's ->> Carlene Tinker: That's usually how it works, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, lately that's been what the Sister
Cities Program has been doing is us hosting and them hosting us.
You were mentioning earlier about these schools. Holland
Elementary has a relationship with, you know, Kochi Elementary
in Kochi. But you know, it's so sad. They wanted to set up video
conferencing and whatnot but it doesn't work because of the time
difference. You know, when our kids are in school here, it's the
middle of the night over there. And then by the time they get
into school it's late in the evening here or in evenings over
here. So it's hard for them to have a timeframe where the two
overlap to be able to make direct communications that way. So
although they do communicate and there are some communications
still, I understand, pretty much by letters, it's hard to have - you know, in a modern age right now it's not letters anymore.
It's texting and videoconferencing. And so real time and they
can't really. It's not possible.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And of course, you know, before all the modern
technology took over and the junior high schools were also part
of that project. And I think some of the kids who went from the
elementary school carried it on. And the next thing you had
contacts with junior high schools. That's pretty much gone now
because they just -- it doesn't have the connections. I've tried
to set up something with the high school level.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, Ken. There are a couple things I did not
ask about and I'm not sure how much you know about them.
Relocation -- you said, I think, both sides of the family were
in camps.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, in the same camp.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. How did that happen? Where were they
living at the time that evacuation occurred?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, both my father's side and my mother's
side were both living in the Los Angeles area so they both got
sent to San Anita.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And from San Anita they were all transported
to Granada or Amache.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. And what were their surnames?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Kimura and Hayashis.
>> Carlene Tinker: Hayashis. OK. And I recall -- I happen to
have been in Amache myself. You were able to locate the barrack
that they were in? How did you find that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, you gave me a directory so I looked at
the directory and I knew their last names. I knew their names so
I searched it. Naturally, my mother's side under Hayashis was
quite easy to find, at least my grandparents. There was just two
of them. My father's side, though, because my grandmother
married Kimura, I had to search under Kimura and Taniguchi. And
sure enough Masawo and Hana Kimura popped up.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Then I had to look for my aunts and uncle. And
sure enough Yasco, Tasco, and Iwoao Taniguchi popped up and
naturally they were all housed in the same unit.
>> Carlene Tinker: Is that right? Do you remember the barracks
number and the apartment number?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I've got it here but I don't. I'd have
to look it up. [Laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Let me see if I have them in my notes then.
Let's see here. Oh, I guess I didn't write them down. It's
something like nine ->> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I might have them right here. Hang on a
second.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, block 9L and block K. Does that sound
right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Could be. Let's see. I think I've got that in
this thing here. I think I kept that in -- let's see. Let's see
here. No, that's the ship's manifest I'm looking at [laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
[ Inaudible Comments ]
>> Carlene Tinker: Nine L and block 9K. Does that sound ->> Ken Taniguchi: You know, if you wrote it down, you probably
have it. Let's see. Oh, I think it is right here. Let's see if
this is it here. Kimura. Oh, my grandmother's -- my mother's -her name was Hide [phonetic]. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, Masawo and Hana Kimura were in 9L7B.
>> Carlene Tinker: Seven B.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And let's see if I've got the other one here
somewhere. I think I do. Oops. I must have misplaced it. Oh,
there I probably put it on my mother's side maybe.
>> Carlene Tinker: Now these were your grandparents, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right, my grandparents. Yeah. Here it is.
Let's see here. Hayashis. Yeah, Yoshioni and Hide Hayashis were
in 11K/10A.
>> Carlene Tinker: Eleven K ten A?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: And I was in 11G/4C. So I was a neighbor.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: I didn't know that at the time! [Laughter]
Did you ever have a chance to talk to your grandparents about
their experiences? Your aunts? What did they do? Do you have any
ideas, anything about that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I know that my grandmother Hana Kimura
became rather a very good artist. I still have some of her oil
paintings. And she was in an archival photograph of the art
class. My grandmother is in the photograph. So I was able to -you can actually see her in the class in that old photograph.
And I don't know what my mother's side was doing. I know my aunt
on my father's side who was in camp -- Yasco was a very good -excuse me. Drink some water. She was a very good -- with her
hands.
>> Carlene Tinker: Be careful. That doesn't [spill on you].
>> Ken Taniguchi: She was very good with her hands and she was a
seamstress. And so they were -- I had got the copy of her clove
patterns book that she created in camp. In fact, I think it was
on display here at Fresno State when we had the ->> Carlene Tinker: Oh, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I know she was good at that. Later on in
life she was so good with her hands that she was in the early
stages of the electronics business putting together computer -well, microboards. She was so good at soldering that she was out
doing that when she was living in southern California.
>> Carlene Tinker: So they came back to L.A.? Is that right?
When they -- did both sides come back?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think so. I think they both came back
initially because that was an area they were familiar with. I
don't think -- there was really no connection to Fresno that I
know of. But somehow the Kimuras ended up coming to Fresno
apparently because they must have talked to people or something,
maybe in camp, and they said to come to Fresno. So they settled
in west Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: So that's how your mother was here. Is that
right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, that's how my father was here.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, I mean your father.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. I get that mixed up. OK. Now of course
because they were in camp they were able to receive reparation
monies, right? Or did they accept it?
>> Ken Taniguchi: When was that anyway? That was 1980s? No.
>> Carlene Tinker: It was -- oh you mean 88 is --?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, '88 was when they ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, that was a civil liberties act then.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: And then we got our money staggered probably
19 -- I got mine in '92.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, so all my grandparents were gone by
then.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I'm pretty sure. My aunts and uncle on my
dad's side, of course, they were incarcerated so I think they
did get it. In fact, I know my aunt up in Sacramento, Auntie
Tasco, she got it. Yeah, for sure.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, yeah. OK. Let's see. What else did I
want to ask you about on that? OK. So basically you made a
comment a little bit earlier about, you know, when something
happens you don't know exactly is it because I'm Japanese or is
it because of something else. Do you ever feel that you've been,
even as an adult, discriminated against?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know. You always put it in the back of
your mind sometimes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Because it works both ways. Maybe I was picked
because I'm Japanese. Or maybe I was excluded because I'm
Japanese. You never can tell.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, that's true.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But it's always in the back of your mind
because having gone through the negative part of it, you always
kind of wonder. You know. I think I told you one of the reasons
why I'm a Dodgers fan was when I was in grade school -- I'm a
big baseball fan. And the Giants and the Dodgers moved to
California in 1957. And that was about the time when I was about
-- well, it was '58 when I was, when you about start playing
ball as a kid.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I wanted to play ball. I wanted, you know,
to go to Little League and the whole bit. And there was a lot of
kids back then that were still pretty hostile to me and they
wouldn't let me play ball. They said, we don't want the Jap on
our team. So you know, maybe I wasn't very skilled but and so I
thought -- you know, initially you think it's because, you know,
you're just not very good but when they interject that into it,
you said, oh maybe it's not because I'm not so good. It's
because of who I am. And those kids that were saying those kinds
of things that were mean to me, you know, they were all Giants
fans. I was going to be a Giants fan like everybody else in
Fresno, you know, because the Giants were being promoted here.
And if you know the Mason-Dixon line, so to speak, between the
Dodgers and the Giants was pretty much the Fresno County border.
So everything north of Fresno was Giants territory. With the
gentleman's agreement, everything south was Dodger territory. So
and the Giants had to -- you know, the Fresno Giants were here
back then. So everybody was going to be a Giants fan, I was
going to be a Giants fan and Willy Mays, the whole bit. And then
these kids come after me and I said, the heck with you guys. You
know, I'm not going to be fans of a team that has you for fans.
So I became a Dodger fan.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh. Oh, that's interesting. You said the
dividing line was at the end of ->> Ken Taniguchi: Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And you know, and I'm glad I became a Dodger.
You know, today is Jackie Robinson Day. Today is the day Jackie
Robinson broke the color barrier with the Dodgers in Brooklyn.
And so when I -- as I became a Dodgers fan I started to read
about the Dodgers and realized I picked the right team. This is
the team that broke the color barriers. This is the team that
was going to be more inclusive.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I was very happy that I ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, you made a good choice.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I became a Dodgers fan. And then -- then
even later when as time progressed and the Dodgers won the World
Series in let's see '59 and I had the last laugh of all these
Giants fans because, you know, my team wins the World Series.
Your team, you know, they beat the Dodgers in '62, I think it
was, in a one game playoff and they went to the World Series and
they lost. You know? I said, haha! You know?
[ Laughter ]
We can win it, you guys can't. You know?
>> Carlene Tinker: Well that's interesting because I have a
friend who grew up in Fowler which is south of Fresno and she's
a Dodger fan. I didn't know that was -- maybe that's why.
[Laughing] I don't know.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know but I just know that my story is
why I'm a Dodger fan is because I had to face that kind of
hostility and so I gravitated to the opposite of those people
that I detested and ->> Carlene Tinker: That's right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I became a Dodger fan.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: Now you've got your iPad -- I guess that's
your iPad. And you were going to show me some pictures.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I was trying to.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It's pretty tough. I can't get into the photo
albums that I wanted to. I can show you some things here. Like
this is my grandfather on my father's side.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: This is Kosaburo Taniguchi [phonetic].
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: OK. And then this is my Auntie Tasco.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, beautiful.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. And this is my Auntie Asco. Like I said
by this time they were -- you know, this was back in the states.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I wish I could get into my other photo albums
because they had much more interesting photographs. It just
doesn't seem to want to open up for me. I've got pictures of me
[laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: Well, we like to see those too!
>> Ken Taniguchi: This is an interesting one. No, that's not.
That's just my dad's buddies in Japan. Let's see here. Well this
is -- this is even dated. This is my birthday in 1953.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: That's me in the middle. And you can see that
the kids are there. The neighbors' kids are Hispanic and then
there's some Japanese kids so --
[ Laughter ]
Let's see if I can -- if I can get that other thing to open up
it would be so much more interesting. Let's see if I can [try to
log on] one more time to see if I can get it to open up at all.
It just doesn't seem to want to open up for me. It looks like
these are opening up very slowly.
>> Carlene Tinker: I think that's partly because we're in this >> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, here we go. Here we go. I got some stuff
here now.
>> Carlene Tinker: Ok.
>> Ken Taniguchi: These are my -- this is my father's side. This
is my father as a cadet in the Japanese Merchant Marines.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. Very typical haircut there.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Let me see if I can find something more
interesting here. Oh [laughing] -- I told you my father and this
gang at the elementary school. Remember when he was -- see these
are the boys. [Laughing] These are the rough kids.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, these are the gangsters. [Laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: These are the gangsters in elementary school.
That's how old they were. [laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Was that a very common practice to try to get
the group to learn English? I wonder how their communities did
that.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it was
something unique to Fresno or not but you know ->> Carlene Tinker: I'll have to ask.
>> Ken Taniguchi: See, this is my father when he got here in
Fresno. That's what he looked like.
>> Carlene Tinker: This is your dad?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My father, yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, see, you don't look like him. Do you
look more like your mom?
>> Ken Taniguchi: [Laughing] Maybe I do. I don't know. Of course
maybe if I showed a picture of them older, maybe --
[ Laughter ]
See this one's even got the date on this one. This one is a
photo inside of our mom and pop grocery store back in 1954.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know if this is getting on your camera
or not but ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. That was over on ->> Ken Taniguchi: Merced and C Street.
>> Carlene Tinker: Merced and C.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Maybe the other one is going to open up now.
Let me see what happens here. So I've got -- oh. Like I said, I
was a troublemaker here. Here's a -- oops. That's me in the
middle with my cousins. [Laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Who's the adult?
>> Ken Taniguchi: That's my dad.
>> Carlene Tinker: What?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My father.
>> Carlene Tinker: Your father. OK. And where is the place that
you're standing?
>> Ken Taniguchi: This is probably Roeding Park, I'm guessing.
>> Carlene Tinker: Where?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think this is Roeding Park.
>> Carlene Tinker: Roeding Park?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah I think so.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think it's Roeding Park. I can't tell for
sure. I mean, it's a park someplace. It could even be a park up
in Sacramento because that's where my cousins were. These were
my cousins from Sacramento and my sister's right there. That's
Jane. She's right there. That's my -- that's the second born.
>> Carlene Tinker: Second born, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Let me see if I can find -- [Inaudible]
something interesting out of here. Oh, there's more of my -I've got so many shots of my father in Japan. He's ->> Carlene Tinker: I don't remember where they were going to
school. Were they in Wakayama Ken when your mother and father,
when they were ->> Ken Taniguchi: My father was in Asumi.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, and the other one was Saitama.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, Saitama. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Saitama.
>> Ken Taniguchi: In fact, my father's childhood friend who's
still living is, his name is -- his last name also happens to be
Taniguchi but he's not related. His name is Fukuzo Taniguchi
[phonetic]. And this is my dad and his buddy Fukuzo Taniguchi
back in school. So my dad's in uniform and Fukuzo is not. That's
them back in Japan back in the 1940s.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1940s, yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: OK. And then my father -- let's see. I've got
a picture of a more recent photo of those two guys together
here.
>> Carlene Tinker: Now, your mom is still alive, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, my mom is still alive.
>> Carlene Tinker: But your dad passed when? Two years ago?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, about two years ago.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Let's see here.
>> Carlene Tinker: How old is your mom now?
>> Ken Taniguchi: She's 91.
>> Carlene Tinker: Ninety-one.
>> Ken Taniguchi: See, there's the same two buddies together -so my dad and Fukuzo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Good.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So they kept a lifelong friendship to
the very -- literally to the very end. The last voice my father
heard before he passed away was Fukuzo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. I was able to get a video sent from his
daughter to -- Fukuzo sent a video of himself talking and my
father had got it at about midnight. And I was able to get it to
my brother who was at my dad's bedside that night. And I told
him, you got to play this. And my dad was out of it. You know,
he was -- he didn't appear to be conscious but he was still
alive. And I said, but you know, even though he's not going to
see it, you should play this. So he did and he could hear his
voice. And he could hear his buddy telling him, you know, hang
in there, you know, you got to get better. We can still go hang
out together, that kind of thing, you know. And it was about 15
minutes later he passed away.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It was like he was waiting for closure, you
know.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So it was -- you know. I thought ->> Carlene Tinker: Was your dad here in Vintage Gardens too?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. That's where he passed away at. But it
was, like, so poignant. It fitted. You know, everything -- he
lingered for like two or three weeks, you know. And pretty much
unconscious and kind of comatose state. But he heard his buddy's
last words and then he was able to go. So it was kind of nice.
>> Carlene Tinker: That is something.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Let's see here if I can find that -- I'd
like to show you a picture of our store if I can find it here.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: For some reason, this was not just -- this
page does not want to open up for me. Maybe I got it in my -No, those don't open up either. Hmm. It must be a slow
connection. It's having trouble loading it, it looks like.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: At least I got part of this stuff opening up.
[Laughing] Let me see if I can find -- Maybe that one. Hmm.
Yeah, it looks like right now I've got sporadic pictures that
are popping up on here for me. Let me see if I can go down all
the way down to the bottom down here and see if anything else
popped up. Well, I've got pictures of me and fish as always.
[Laughter] Let's see.
>> Carlene Tinker: Why don't you show one of those? [Laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: This was -- that's me and my little brother
down there. These are albacore.
>> Carlene Tinker: How old were you at that time?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Probably about, I'm guessing about -- my
brother's born so he was born 12 years after I was. So he looks
like he's about, probably about four years old, I guess, in that
picture. So that would be ->> Carlene Tinker: So you were 16.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Beautiful fish. I've caught a few
myself.
>> Ken Taniguchi: They're not much sport to catch but they sure
are good to eat.
>> Carlene Tinker: What's that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I said they're not really a hard fighting fish
as far as I'm concerned but they are sure good to eat.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: Well, I'm not in the same category as you but
I found them very fun to catch. [Laughter]
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. OK. Yeah, unfortunately I can't get the
other pictures to come up for me. I would have loved to have
shown you the store. I have pictures of the store that I was
raised at, the Columbia Market. I've got that in my album here
someplace that won't come up for me.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Well thank you for sharing those. Let's
see. I think I've covered what I intended to cover -- what your
life has been like as a citizen of the Fresno area, San Joaquin
Valley, and some of your experiences. Is there anything that I
have overlooked and you might want to add to kind of round it
out?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, just living in Fresno it's kind of
interesting how we got -- it seems like there's two distinct,
separate Japanese communities going on right here because you've
got the agricultural community out there which has a different
lifestyle. And I play golf with a bunch of, you know, guys my
age, maybe a little older. They're, you know, they're Sanseis.
But their life experiences are so much different than mine. You
know, they grew up with other Japanese Americans. I didn't
really except for my relatives. I didn't have the connection. I
probably would have if I stayed in Japanese language school or
you know if we were with the Buddhist church or Japanese
Congregational Church or something. And I did go to those
churches as well. But my mother was so trying to get us involved
in American culture, I think it might have gone into the extreme
the other direction. My brothers and sisters, they don't have
nearly the Japanese American experiences that I had growing up.
When I first went to Japan when I was 16 with my brother Brian - Brian is the one that's the Stanford grad. He's the smart one.
[Laughter] Let's just say he's the one that was able to take
advantage of the situation better than I was. I don't know if I
would have been able to do as well academically as he did. But
you know, my brother Brian graduated valedictorian of Fresno
High School. And but he also had -- it's also kind of funny that
we went through grammar school together at the same school. And
my mother was the longest continuous PTA member at Roeding
Elementary because my little brother David was 12 years behind
me. So she has an unbroken chain of membership in the Roeding
Elementary School PTA from me all the way to the end of my
little brother's time there. So that's a long time to be a
member of a PTA. But my brother Brian was so good in school
that, you know, the teachers all remember him for his academics.
But they remember me as the Taniguchi. So my mother's always
cracking up that, you know, teachers would say, oh yeah Kenny
was such a great student and la-da-da-da. And she's going, they
got you confused with Brian. [Laughter] You were not the great
student. He was but you left a lasting impression. [Laughter]
>> Carlene Tinker: Well what does Brian do now?
>> Ken Taniguchi: He's an executive for Chevron.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Well you said that -- correct me if I'm
wrong. You said you were not as Japanese as some of these guys
you play golf with?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, I think I'm more Japanese.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, just the opposite. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. Yeah. They're -- you know, I speak to
them and they all say something in Japanese but the inflection
is like a caucasian would speak. You know, they don't say the
word like I think the word is pronounced but because they've got
-- they've Americanized it so to speak. And so I'll hear them
and I go, OK. You know, I'm not going to say nothing but, you
know, that's not the way I was taught how to say that word. And
they will string something together and it's pretty much like
listening to -- which I was used to in college. I took Japanese
a little bit in college and the other students would be speaking
conversations. The conversation part of the class they would be
speaking and it would be very consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel -very staccato.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You know? And I'd just rattle off something in
Japanese and it's -- you know, since I'm used to saying it, it
would flow out. So you know, that's kind of how the guys I hang
with -- they tend to speak that way.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Well that leads me to a question. Why
are you so involved? Do you think -- I don't know about your
siblings. Are you more involved in the Japanese American
community than they are? Why do you think that is?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think -- well, I know they all are to a
degree. My little brother maybe not so much and Jane maybe
somewhat but more because of church. She goes to the UJCC -United Japanese Christian Church. Brian probably because he's a
globetrotter. And his Japanese is probably better than mine
because he has to use it more for travel. Although when we were
-- like I said, when I was 16 I was in Japan with him. He'd have
the vocabulary but I'd know how to string the sentences
together. So we were kind of like a tandem team in Japan. I'd
ask him, what's the word for [inaudible]? And he'd tell me. And
then I'd ask the question, you know. So we'd wander around Japan
and he'd be kind of like my dictionary and I'd be the one
talking.
[ Laughter ]
My sister, Kathy or she actually uses her middle name, Keiko.
Everybody knows her as Keiko. She's involved. A lot of it has to
do with her children. Now, there's an interesting thing there
because of cultural distinction. Well, the problems with the
generation -- now we're talking yonseis there. But she married
an Italian American, Viacona. So her kids are half Japanese and
half Italian American. And her son had problems. He was, both my
-- well, let's see. I think they were -- yeah, both my niece and
nephew were born in California. My niece, she seemed to be able
to, I don't know, maybe merge better or she was better adapted
at it. But my nephew had real problems. He had developed
behavioral problems in living in Santa Fe, New Mexico where my
brother-in-law was working at the university over there. And he
got into trouble. He got into some serious trouble over there.
His mother, my sister, was at wit's end about what to do about
this problem. And we were wondering, you know, which way his
life was going to go. So she sent him -- he was able to get a
GED, I guess and get into the University of Hawaii. He went to
University of Hawaii and all of a sudden it's like he flipped
the switch all of a sudden. I guess the culture -- my sister
didn't realize how much he was being stigmatized by being half
Japanese in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
>> Carlene Tinker: That's interesting.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And so that's where his behavioral problems
were coming from. But when he got to Hawaii where you have a
much more of a blended society over there he felt more accepted
and he actually became more receptive to his Japanese side. In
fact, he's in Japan now.
>> Carlene Tinker: I'll be darned.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, he went to -- he graduated from
University of Hawaii. He started studying Japanese. My mother's
delighted that he writes to her with some Japanese stuff and
he's studying organic farming in Japan right now. He'll be there
until the end of the summer, I believe. So you know, his
experience at being “happa,” you know, you can see that there is
the problems out there for that generation out there that have
to learn how to fit into society being of a mixed race.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. That's interesting. I'm thinking about
my father who was “happa.” OK? And in the '20s and '30s he
suffered a lot of discrimination and I'm surprised to hear that
even now that's a problem, you know, for your nephew and ->> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, and I don't think it's just Japanese. I
think it's any kid who come from a mixed race background. Yeah.
Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. Yeah, that's true. I don't mean to say
it's just unique among us. But being a marginal person and you
know, I keep hoping that we have grown away from it but
unfortunately ->> Ken Taniguchi: I think that the current society right now
it's raised its ugly head again big time and that's this.
There's one of the things that -- and then you asked me about it
and why I'm involved with JACL and whatnot. I think now is a
time when you need to really step it up.
>> Carlene Tinker: That's right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You need to be actively involved. You can't
let this be put off to the wayside. You have to confront it head
on.
>> Carlene Tinker: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's
why I tend to be more vocal than I used to be. And I think it's
a time for everybody to step up, you know, and not just Japanese
and Japanese Americans.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I've turned off a few people that were
used to be my friends who I've had to confront because what they
were saying was unacceptable. And I pointed it out to them and
some of them really have stopped talking to me. You know? And
like I say, OK, that's fine. You know? I was trying to point out
something but if you're going to -- if that's your attitude,
well you know what? I'm going to keep correcting you whether you
like it or not. So if you don't want to hear it, I can
understand why you don't want to talk to me anymore but that's
OK. You know? I've done my job.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I just want to keep it in the forefront. So.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, right. Well, thank you very much, Mr.
Taniguchi. Just to summarize, you are a Sansei born in Fresno
and you had a rocky start as a student [laughing]. However,
you've overcome that because you've become a successful lawyer
and have done that very well in the public defenders office and,
you know, ultimately became in charge of that. One of the things
I like to conclude our interviews with is a question to you.
What do you think your legacy will be? How would you like to be
remembered?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I guess that I did my share to maintain
the community standards that make Fresno a welcoming society for
everybody, that there is justice for all, that the rights of the
US citizens were defended by me, and that hopefully people will
-- a little side note here. The public defenders office back in
2008-9 during the recession was in danger of being abolished.
And -- which I thought would be a travesty for our justice
system in Fresno County. And so I had to make some hard choices
and I had to do some major battling during that period of time
to keep the public defenders office alive. And I'm so glad I
succeeded. The public defenders office right now is flourishing
beyond where it was when I took office. In fact, they've added
more and more staff to it. It's probably about as healthy as
it's ever been. And I hope that that was partially because of
all the effort I put in to raise it to that level that the
electeds could understand that this is an important
constitutional right that needs to be cherished by our local
community and make sure that, you know, all people have a fair
shake in this community.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. A right to be protected. I appreciate
your statement here. I think in your role not only as a public
defender but also in your role as a member of the Kochi Sister
Group, the JACL, and so forth, you've done a lot and are as much
appreciated by the community in making sure that we're
recognized, that we have our place in history. And that is one
of the ultimate goals of an oral history project like this. We
want to share your story and also have it part of our history so
other people can know what you went through and what others have
gone through. So I thank you today. Your story is very unique.
I've enjoyed interviewing you. I hope you have enjoyed it as
well. And obviously people who will see this will enjoy it as
well. Thank you very much.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, you're welcome.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Good morning.
>> Carlene Tinker: Welcome to Special Collections. We are at the
Henry Madden Library and Special Collections is a research
center here and we are focusing on an oral history project. And
the name of the project is Issei to Gosei Interview Project. And
I know that's a mouthful and actually it's a condensed version
of a title that we had come up with representing the five
generations of Japanese in the United States. For the viewers,
I'd like to take a little time right now to explain what the
generations are.
>> Ken Taniguchi: [Laughing] Oh, go ahead.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Issei are the first ones who came
probably late 1800s to early 1900s from Japan. So that Issei,
“ichi,” is the first number in Japanese. Their children are
called Nisei. They are born in the United States. Their children
are called Sansei. Sanseis’ children are called Yonsei. And the
Yonseis’ children are called gosei. Which generation are you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I'm Sansei except I'm probably more, I
guess culturally more, like a Nisei.
>> Carlene Tinker: More what? Nisei?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I'm more Nisei, my upbringing, but
generational-wise I'm a Sansei.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. But -- oh, I see. OK. I understand. OK.
So the focus of our project is specifically to gather stories
about people who have grown up in the San Joaquin Valley,
especially Japanese Americans, to find out what their
experiences were like. And I believe our director, Tammy Lau,
had talked to you earlier and she was inspired by your story. So
that is why we are talking to you today.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Alright.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Today is Monday, April 15, 2019. And the
time is 10:03. OK? First of all, let's start with some
identification. What is your full name?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Kenneth Kenichi Taniguchi.
>> Carlene Tinker: What's your middle name?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Kenichi. Kenichi.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. You're going to have to speak up for me
because I'm hard of hearing.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Alright.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] OK. Date of birth?
>> Ken Taniguchi: September 12, 1951.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1951, so you weren't in a camp.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No.
>> Carlene Tinker: No, OK. So your parents had come back to
California at that time? Or is that true?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, my parents were in California, yes.
Coming back to California -- they were not interned so they did
come back to California in the late 1940s.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Well we'll talk about that a little bit
later. They happened to have been in Japan at that time?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Correct.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. OK, but where were you born? You were
born where?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right here in Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: In Fresno. Do you remember what hospital?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Saint Agnes, the old Saint Agnes.
>> Carlene Tinker: The old Saint Agnes over on Glenn Avenue?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, OK. And is that where your family was
living, in that area at the time?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My family was living in West Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Oh, West Fresno. What was the address of
that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know the exact address. It was a
market, a mom and pop grocery store, on the corner of Merced and
C Street.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! OK. So how long did they live there?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I don't know how long they were there. I
know I was there after I was born until I was about five years
old.
>> Carlene Tinker: Until you were five years old. OK. OK. What
schools did you attend?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Roeding Elementary and then Cooper Junior High
School, Fresno High School. Those were locally. Then I went on
to college after that.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Alright. And your educational background
-- as I recall, you went to UC Davis. Is that correct?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Originally UC San Diego.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, that's right. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Transferred to UC Davis. Graduated from UC
Davis and then I also went to the law school.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Yeah, we'll talk more about that in a
minute. Marital status -- are you married?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Single.
>> Carlene Tinker: Single. And family members, do you have any
of your siblings still surviving?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. All of them are still surviving, yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Are they here in Fresno?
>> Ken Taniguchi: One is in Fresno, my sister. And then I have a
brother in the Bay Area, a brother in San Diego, and another
sister in Hawaii.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So there were four of you.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Five, myself included.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK [laughing]. Well, we can't forget you, can
we? OK, so let's go on. I usually like to start with your
grandparents' generation because that is actually the beginning
of your story.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Correct.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. So let's talk about your paternal
side.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Alright.
>> Carlene Tinker: What -- where did they come from? Why did
they come here? Names, etc.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, my grandfather is Kosobro Taniguchi
[phonetic] from Asumi in Wakayama Ken.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: My grandmother, her maiden name was Hana Ono.
My sister likes to make fun of that because she says she's
related to Yoko. She's also from Asumi in Wakayama Ken.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, and where is Wakayama Ken?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Wakayama Ken is located on Honshu, the main
island, and it's -- if you know the shape of Japan, you know it
has the shape of a dragon. The island kind of at the lower -the first island just below Honshu would be Shikoku.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: North of Shikoku would be pretty much where
Wakayama Ken is.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. I think my grandfather on my dad's side
was from there, however he died before I was born so I never got
to find out anything about him. What about your mother's side?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My mother's side is Yoshiyo Hayashis
[phonetic], my grandfather. He's from Saitama Ken.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I believe my grandmother -- I'm trying to
remember her name right now. I can't remember her last name but
let's see -- her first name. My grandmother knew me but she
passed away after I was born. Yoshiyo and -- I've got it written
down but I can't recall her name right now.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, where was she from?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Apparently she was also from the same area,
from Saitama.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: She was pretty much, I guess, a mail order
bride. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Now, locate that place for me. I don't
remember --
>> Ken Taniguchi: Saitama Ken is located pretty much to the
northwest of Tokyo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Northwest of Tokyo, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Maybe west or northwest of Tokyo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. I'm trying to think of my mother's
side, where they're from, but I can't right at the moment. What
kind of occupations did your grandparents have?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I know my mother's side, my grandfather
on my mother's side, he had a much more interesting experience
in this country. I don't know exactly what he did. I know that
he made and lost several fortunes, apparently. He was an early
immigrant to this country before the turn of the 20th century so
in the late 1800s he came here.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: He landed, apparently, in Seattle from what I
understand, migrated his way down south, came all the way down
into the Fresno area. He actually said -- my mother says he
actually worked for Theodore Kearney at one time on the Kearney
plantation or farm out there toward Kerman. My grandfather, I
remember, he described one time Kearney Boulevard back then as
being a long, dusty road with little tiny palm trees about kneehigh all the way down for miles and miles. Which of course now
have got giant palm trees.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, they're very tall.
>> Ken Taniguchi: He was much more of the adventurous type. He
traveled all the way back east. Apparently he went to the
World's Fair in Georgia at sometime in the late 1890s at some
point.
>> Carlene Tinker: Now, which grandfather was this?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My mother's side.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow!
>> Ken Taniguchi: Iyoshiyo Hayashi [phonetic]. He went into the
deep south at the time of, you know, pretty much post-Civil War,
highly segregated. How he would go there and they had never seen
a Japanese person before ->> Carlene Tinker: Oh my gosh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: He said that he saw the signs saying when old
drinking fountains and restrooms were all separated by, you
know, colored or not colored.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: He thought the water would be colored when he
drank out of a colored water or drinking fountain. [Chuckling]
He said he mentioned something about going onto a bus one time
and all the African Americans were at the back of the bus and he
tried to go back there and the caucasians all said, no, no, no,
you're not a colored, you've got to sit up in front. He didn't
understand what was going on but he followed directions.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I know he traveled quite a bit back east. His
favorite city, apparently -- I think he was working in some kind
of Chinese restaurant or something in Cincinnati.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh for heaven's sake.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And Cincinnati was his favorite town. I found
out later when I found out he was a Cincinnati Reds fan. Why did
he like the Cincinnati Reds? Because he had been living in
Cincinnati and you know back then that was the beginning of
major league baseball. He was a Cincinnati Reds fan.
>> Carlene Tinker: So about what years would those be?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, you know, it's very foggy back then. My
mother has never really disclosed all that. I should ask her
more questions about that.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But she's hard of hearing so it's hard to get
answers out of her.
>> Carlene Tinker: Join the crowd [laughing].
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I know he was there probably into the
1920s.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1920s.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Yeah, I bet there weren't very many
Japanese at all at that time ->> Ken Taniguchi: Oh no.
>> Carlene Tinker: In the east, right? Or in the south.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: That's an interesting story that you told
about the colored versus non-colored.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Apparently he had a caucasian girlfriend at
one time back there too that he was strongly considering
marrying and then my mother said he had an epiphany when one day
he was walking with her and he looked into the mirror of the
reflections off of a store and saw him with his girlfriend and
he for some reason he felt this is not going to work. And so he
broke off that relationship. And then he sent back to Japan to
try to find a bride. And that's how my grandmother came to this
country.
>> Carlene Tinker: I see. So that was a picture bride marriage.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So OK. This is your maternal grandfather?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Now what about your paternal grandfather?
Tell us about him. [Laughter]
>> Ken Taniguchi: [Laughing] That's another interesting set of
stories. He came apparently in the early 1900s. So I'm guessing
-- I've got the records. I just can't remember off the top of my
head. I was able to pull up the archival records from the
Japanese National Museum and saw the boat that he arrived in
from Japan into Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: I'll be darned.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I have to -- I'm guessing it was something
like 1910, 11, 12. Somewhere around there, I think.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And then he also had called for a wife from
Japan and that's how my grandmother ended up coming. And they
had known each other apparently in Japan, I believe. So they had
already kind of preset the whole thing. In Seattle he was -- he
and my grandmother apparently were running a hotel or operating
a hotel or managing, I'm not sure. But my grandfather was an
avid fishermen which kind of rubbed off on me, I suppose. So
apparently he had -- my father was, well my aunts were born
there first. My father had two older sisters who were both born
first. My father was the third born and that was in 1924 he was
born in Seattle. So they were all living in Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I know they had a hotel going into the
1920s and almost into the '30s, I believe.
>> Carlene Tinker: Were there a lot of Japanese living up there
at that time?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh yes because that was one of the ports of
entry up there.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: There was probably more -- I think more
Japanese probably came into Seattle, I think, than anywhere
else, from guessing right now because most of the records I've
seen seem to be at ports of entry being Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Most of them were bachelor or single men and
the hotels up there were pretty much -- I'm not sure if they
were room and board or whatever but there were a lot of single
men residing in those hotels up there in the Japantown area of
Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So your grandparents were -- this was
your paternal grandpa.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. And they were running this boarding house
or hotel.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, it was called the Royal Hotel. So ->> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So that's -- and I know where it was at. I
mean, I've had the address. I even tracked down the location of
them when I did some investigating on my own. And of course it's
gone now but it's a rather nice looking highrise office complex
right where it used to be. But it is right in the Japantown area
of Seattle.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, OK. So What happened after they ran this
hotel for a while? Didn't your grandpa go fishing a lot?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well yes, he was. Like I said, my grandmother
was left pretty much in charge of the hotel. My grandfather was
more interested in going fishing and apparently my grandmother
had an attraction for one of the tenants over there. So ended up
one thing led to another and next thing you know my grandparents
are being separated. And my grandfather took his kids, my two
aunts, my father, and then there was a younger brother my dad
had. He also went back with Japan with them, back to Asumi.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: My grandmother apparently remained in Seattle
with her new beau and they married. So she became a Kimura
[phonetic].
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And apparently we have to -- you know, this is
one of the family things that's we've come to recognize. That my
dad's younger brother may very well have been fathered by Mr.
Kimura.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Because my grandmother went back to Japan and
brought the young, her young son back to America with her. My
dad and his two sisters stayed in Japan for quite a while.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And my dad was pretty much educated in Japan
from preschool all the way through -- well, through afterwards
as well. He was in Japan throughout the war alone because both
of my aunts had been called back to help their mother in
whatever business they were operating which I believe was a
produce business in Los Angeles by the end of the 1930s.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, these are the Kimuras?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. Kimuras were Massawa Kimura [phonetic] -that was my step-grandfather who was the only grandfather I've
actually known on my father's side.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And my grandmother, Hana. So they were both
living in Compton, I believe.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, Compton. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And so they had brought both my Auntie Yasco
[phonetic] and Auntie Tasco [phonetic] back to the States with
them. Neither of them spoke English so they had to pick up
English. My Auntie Yasco, she ended up -- she was actually
pretty good. She picked up the English language much better. My
Auntie Tasco pretty much spoke Japanese. She never did seem to
pick up English very well. My uncle George, George Kimura -- he
took the name Kimura. He was born Taniguchi but he took the name
Kimura. His entire upbringing pretty much was in the United
States because he was brought back as a toddler. So he didn't
have the same upbringing as my aunts and my father did.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Now, that was your dad. So your dad
stayed in Japan?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My dad was in Japan and he went through
school. He got accepted to the Japanese Merchant Marine Academy
which was a very prestigious organization in -- let's see. I
think it was in Toba, I believe. And he was in -- he was, I
think, first year cadet at the Merchant Marine Academy. First
year or second year, I can't remember. Well, I take that back.
It must have been second year but I think he was -- because he
went into the Merchant Marine Academy, I believe, in early 1941.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So he had pretty much finished his first year
at the academy when World War II broke out. And ->> Carlene Tinker: And of course he stayed in Japan.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, he couldn't come back. I mean, once
you're ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Once the war broke out, there was no way to
get moving back and forth between the two countries. And my
father, who was a US citizen born in Seattle, being at the
Japanese Merchant Marine Academy, the entire merchant fleet was
conscripted into the Japanese Navy.
>> Carlene Tinker: Hmm.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So my father ended up being pretty much a
Japanese Naval Officer.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Even though he was a non-combatant. He was a
merchant seamen.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, right. Now, what about your mom? I
understand that she was raised in Japan. Is that right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: how did that happen?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, my mother was born in 1928 in Los
Angeles.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Because my grandparents apparently had come
all the way back to California by that point and he was -- and I
really don't know what my grandfather was doing in the Los
Angeles area but I should have. I know I have it written down
someplace but I don't have it off the top of my head.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: My mother was actually the second born.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Her oldest sister, unfortunately, had passed
away.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So -- in fact, I'll give you a little story
about that one too. My mother's side of the family has this, I
don't know, this psychic thing going on with them that my mother
always alludes to. But my aunt that passed away, my mother's
oldest sister, had a very odd name. Her name was Sound of a
Thousand Years. It translates as Sound of a Thousand Years. And
my -- and the firstborn child and everything else. So apparently
my grandparents decided to take her back to Japan as an infant
and wanted her to be raised in Japan since the custom was back
then discrimination and the lack of proper education was pretty
noticeable to the Japanese living in this country -- that they
weren't treated as full citizens.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And given a second class education, so to
speak. And those who could afford it would often send their
children back to Japan so they get a good education. So as an
infant, my grandparents took my older sister to Japan and left
her there. And apparently my grandparents were living in this
country and then one night while they were sleeping, they were
awakened that night by just a tremendous noise. They didn't know
what the heck was going on. They thought, you know, that just
whatever it was -- it just roused them out of their sleep. And
they woke up the next morning and they asked everybody in the
building what happened last night and they said, what? They
said, well that huge noise last night. And they said that they
said, there was nothing last night. Nobody heard anything -just my grandparents. And then they got the telegraph from Japan
that their daughter had died.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh wow. Isn't ->> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. And that's one of the stories. The other
story is -- and I'll tell you that there's a [good one?] here.
My sister, my mother and her sister and their younger brother,
as they were born they were all sent back to Japan to relatives
in Saitama and in the Tokyo area for their education. So my
mother was sent to Japan preschool. So she had her entire
education also in Japan.
>> Carlene Tinker: So she was there probably in 1930? You said
she was born in 1928.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So in 1930 she was sent to Japan and she went,
she was all over. She was in high school when World War II broke
out.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, so basically she got stuck there.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And like I said, this was -- this psychic
thing is my grandparents, my mother. And apparently one of my
stories -- two stories -- that we have is I think one. I think
maybe it was my mother or my aunt or somebody met this young
couple who were expecting a child and one of them, they told
them, you know, she's going to have a baby. And he says, whoever
it was -- my mother or my aunt -- just blurted out, no, they're
not. And he said, well, yes, she's having a child. No, no, she's
not. And sure enough, the child was stillborn.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And they were going, this is kind of strange.
And another story from my mother's side is how during the war, I
can't remember who it was but my mother tells the story how one
of her aunts was, her son was off to war. And she was coming
down the street and saw her son walking toward her down the
street and she thought, oh good, my son's come back from the
war. So she ran up to meet him and he just disappeared in front
of her. And then she got the word that her son had died that
day.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my gosh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So this kind of runs in -- [laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! Ooooh. That's kind of eerie [laughing].
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I have my own experience like that too
which is kind of strange. I was up doing a wine tasting up in
Sonoma County.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I was supposed to spend the weekend up
there and after dinner that night, I just -- something was
telling me I had to get back to Fresno. And I couldn't
understand why I had a strong urge I had to get back to Fresno.
But I said, you know, I got -- I just got to go back to Fresno.
So I canceled the rest of the trip, came back to Fresno. So I
got here that night and that's the night my grandmother passed
away.
>> Carlene Tinker: Who did?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My grandmother.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my gosh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So -- [laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: You guys have this special talent. [laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: It's a little eerie to have to deal with
sometimes but -- and my mother, she keeps using that as for one
reason or another she tells us things are going to happen. And
most of the time nothing happens. But you have to have a little
bit of hmmm, you know? Maybe I ought to just listen to some of
these things sometimes. So ->> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] OK! Whatever you say!
[ Laughter ]
Well, OK. So getting back to your mom and your dad, they didn't
know each other in Japan?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, no. Not at all.
>> Carlene Tinker: However, didn't they meet in Japan somehow?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, no.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, they didn't?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, well now, when did they come back to the
United States? When were they able to?
>> Ken Taniguchi: After the war. My dad survived at least two
sinkings by US submarines during World War II. He worked on the
Merchant Fleet for Japan. And my mother survived. I think she
was in Tokyo when Doolittle came over. She was passed around
from one relative to another during the war because, you know,
before they were getting money from the United States to support
them. But once communications broke off between Japan and the
United States, my mother and her sister and her uncle were
pretty much left as almost, you know, cast-offs and then passed
off from relative to relative.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I mean, they were -- I think they were even
separated out because, you know, they, one, couldn't support
three kids.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You know,
relative. So my mother, you
during the day and she was,
then, they were all sent to
so they were passed from relative to
know, was a high school student
as all the other girls were back
the munitions factory.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So that was the war effort that was going on
in Japan. So both of my parents were somewhat involved in the
war by circumstances -- my father in the Japanese Merchant Fleet
and my mother being conscripted as a schoolgirl to work in
munitions. When the war ended, things were really tough in Japan
by then, you know. The country was devastated.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: My mother was telling me how they had
instructions on which weeds were edible to try to fend for
themselves. But my mother was fortunate because she was a US
citizen and when the occupational troops came in and they
brought their families with the occupational troops, especially
with the staff, the upper military staff, they were looking for
domestic help. And they were fearful of, you know, Japanese.
They would, you know, they weren't -- they were very distrustful
of them. But the fact that my mother was a US citizen, she was
able to find employment. So she was one of the lucky ones that
was able to get work post World War II in Japan. [Inaudible] The
opportunity to repatriate back to the United States arose little
by little after World War II. And I'm not sure what year it was.
It's got to be '46-47, somewhere around there, that they were,
both my parents were able to get a ride back to the States
because they were US citizens and the Japanese, they'd get
repatriated.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, right. So did they meet during the
time that they were coming back? Or when did they meet? I kind
of remember there was something about being on a boat together.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. The USS Swallow.
>> Carlene Tinker: What was that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: The boat's name was the USS Swallow.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh [laughing].
>> Ken Taniguchi: In fact, I've got a picture of it and
everything else too. It was a converted US military transport
vessel that they were using to bring people back across.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And they were, they happened to be on the same
boat coming back to the United States.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: The men and women were segregated in the
course, you know, where the bunks where and whatnot. My father
was bunked with my mother's brother. So my uncle, they didn't -nobody knew each other but he happened to be my Uncle Leo was
bunked with my father.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And through my Uncle Leo, he Uncle Leo,
introduced my father to both my mother and my aunt. And my
aunt's name is Naomi.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So they were -- my mother's name is Marie. So
they were both introduced by my Uncle Leo to them. And it's a
long trip coming back from Japan back then.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] Long enough.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It's -- you know, I guess it's close to a
month-long journey maybe.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, that long! [Laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, it's several weeks, a couple weeks at
least. So anyway, they were, you know, they hit it off and
everybody on the boat, the ship, was saying, oh those two, they
got something going on here, you know. So they were the kind of
the ->> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] Long enough for them to become
interested in each other.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, yes. So apparently that's what happened
on the ship coming balance across from Japan.
>> Carlene Tinker: And that was the US Swallow?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, the USS Swallow.
>> Carlene Tinker: did you say you have a picture of it?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh yeah. I've got pictures of quite a bit of
things I've got in here. This is on my iPad but ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, just let me know when you want to
introduce a picture.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, let me log this thing on so I've got it
on here. Let's see. See, I think I -- oh. Oops. I think I'll let
it load. You know, I'll let it load up first.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, well we'll come back to that. So they had
this romance that budded on the US Swallow and then did they get
married after that or what happened after they landed in the
United States?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, it was kind of funny because, like I
said, they didn't know each other at all.
>> Carlene Tinker: Who didn't know each other?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My parents. Before they had been on the boat,
they didn't know each other at all. So the ship ended up -Going up, ending up in San Francisco. That's where the vessel
ended up.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Finally disembarking. And you know, the ship
pulls in and pulled up next to the wharf and whatnot and they
looked down there. And they're looking for their parents. And
there's my father's -- my uncle, my grandfather, and my
grandmother from my dad's side. And there's my grandfather and
grandmother on my mother's side, and they're next to each other
at the dock.
>> Carlene Tinker: They're standing each other, coincidentally.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, they were with each other. Yeah. And so
they get off the boat not knowing that both my grandparents who
didn't know that their children were hooking up on this ship
coming back knew each other because they were been in Amache.
>> Carlene Tinker: Who was ->> Ken Taniguchi: During camp.
>> Carlene Tinker: Who was in Amache?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Both my grandparents on my father's side and
my mother's side.
>> Carlene Tinker: And your mother's. So that would be the
Taniguchis and the Kimuras.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, that would be the Taniguchis and the
Hayashiss.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, Hayashis, excuse me.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, well it's actually it would be the
Kimuras and Hayashis because my grandmother remarried Mr.
Kimura.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, OK. Thank you.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So the Kimuras and the Hayashiss were both at
the dock to greet their children who were coming back, not
knowing that their children had hooked up during the trip coming
back from Japan. [Laughter] In fact, they had known each other
so well that they were both in Los Angeles, I believe, at the
time. Or -- I know they knew each other. But they had both
carpooled to greet them up in San Francisco.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: That's an amazing story.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. It was bizarre coincidence. Bizarre.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] But then -- well then did your
mother and father continue their relationship or did they
separate at that point or --?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well my father went with my Kimura
grandparents and they resettled in Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: Ok.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Where my grandfather, Kimura, was operating a
grocery store. My mother went with her parents back down to Los
Angeles. So they were separated because now my father's in
Fresno, my mother's in Los Angeles. But apparently the
relationship was enough that my father would take the time to
drive from Fresno to Los Angeles to go out with my mother which
is, you know, quite an endeavor considering the distance back
then. It wasn't a quick trip from Fresno to Los Angeles at all.
I mean, it probably took easily half a day to get down there. So
->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. So your mom went to L.A.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. And your dad was staying here.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Again, what did your dad do?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well [laughs], initially my father had to
learn English.
>> Carlene Tinker: He what?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Had to learn English.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! OK. Well both of them probably.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. Pretty much both of them.
was, you know, he was in his 20s at that point. So
to grammar school with a bunch of other -- what do
We know the Japanese Americans who are educated in
known as Kibei.
My father
he got sent
[inaudible].
Japan are
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So both my parents are Kibei. And my father
and for several other Kibei in the Fresno area, they were all
rounded up and sent to grammar school in Fresno to learn
English. But my dad was kicked out.
>> Carlene Tinker: What school was this? Was it one of the
public schools or --?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, it was one of the public schools.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: But I can't remember the name of the school.
I'll have to look it up. He was in -- went to one of the public
schools in Fresno but he was booted out.
>> Carlene Tinker: Huh! Why was he booted out?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Smoking.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
[ Laughter ]
But he was also an adult at that time, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, he was. He was. Yeah. They were all -all these Kibei young men who were sent to this grammar school
were all basically men. They weren't, they weren't children. But
they ->> Carlene Tinker: Was that on the west side, do you think?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Ah, you know, I've got the name of the school
somewhere in my records. I can't remember where it is. But in
fact I should try to get -- I guess if I could get this thing to
open up I've got pictures of him and his buddies in front of the
school and they look like a bunch of, I don't know -- I guess
you could call them like gang members hanging out [laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: I was going to suggest that but I resisted,
but you -- [laughing].
>> Ken Taniguchi: It looks like a bunch of young, little punks.
They're all, you know, hanging together there. And I can see
these guys smoking and getting in trouble because they're -- you
know, they're young men. They're not kids.
>> Carlene Tinker: Well obviously he didn't last very long. When
-- so his English didn't take off right away?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, and you know, his English never did fully
develop. I mean, he spoke business English pretty much and the
things he needed to know to operate a business. So you know, my
mother ended up picking up English a lot better than my father
did.
>> Carlene Tinker: Well now, what kind of -- well, he went into
business. What kind of business did he do?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, he was -- he started apparently working
with my grandparents Kimura at their market. And then when I was
born, I was like I said, living in the back of a mom and pop
grocery store. So that was their store.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: The Columbia Market was my parents were
operating it.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, you said on Merced Street.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Merced and C Street, yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It was across from the old Columbia Elementary
School.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Because I remember -- I can remember
living there and you know, you look out the front door you're
looking straight across the street at an elementary school.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. OK, so they were separated after they got
off the boat and corresponded for a while, right? How long did
it take for them to get married?
>> Ken Taniguchi: It must have been about -- I'm guessing it was
about two or three years.
>> Carlene Tinker: Two or three years?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, because they were married in 1950.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1950, OK. So they came back probably '46-47?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So they get married and then Mom comes
from L.A. She stays here with your dad, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Once they married, yeah. They settled in
Fresno and that's where I was born.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. Are you having trouble getting on
[trying to use IPad]?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, I need to get onto the WiFi system here
it looks like.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I see one so it looks like a public access.
I'll see if I can load that on. I guess Bulldogs is the ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, I don't know how to do that.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It says I'm -- it looks like I'm logged in
now. [Lots of notification alarms] Oh yes. Oh yeah [laughing].
It looks like my [inaudible] definitely. I think I'm on here.
OK. OK, let's see if this is going to let me open this up now.
I'll see what happens.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. I had trouble
with my phone, too, getting on. OK. So you were the first one
born. What was your date of birth again?
>> Ken Taniguchi: September 12, 1951.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1951. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. In fact, my middle name Kenichi -- Kenichi -- in Japanese characters, the kanji character for ken is
the same character you use for important documents like on a
constitution or a treaty because that was when the final peace
treaty was ratified with Japan. So my mother used that character
for my middle name.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. So that's the derivation. I like that. So
you were the first one born.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: And you have two sisters.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: And the brother.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Two brothers.
>> Carlene Tinker: No, two brothers. Yeah. OK. What was I going
to say about that? Now, because your parents were Kibeis and
their English was not very fluent, I assume that they were
speaking mostly Japanese at home.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Exactly. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, so you kids were speaking Japanese only,
probably.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Me.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, just you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think just primarily myself. My sister was
one year behind me. It's boy, girl, boy -- it's boy, girl, boy,
girl, boy.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: OK, so we're flip-flop-flip-flop. When I was
born, yeah, that's pretty much all we spoke was Japanese. I was
-- my grandparents as well. They spoke Japanese to me and my
parents spoke Japanese to me. My first language was Japanese. My
mother still has -- I have them still. There's a vinyl recording
of me talking and singing in Japanese. Just a little side story
there. Back then, a lot of these mom and pop grocery stores, it
was all cash or some kind of bar system going on in these
stores. And one of the things they had, when somebody owed them
money they gave them a record-making machine. So that's how I
ended up my voice getting on vinyl. And I'm speaking Japanese a
mile a minute and singing Japanese. And I can't understand
myself anymore. [Laughter] And it's me speaking. It's kind of
bizarre.
>> Carlene Tinker: Do you still speak Japanese?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Some. I never really kept it up. So my speech
pattern and my vocabulary kind of died when I entered -- well,
it was locked during that period when I entered public
education.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But so I do have a fundamental grasp of the
Japanese language and sometimes I'll rattle off a sentence
without even thinking about it. And then someone from Japan will
think I'm speaking fluent and they'll start talking back at me
and all of a sudden I hit a stone wall. [Laughter] And I have to
tell them, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
>> Carlene Tinker: I'm sure, however, if you stayed there a
while, you'd be back in business.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I notice that when I go back to Japan
sometimes all of a sudden I'll start thinking in Japanese and ->> Carlene Tinker: I know, isn't that interesting?!
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, so I start thinking Japanese and I've
even -- I take these delegations to Japan once in a while. And
it was kind of bizarre. I got so involved in something one time
that somebody said something in English and I started answering
in Japanese. They looked at -- wait, wait. Oh, excuse me. I just
push back again.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] Yeah, I'm not very good at other
languages but I had a little experience with trying to learn
Spanish. And after being in Mexico for a while it took a little
while but after about three weeks then I started thinking in
Spanish rather than English. Well, getting back to your not
being able to speak English right away, that gave you a rough
start in school.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, it was extremely bad. When I was growing
up in west Fresno, west Fresno back then -- we're talking in the
early '50s -- was still a melting pot of immigrants. It wasn't
primarily any particular ethnicity over there. You know,
Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, African Americans, as well as
Armenians, as well as Italians, just about any ethnic group you
could think of when they first immigrated to the or moved into
the Fresno area seemed to end up in west Fresno. So we -everybody got along. And I didn't have any -- I didn't realize,
you know, anything special. The next-door neighbors were the
Ranterias [phonetic] and so, you know, I was speaking a little
bit of Spanish. But most of the time it was Japanese. And you
know, my mother was taking me to the Buddhist church and so
everything was hunky dory until my father decided to move us out
of west Fresno and he bought a house in what was back then
northwest Fresno which is the area of Dakota and Shields.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Dakota, Shields, West Avenue, that area right
there.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Roeding Elementary is on the corner of Dakota
and West Avenue so that's the exact -- that's we were one block
from the school.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But when I moved into that area, it was
suburbia, pretty much a new suburban area. The houses were all
built post World War II. And the kids there were all caucasian.
I mean, I was the only Japanese kid. I think I might have been
the only -- well, other than some Jewish families and some
Armenian families, everything else was pretty much straight
caucasian. A lot of people from, you know, who had come here
during the Depression from Oklahoma. So I knew there were -- so
that's the group I ended up falling into and they had not seen
anyone Japanese other than the war movies and the fathers having
been through World War II. So I ran into a lot of racial
hostility.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. So what kinds of experiences did you
have? Did the kids tease you, bully you, harass you? What kind?
Did they -- of course, you weren't speaking English yet.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, it was ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, you were struggling with that.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think in the group that I was going -- my
own age group, you know, we're all kindergarteners, first grade.
I went from first grade all the way up through sixth grade in
Roeding Elementary. The biggest prejudice I seemed to be getting
was from those kids in the older grades.
>> Carlene Tinker: They were what?
>> Ken Taniguchi: The older grades. You know? The ->> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You know, the kids that were -- you know, four
or five years ahead of me.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Of course, those kids were born, you know, end
of World War II.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: They were 1946-47. Their fathers are just come
out of the military. So the fact that I was Japanese and I had,
you know, coke bottle glasses and I had pretty much a butch
haircut -- Buddha head haircut -- boy, I was like stereotypic of
what they'd been trained to hate.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So the older kids were the ones that I got
most of the grief from. And yeah, I would be chased down by
groups of boys coming home from school and there was an open
field just past between the grammar school and my house which
was a block away. There was an open field. There was still a lot
of agriculture -- there was a cow across the street from our
house. That's how it was back then. [Laughter] And I remember
being ambushed by these boys sometimes coming home from school.
And I'd be in the middle of a dirt field. Just, man, they'd be
throwing dirt clods and rocks at me and I'd be trying to fight
myself off of these kids coming at me.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my gosh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: I got pretty good at throwing things, you
know?
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah!
>> Ken Taniguchi: I was pretty good.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] Well, were you walking by yourself
or were you with any of your ->> Ken Taniguchi: No, I was by myself.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: But now, I assume it didn't last the whole
time you were in elementary school because as you, as time
passed, those kids graduated and they went on. And then you
learned English. OK, of course, that helped, right? So what were
your experiences like as you went on to junior high and high
school?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, it definitely got better as the other
kids graduated out or moved on. And you know, when you start
getting into high school and junior high school you're dealing
with a lot shorter age groups. There's three-year chunks,
basically, right? Because junior high school was 7th, 8th, and
9th, and high school was 10, 11, and 12. So you know, now you're
dealing with a much smaller group of kids and you're dealing
with kids -- as you move forward, you know, you got three years
coming in behind you. So my sister was one year behind me. And
my brother is about three years behind me. Three, four -- yeah,
three years behind me. So my sister got some of the same grief
that I did. But she had a different way of having to cope with
it. She was a girl so she had to cope with it a different way.
But as I got toward the end of grammar school, things got much
easier. And then by the time I had gotten to junior high school,
then I'm just basically with my own gang or my own group anymore
and as a matter of fact, one of my oldest friends is we went to
kindergarten together. And most of my buddies here in Fresno, we
all went through, you know, that whole era, the time period from
elementary school through junior high school through high school
together. We all went through Boy Scouts together. We all went
through Explorer Scouts together. So the bond with my gang, as
we call ourselves the wolf pack, is, you know, engrained in that
period of time when we all bonded. So yeah. It got -- by the
time I got into junior high school I didn't run into that
problem nearly as much as I did before. In high school, the same
thing. And of course as the larger schools you went to, the more
kids you got, we started drawing from other areas. So now there
were other Japanese American kids, a lot more other ethnic mixes
in there -- you know, Chinese and one of my other oldest best
friends is Mexican American. And he came into my elementary
school in the fifth grade and he's been a lifelong friend as
well. And ->> Carlene Tinker: I'm trying to think of what years these were,
Ken, when you were in elementary school and high school.
>> Ken Taniguchi: 1956 would have been when I started
kindergarten.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, '56. OK. Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, so I was only about five years old then.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And then so then, you know, you got
kindergarten then seven years after that, so 1960 -- let's see,
'63 would be junior high school because I was in seventh grade
when Kennedy was assassinated.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And then high school was '66 through '69.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Yeah, I'm trying to remember what the
geographic distribution of Japanese were and other ethnic groups
during this time. As I recall, the railroad tracks were a
dividing line for a lot of them. I mean, segregation. I'm
surprised that you were actually over in the northwest side of
Fresno.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, that's my father's doing. My father
wanted to move us into what he felt would be a better
neighborhood, better environment. You know, trying to look after
his kids. He thought, you know, going into suburbia would be
better than dealing with what he thought was a degrading
neighborhood in west Fresno. So he moved us to the northwest
Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. OK. And then as I recall, you told me
earlier about not being a very good student.
[ Laughter ]
In grammar school. And I think that was a result of, you know,
your inability to speak English fluently and there was some
correlation between that. And I think at one point didn't your
mom want to hold you back? Or was there an issue like that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. It was -- I had a very rough start. In
kindergarten I didn't speak English. It was -- if it wasn't for
television which, you know, one of the new things that came out,
black and white television. Probably one of the -- I guess one
of the tools that people used to start learning the language.
And my mother, she saw the hassles I was going through. She
decided that it wasn't going to happen to the rest of her kids.
So she started forcing herself to use English rather than
Japanese at home. We hardly ever saw my father. He was working
all the time. So you know, and I started school, basically
trying to catch up just with the language. So I was a terrible
student first grade, second grade, third grade, you know, all
the way through elementary school. But I guess I did stand out
because I was a troublemaker. I was a class clown, goof-off,
whatever. A funny story on one of my first trials as an
attorney. I wasn't even looking at the jurors that were coming
in that day but the judge asks the jury panel, you know, do you
know any of the parties. And this lady said, I believe I know
Mr. Taniguchi and I looked up. And I go, oh my gosh. It was my
first grade teacher.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! [laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: She had remembered me. [Laughing] But yeah,
all the way through elementary school I was pretty bad. By the
third -- I was basically, you know, C-D student.
>> Carlene Tinker: Whoa!
>> Ken Taniguchi: Terrible. By the third grade, I was below
grade level. You know ->> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: By then they test you to see if you're keeping
up with the rest of your classmates. One of my good friends,
Milo Lukovic [phonetic] and I were pretty much in the same
situation and he was also below grade level. So they kept Milo
back a year. Back then, if a student wasn't keeping up with his
classmates, they'd make him retake that grade over again. So
Milo got held back and it has a stigma to it. You know, we were
good friends when I was, you know, all the way up until that
point and then when he got held back, all of a sudden, you know,
he was no longer part of the gang anymore. You know? So I
completely lost contact with Milo. My mother was worried about
me so she told my fourth grade teacher -- because I got through
third and went to fourth and in fourth grade I was again in
trouble and whatnot, messing up. And my mother asked my fourth
grade teacher to hold me back. And I know her name, Mrs. Dudley.
She told my mother no. She said, you know, he's not stupid. He
just needs to catch up. You know? And she thought it would be
detrimental to hold me back, making me -- in a way, teachers
need to be aware of these types of things, you know. The selfesteem of a person is important and [inaudible] to their
educational track. So she said no, make him struggle. Make him
earn it. So my mother followed her advice and let me continue.
And I was pretty much still struggling all the way through
seventh grade. And then all of a sudden, eighth grade, I guess
everything just finally came into place. And all of a sudden
from becoming a barely passing D and C student, I started
getting As and Bs. And it took off from there.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. And then when you got to high school, I
think, you got good enough grades that you were winning a
scholarship to university.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I got a Cal State scholarship, yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Which one was it?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Cal State.
>> Carlene Tinker: Cal State?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, California State scholarship. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. And so then high school was just the
opposite of grammar school.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: For you. You found your niche. You were able
to speak English well. And as I recall, you felt very
comfortable in high school. You found your friends and you
started some clubs, didn't you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I did a -- I got involved in more things
than just, you know, being a goofball. I was involved in clubs.
I ran for class office. All the things that, you know, you need
to do to get into college, all of a sudden I was doing all those
things. And so yeah --
>> Carlene Tinker: Mrs. Dudley did a good thing.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, she did.
>> Carlene Tinker: She knew what she was doing.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, smart teacher.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. And I'm glad your mother didn't
capitulate.
[ Laughter ]
So then you successfully graduated, I think from Fresno High.
And then where did you go to school? Where did you go to
college?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I was the first of my siblings or pretty
much most of my family to actually get into university. I didn't
know what I was doing. I just knew that I wanted to go to
college. My parents thought I should go to City College. But you
know, I was pretty much full of myself. I figured I could do
anything, you know. So I said, I'm going to apply to UC. They
said, well you know, it's kind of hard to afford that. I said,
well, I'll apply for the scholarship. So they said, OK, fine.
You know. So you try it. So I did. And I didn't know one college
from another. I just knew UC was probably, you know, for a
university was probably the most inexpensive. So I applied. But
I didn't know where to apply to. I had no idea which, what
colleges -- how they're configured, what's the difference
between the, you know, colleges. Especially the University of
California has different colleges within the university. You
know, so San Diego there was Muir College, Third College,
Revelle College. I knew Scripps Institute of Oceanography was
down there. I wanted to be -- I was interested in fisheries and
fish and whatnot. So I think, I want to be an oceanographer. I
didn't realize Scripps Institute was a graduate program. I just
knew that it was there. So I applied and they were asking which
college and I'm going, well, I'll pick Revelle, you know. So I
pick Revelle, not knowing that I had probably selected probably
the most difficult college in the University of California
system. No wonder there weren't a whole lot of applicants going
there. It was people who had any, who knew the system knew that
was not where you wanted to go to. But I applied there and of
course they accepted me. And with a Cal State scholarship, so
off I went to UC San Diego.
>> Carlene Tinker: And what was your experience like in Revelle
College?
>> Ken Taniguchi: That was ->> Carlene Tinker: A learning experience?
>> Ken Taniguchi: It was a very learning experience. I got in
the first -- it was on a quarter system back then. First
quarter, I ended up with an A, a B, a D, and an F.
>> Carlene Tinker: Whoa!
>> Ken Taniguchi: For a C average. OK.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, so you were able to stay in.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So, I'm OK. Second quarter, I fell below a C
average.
>> Carlene Tinker: Whoa.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I'm getting in trouble now.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And so they put you on probation.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Which means that you're on the verge of
getting expelled if you keep this up. And of course this was
back in 1969-70. And for those who don't know it, back then the
Vietnam War was going on. We were all raised for the draft. You
could avoid the draft if you were a full time college student.
It was called a student deferment. If you got kicked out of
college, now you're in line to get shipped off to Vietnam.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So you know, there was a lot more at stake
than just an education.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You know, the fact that you may get yourself
killed if you don't continue your education. So here comes the
spring quarter of 1970 and I'm in big trouble. I was taking a
full time student so with all my classes and I think I was only
passing maybe one or two of them. And the rest of them I was
pretty much headed right out the door. And then Kent State
happened. And for those who don't know Kent State, that was a
student protest at Kent State University and the National Guard
opened up gunfire on unarmed protesters and gunned them down. So
the death of those college students caused tremendous turmoil in
the university system. The UC system went into pretty much a
giant protest on every campus of the UC system and they shut
down the university. The university was shut down for about a
week, almost two weeks, it seems like. The university got shut
down. When we came out of that shutdown period, the chancellors
said it's not fair to have you guys try to continue this quarter
having lost this much time. You can drop any classes you want,
as long as you have some class you can still remain a full time
student.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: That was my opportunity. I dumped every class
I was failing or getting below grade. And I was able to -- I
think I only carried two classes for that end of that spring
quarter which was enough because those were my best classes. And
I was able to pull myself out of probation because of the Kent
State situation. So by the end of the first year, I was back
onto an even keel so to speak.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, you were OK at that point.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. And then after that, I got wise to how
to study, how to be a good university student. So the second
year I went back to the classes that I was having trouble with
and retook them and I excelled in those. That little extra time
to get up to speed. So by the end of the second year of
university at UC San Diego, I was not on probation. I was on the
dean's list. And now on the dean's list, I said, I've got to get
out of this place. This place is too hard. So I tried to find
someplace. Now I understood the system and I realized where I
wanted to be was UC Davis which had a fisheries program. So I
transferred to UC Davis.
>> Carlene Tinker: So how did you get involved with fisheries?
Were you like your grandfather, liked to fish, or is that ->> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. That's pretty much it. That's my -- see,
I was a problem child. And one of the things that I had was a
very bad temper. And I'm one of these kids that would get so
angry and throw a temper tantrum to the point that I'd hold my
breath and pass out.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So my grandfather Kimura said he needs
something to, you know, compensate for this thing. So they said,
teach him how to fish. Fishing teaches you patience. You know?
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, it sure does.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, because fish aren't going to bite all
the time.
>> Carlene Tinker: No.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And it's not ->> Carlene Tinker: [waiting for a fish to bite] for hours.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Like I tell people, fishing is fishing. It's
not catching. It's fishing. It's an actual activity that has
elements of meditation in it and concentration. So they told me,
you know, you've got to learn how to fish and then you can't get
mad at the fish because if you get mad at the fish you're not
going to catch them. So you have to learn how to calm down. And
so I got involved with fishing and it's -- you know, that's been
pretty much me my whole entire life. [laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, I know it continues to be a very
important part of your life. So then you found Davis as a likely
place to transfer to?
>> Ken Taniguchi: So much simpler. It felt like going back to
high school. That's how much easier it was academically than UC
San Diego Revelle College. Like I said, I found out later I had
gone into the hellhole of all colleges in the UC system, not
realizing it was being run by a bunch of Cal Tech alums who
wanted to create the new renaissance man. I mean, the campus had
-- you had no real academic freedom to pick classes for the
first two years practically. The first two years were pretty
much regimented that you had to take a set course of social
sciences and set course of science. And they wanted you to have
not only a major but a noncontiguous minor. So in other words,
if you're a science major you have to have a -- you had to have
a non-science minor. And you had to go and pass a language
proficiency of a second language.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So it was crazy.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. So you felt as though you moved to
heaven. [laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, it was so much simpler. It was so much
simpler.
>> Carlene Tinker: So you then pursued the wildlife fisheries
major and graduated in that major as I understand.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: And then -- but I know that you've become a
lawyer.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Or you became a lawyer.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: How did that happen? I mean, wildlife
fisheries, law. It doesn't seem to connect.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, it goes back to UC San Diego again. UC
San Diego, because you had to take the social science classes,
one of the classes was a humanities class on law and society.
>> Carlene Tinker: Law and society. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, and it was taught by a US magistrate. A
US magistrate is like a judge. He's not a life appointment like
you have with a US judge but they work as judges in the US court
system. And he taught that class. And I aced the class. And he
came up to me, you know, at the conclusion of the class and
said, you need to go to law school. And I said, I'm not a -- I'm
a science major. He goes -- but he told me, you have the
aptitude to be an attorney. You have the legal mind. You should
be an attorney. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. Heaven forbid.
I'm a scientist. I'm not a lawyer. You know. So but it was in
the back of my mind. So I went -- when I graduated as a
fisheries biologist, I tried to get a job as a biologist. And I
got picked up a couple of times by the California Fish and Game
as a seasonal aide biologist. So I worked on two different
projects. One was the Bay Delta Striper Project and one was the
Herring Assay in the San Francisco Bay. And they were both -you know, one was a summer job. One was a winter job. But I
couldn't get picked up full time. You know, I kept applying and
US Fish and Wildlife Service. But the job opportunities just
weren't there for a fisheries biologist. And so I was doing odd
jobs. I did everything from I went to bartenders school so I
bartended. My photography, which I picked up in junior high
school and high school, also paid bonuses. I became a -- I was a
stringer newspaper photographer up in Davis for one of the
newspapers up there. All the time, all my fishing down in as a
youth and also when I was at UC San Diego during the summertime,
I was deckhanding on fishing boats. I accrued enough time to
take the captains license to become a captain. I failed the
first time so I went to nautical school in San Francisco and
then I took the exam again and I passed. So I became a licensed
sportsfishing captain. So I was doing that as well. And but it
got to the point where I'm going, you know, I really wanted to
be a fisheries biologist. That's not happening. I could be a
sportsfishing captain for the rest of my life but it -- you
know, all through it I felt guilty. It didn't seem like work. It
feels more like play when I'm running a boat. But it's also very
stressful when you're dealing with a boatload of people whose
lives depend on you to keep them out of harm's way.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And especially running boats out of San
Francisco. That water is ->> Carlene Tinker: Oh yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, it is -- it was one of the ->> Carlene Tinker: Unpredictable.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, that and the dangers up there. There
were two types of captains up there -- ones that are extremely
obese from eating all the time and those that are extremely
skinny and emaciated looking because all they were doing was
drinking coffee and smoking all the time because that's what the
job entailed, having to pay attention to not only trying to
catch fish but watching out for other small boats, watching out
for sea conditions. And then in and around San Francisco,
especially, with all the heavy ship traffic going by. You had to
keep your eyes open for freighters and other things coming your
way. There were days when I had tremendous nervous tension built
up because I'm sitting there trying to watch a sonar screen, a
radar, the deck, and visually keeping my eye out in a zero-zero
fog so I don't hit anything.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So you know, it was a high stress job. You
know, on beautiful days it was great. But on those marginal days
it was extremely stressful.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So this was probably about 1977 or so. I
graduated in '73. So about '77. After about four years of
knocking around trying to, you know, find another occupation, I
thought, you know, let me take the LSAT which is the law school
entrance exam. Let's see how I do. I scored pretty good. So I
applied and I was -- I wanted to get into another UC system
again because of the cost. And I got accepted by about two
California law schools but the UCs I was on the waiting list.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I was on the waiting list at UCLA. I was on
the waiting list, I believe, at UC Davis. I can't remember if
Berkeley had me on the waiting list at all. But I know I was on
two of the UC campuses waiting lists. So I turned down the ones
that accepted me and tried to hold out to see if I could get in
in the UC system but it never happened. So the first year I
applied went to waste. So I said, well, maybe if I take the LSAT
again and try to boost up my score, maybe it would help. So I
took the LSAT again. I think I scored about the same, really.
And I guess maybe that was the stigma because I applied again
and you know I couldn't seem to get on anybody's UC system
waiting list this time but the other schools kept, you know,
offering me positions. So at the last minute I decided to take
Southwestern University Law School all the way down in Los
Angeles which is the fifth largest law school in the country. I
accepted to take their invitation and said, OK, I'll start over
there. So that's where I went to law school.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. And then how long was law school? Three
years?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Law school was full time. It was three years.
>> Carlene Tinker: Three years.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And everybody told me how -- what a, you know,
how difficult law school is. So I was steeling myself for a hard
go and I found out it wasn't hard [laughing]. For me, it wasn't
hard. I guess that U.S. magistrate was right. I just fit right
in. So ->> Carlene Tinker: Well, that's great.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I went through the first year and I
figured it was going to be difficult but I did -- I think I
might have overdone it, overanalyzed too much. I mean, I ended
up with a good, you know -- I ended up in probably the top, I'm
guessing, I don't know, the upper half of the law school class
final exam scores that year. I might have been higher than that.
But I know that I tutored two of the people who won top scores
in a couple of the classes. I was actually tutoring them
[laughing] and they excelled me. But at that point I realized
law school was not going to be that hard for me. I just needed
to get it done, so I did.
>> Carlene Tinker: Good.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: So then did you practice law down there or
did you come back to Fresno to -- where were your first jobs as
a lawyer?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well -[ Chuckles ]
I was -- law school. The bar exam is in June. I took the bar
exam. My intent was if I passed it, great, but I wasn't going to
take it more than once.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: If I failed it, I'm going to go back to the
fishing boats again. So I was running fishing boats waiting for
the bar results to come out.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It paid pretty good money too, by the way, so
I mean it's not -- you know, it's a very good occupation if you
want to do that. But then I passed the bar. And then so now I've
got to figure out what I'm going to do with this. So I started
applying. And I had worked in Los Angeles and interned -student intern -- with the Los Angeles District Attorneys
Office. I was supposed to work for Lance Ito, Judge Ito. He was
a DA back then but he was working the Gang Task Force Unit with
the Los Angeles District Attorney at the time and I was living
in East L.A. which was the middle of the gang territory. So when
he offered me the job, I said, I don't think I can work for you
because the guys you're prosecuting, I'm living in there. And I
don't think I want to be in that situation [laughing]. So I
mean, you know, he was kind of upset with me. He said, it
doesn't matter. Come on! I said, no, it's OK. So I ended up
working in the Consumer and Environmental Protection Division.
Again, my biology background, I had some help there. And the
fact that our family had run grocery stores, I had some
commercial experience too. So you know, my other life experience
would fit right into that division. So I started applying to
DA's offices, figuring that the fact that I had interned in the
DA's office would help. So I applied with Fresno and I applied
to Sacramento and a few other places. And I also applied to the
Public Defenders Office in Fresno. But meanwhile the fact that
I'm a captain and one of my friends in law school's wife was a
lieutenant commander of the United States Navy, told the US Navy
to recruit me. And the US Navy did come after me. And they
wanted me to be a JAG officer. So they were recruiting me pretty
hot and heavy [laughing]. They came after me. They said, you
know, we'll offer you this, we'll offer you that. You're the
perfect guy for this job. You know, they knew exactly were they
wanted to put me. They wanted to put me on shipboard duty,
knowing that I'm, you know, I can handle the ocean. I'm not -- I
don't have a problem with seasickness or anything like that. So
they were giving me all kinds of incentives to join the US Navy.
So I was tempted even though back during the Kent State and
everything else I was pretty much involved in the anti-war
activism down there. Little side note, I got in trouble with my
brother because of that because you know back then anybody
involved with the anti-war movement, even though I may not be a
face of the anti-war movement, if the fact that you're involved
in the anti-war movement drew the attention of the FBI. So I
didn't know it but the FBI apparently had a file on me. So when
my brother, who was -- my brother Brian which is the third child
born. He is the one that really excelled in school. He ended up
going to Stanford and he graduated cum laude Stanford. And he
wanted a job with a government agency and they turned him down
because of me.
>> Carlene Tinker: Is that right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: He asked them, how come I can't get the job?
Well, we've got a security issue with your brother.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So he told me, what the heck did you do with
San Diego? [Laughing] And I said, I just helped out these guys.
I was kind of like a courier. I just, you know, passed
information.
>> Carlene Tinker: Isn't that something that they would do that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. And that's how pervasive some of these
government activities are that you don't realize until
[inaudible] impacts you.
>> Carlene Tinker: Not just the person but the relative.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Well, they figured that there was
something going on. I don't know if they thought maybe -- I
don't know. I doubt it was anti-Japanese sentiment, but you know
there was something in the fact that I had helped out with the
Peace March in San Diego, the fact that I had confronted a
security guard at the naval base where I tried to enter the base
to attend the court marshall preceding that was being held at
the time. And the court marshal is supposed to be open to the
public but the base commander closed the base to the public. It
was one of those, you know, one of the tricky things they can
pull off there. Oh, it's a public court marshal. But the base is
closed. So we ended up confronting the guard at the gate, you
know. And apparently I got noted down as being an agitator or
whatever. Anyway, so I had applied to all these places on the
verge of being in the US Navy. Something that I was kind of
leery of since I had gotten this stuff with the, you know, in
the past with the military. And then I had gone through the
physical, all the paperwork. All I had to do was sign on the
dotted line and I was headed for officers candidate school when
I got a phone call from Ed Sarkisian who's Judge Sarkisian.
>> Carlene Tinker: Here in Fresno.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Here in Fresno. He was running the public
defenders office at the time and he said, you know, we got an
opening here for an extra help position. We think you'd fit in.
I know you -- it looks like you're a DA and maybe you are better
for the DA's office but you know, you're a west Fresno boy.
You've been in the environment. You know the clientele. They're
some of the people that you know how to deal with. You can
handle them as customers and whatnot. So we think you'd do well
here. So if you want it, you've got it. So I said, maybe for
this low paying job here in Fresno I'll go stay with Fresno. So
I turned down the Navy and I started working as extra help. And
my career took off from there.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. And basically define what a public
defender is.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, the public defender is your right to
counsel. You know, you have a right to counsel at any time your
liberty is at stake. So you don't get a right to an attorney if
you're being sued by somebody. But if you're going to be locked
up and your liberty is at stake, then you have a right [for
representation, even if you have no money to hire an attorney].
It's a constitutional right. Now, various -- the right was
established by Gideon versus Wainwright which happened back in
the early '60s. And this was Clarence Earl Gideon. It was a case
out of Florida which this man was charged with a burglary which
was going to put him in the state prison for several years. And
Florida had a rule back then that if it was not a capital case - in other words a murder case where they could put you to death
-- that you had no right to an attorney. Well, Mr. Gideon had to
defend himself in the trial. There's a very good movie out, a
made for TV movie starring Henry Fonda as Clarence Earl Gideon.
He had to defend himself and of course he lost because he was
somewhat of an uneducated man. He probably had a, you know,
secondary education, about it. He had to defend himself against
a seasoned prosecutor and of course he lost. So he wrote a
petition of [inaudible] to the US Supreme Court. And he had no
access to any kind of resources. So he had to do this whole
thing in pencil by hand. And he sent this request into the US
Supreme Court because all the other appeal courts had turned him
down. And the US Supreme Court heard his case. And that was the
case that ruled that yes, one of your fundamental rights in the
United States is your right to freedom. If your freedom is at
stake, you have a right to an attorney and if you cannot afford
one, one should be appointed for them. And the government should
pay for it. That forced all the states to have to come up with a
way to have to provide attorneys. Now, some of them did it
piecemeal. Some of them, say they'd you know hire a -- they'd
take a private attorney and they'd appoint them to them and pay
them whatever rate they want to set up. Other agencies started
to go with what's called a public defender which is the office
paid for by the government to take care of all of those people.
And California is the leader in that.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Farrah Shortridge Fultz is the mother of
public defenders. She is a first -- I believe she is the first
female attorney in California and she started setting up this
whole idea back in the early 20th century. In fact, the
courthouse in Los Angeles is named after here. So she started
the whole idea. And public defenders took off probably -- the
idea took off in the 1950s pretty much. People don't even
realize it but, you know, public defenders were held in pretty
high esteem back in the '50s. There was a TV show called The
Public Defender back then.
>> Carlene Tinker: Called what?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Public Defender.
>> Carlene Tinker: I don't remember that.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, but if you Google it and if you look for
it, you'll find it.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And they were -- it's like Dragnet.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: They would take true stories and then they
would make a play out of it. You know, a video play out of it
and they would present it every week as a 30-minute show of a
story of a public defender's case. And so Fresno decided as it
got larger and became to the point where they needed a full
staff as opposed to just piecemeal of appointing attorneys, in
1967 I believe it was they created the public defenders office.
And so that office had been in existence for you know 15 years
or so by the time I started working over there.
>> Carlene Tinker: So you became a public defender. You weren't
the only one, of course.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No.
>> Carlene Tinker: And then did you ultimately become the head
of the department?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, I -- well, when I first started, it was
like, so, like 1982.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And -- because I passed the bar in 1981. After
that one year period where I was trying to figure out which way
I wanted to go. I did a little stuff in between there.
Surprisingly and so many of my friends all decided to hold off
on their divorces until I passed the bar. The next thing you
know, all these friends are saying, you need to file divorces
for me. Oh my goodness! [Laughing] What do I have to do. So I
was doing divorces and wills for about a year. And I wasn't
really charging people for that. I was just doing it for my
friends. And then so I started in 1982 as an extra help. I was
probably getting paid less than the custodian. My mentor back
then was Hugo Cazato. And Hugo Cazato was one of the original
public defenders for Fresno County. He was deputy public
defender for Fresno County.
>> Carlene Tinker: What was the name again?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Cazato. Hugo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So he was my mentor. And you know, he
was the one that showed me the ropes, so to speak. So I was
there as an extra help for only about I would say two or three
months. And they said, you know, you're doing well. We've got a
full time position for you. We want to offer you a full time
position. So I started as a deputy one. And I, you know, worked
my way right up through the ranks. There's several levels -- you
know, attorney one, attorney two, attorney three, attorney four,
and then an attorney five which is called a senior. And above
that is management. So I worked my way right up through the
ranks doing every kind of case you could think of at the public
defenders office -- everything from petty thefts to homicide. I
defended all the people for about every kind of crime you can
think of pretty much. I had to -- I was defending people. And by
the time I -- by the 1990s, I was now spending more time as an
instructor than anything else. I had -- I guess I was good at
it. The new attorneys they would pass off to me for me to mentor
them. So what Hugo taught me, I became Hugo and I was teaching
these young attorneys how to be a public defender. And I think I
did a pretty good job because apparently my reputation was held
in pretty good regard by the entire court system. The DAs knew I
was not a trickster. I was a straight shooter. And so I had, you
know, good rapport with the district attorneys. I had good
rapport with the courts. And when the public defender
unfortunately passed away from cancer in 2006, a vacancy
occurred and so I applied. And in 2007 I was appointed public
defender.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I leapfrogged, actually. I leapfrogged from
being a senior attorney, senior defense attorney. I leaped right
past the management level of a chiefs or assistant public
defender and went straight to the top.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, straight to the top.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Now in that role did you ever face any
racism and/or discrimination? Or I wouldn't think you would.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, I wouldn't. You know, I'm always -- you
know, it's a sore spot for me still. You know, I mean, every
once in a while I run into somebody that does something or says
something that will get me riled up. And so but I try to stem
that saying, you know, I shouldn't be paranoid about it and
start thinking that every time something goes against me it's
because of racism. But you know, sometimes I wonder. You know,
sometimes some of the animosity I face, is it because of what
I'm standing for? Or is it something because of who I am as a
Japanese American?
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's something we're
going to be plagued with all our lives.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh yes, I think so. I can't -- it's just one
of those things, so.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Now, in the public defender role -just an aside -- I guess you deal mostly with blacks and Latinos
or is that true? Or is that --
>> Ken Taniguchi: It is. It is. And it's a sad thing, too,
because I can definitely see the racism involved there. You
know, the demographics of Fresno County -- really the majority
here is Hispanic. The caucasian or the whites would be number
two. Number three is Asian.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh really? Oh yeah, Asians now.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And African Americans are four.
>> Carlene Tinker: And what?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Are the fourth. And yet the, I would say most
of the clientele, at least the public defender's office gets
appointed on, are primarily Hispanic or African American which
tells me something is askew here. Why are there so many African
Americans being prosecuted ->> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: When they are only the fourth as far as the
population density of the area.
>> Carlene Tinker: What have you come up with? What explanation
do you have?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, a lot of it does have to do with racial
profiling and racial bias and the fact that people ->> Carlene Tinker: I'm afraid that's true. Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And you know, when you look at it you'd
expect, OK, so Asians are the third. But they are below them.
You know? I would think -- especially if you look at the jail
population. If you're looking at the jail, you're going to find,
I think, primarily Hispanics which is natural considering the
population.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, the most populated.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And then the disproportionately large amount
of African Americans ->> Carlene Tinker: That is ->> Ken Taniguchi: Incarcerated compared to the whites. And then
the Asians are on the low end.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, that is amazing because in my
experiences as I worked in Fresno Unified as a counselor and as
a teacher. Well, not as a -- an administrator. And we had a lot
of dealings with Asians, southeast Asians. And I'm surprised
that they're below the African Americans.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, in juvenile hall -- because we represent
juveniles as well, or did. [Laughing] I'm retired now. I keep
thinking of myself as if I'm still there. I did notice an uptick
as -- you know, remember, I started back in the '80s.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I just started to notice an increase in the
southeast Asian juvenile problem as far as those that are the
delinquency courts are being -- the population in the
delinquency court. And I could see a lot of it had to do with
these kids being with parents not able to figure out how to deal
with this society and the kids becoming enamored by the gang
life. And they started adopting that. And I can see that the
families themselves -- I don't see where they're dysfunctional
but they just lack the resources to know how to deal with this.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. Particularly if they're immigrants,
right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: The parents, yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. And the kids are -- you know, maybe
they want to be accepted by other people. You know, that's an
easy way. I don't know how they're [inaudible] but that's
another ->> Ken Taniguchi: They're seeking identity and sometimes the
easiest thing for them to do is to adopt an identity that is
given to them.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, right. OK but you're not working
anymore. You retired ->> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: I think about how many years ago?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Let's see. I retired in 2013 so it's getting >> Carlene Tinker: So, it's already six years.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: So what do you do now for entertainment?
[laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, besides fishing?
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: You go fishing. I see your shirt there -Taniguchi, Incorporated. Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It happened to be a company in San Diego that
when I was working as a deckhand I used to buy supplies from
them. It turned out they had the same last name.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh! [Laughing] I thought you were in -- I
thought it was your company.
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, they had the same last name. And
apparently came from the same part of Japan as well, as I was
talking to -- that company now is owned by their son who is Norm
Taniguchi. But I knew his mother and I don't remember if I met
his father or not. But way back then, when I first started
working down in there, I was talking to them. And we were like,
oh yeah, it must be in our blood. We come from fishing villages
on the coast and [laughing] -- we're still doing the same thing.
So yeah, that's how that got on there. So I do fishing. I'm
still involved with the Bar Association.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, are you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I was the past president of the Fresno
County Bar.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It's a nice distinction because I think I was
the first Asian bar president of Fresno county.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I was able to do that. And I'm still
involved with some legal things like next month is Law Day
coming up and I've been involved with their law day public -I'm not sure if it's an informational day at the court house
every year since they started this whole thing. I'm involved
with the Asian Pacific American Central California Asian Pacific
American Bar Association. I started that as well.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh wow!
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I wanted to make sure that, you know, there
were ethnic bars for -- just by everybody. I'm a member of the
Japanese American Bar Association. That's down in, based in Los
Angeles, although it's pretty much a national organization. Most
are members of the National Asian Pacific American Bar
Association which is a nationwide organization covering all
Asian ethnicities. But Fresno now has an Asian bar, an African
American bar, and naturally of course a Mexican American bar.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: I know also you do a lot with the JACL, don't
you?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I do. JACL -- back in the past I used to be a
member of the Board of Governors.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Locally. I kind of let that membership lapse
for a while. The internal politics were driving me crazy. But
I'm just basically a general member right now.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: of the Fresno chapter of the JACL. Judge Ikeda
-- he's been involved in a lot of projects here for the Japanese
Americans so I've been involved with some of his projects. Most
recently was the museum at the Fresno Fairgrounds.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, which is awesome.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So I was involved in that project and in
fact I have a -- we did a big map of what used to be Japantown
which is Chinatown, which was pretty much renamed Chinatown
after or during World War II. But it used to be Japantown.
There's a map of it that we posted up there which I was -- I
helped put that whole thing together. That's drawn from west
Fresno. That was my old haunts.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I figured that was a perfect fit for me. So
I helped with that. There are some of the objects that are on
display in the display cases I donated over there as well. And
then I have been involved with the Sister Cities program with
Kochi, Japan. Kochi, Japan is the longest continuous sister city
relationship Fresno has.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, really?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So it's over 50 years old now.
>> Carlene Tinker: Wow.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Initially it got started pretty much in 1964,
although it's not officially looked at as a sister city until
1965.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But -- That tie with Japan has been probably
the strongest sister city connection Fresno has had.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, I recall that when I was at Bullard
High School there was a group from Tenaya [Middle School] that
went over to Japan and then they hosted a group coming back
over.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right.
>> Carlene Tinker: That was probably in '80-something.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I've got all the records at home.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I can probably pull it up for you.
[Laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: There used to be a lot more stuff than that
going on than now. Initially it started with Holland Elementary
School which is right behind the Fashion Fair.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right behind.
>> Ken Taniguchi: One of the -- the sister cities program in
Fresno is, again, how it came together is interesting. Fresno
had two people who had made connections in Kochi. One was, I
believe it's Eddie Kubota. It was stationed in Kochi after World
War II as part of the occupational troops. And he is pretty much
Japanese speaking Nisei. So he had a connection over there from
having been over there as part of the occupational troops
stationed in Kochi. Kochi, by the way, is both a city and a
prefecture. So when I say Kochi, I don't know exactly if it was
in the city or was somewhere else. The other one was a professor
who apparently taught over there for a while back in the -- I'm
guessing it was the 1950s. So you know, he told them about
Fresno and everything else. And he was -- then he came back over
here to Fresno, Fresno State, I believe. So back then in 1950s
President Eisenhower decided to set up the Sister Cities
Program. President Eisenhower felt that part of the problems of
global tension or whatnot were based upon the fact that people
didn't know people. And he felt that rather than diplomats
talking, you know, like diplomats, it should be citizens talking
to citizens and getting to know each other on a much more
personal level. So he wanted to set up citizen diplomacy. So he
set up the Sister Cities Program. And so Fresno had two other
sister cities before Fresno came into existence.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: One was in Pakistan and the other was in
Burma. Both of those have disappeared. They are -- they didn't
last as long. Kochi would be the third city that became a sister
city with Fresno but the way Kochi got set up, again, it has to
do with culture and language barriers. Kochi wanted to set up a
sister city and they approached Fresno first. They sent letters
to the Fresno City asking if they'd be interested. For some
reason they wrote it all in Japanese and they sent it. And of
course the people at City Hall get this letter from Japan and
it's all written in Japanese. They go, what the heck is this
thing? And they just threw it away. So they never heard any
response back from Fresno. So then in 1964 or so, right around
there, Mr. Otsubo who was from Kochi was on a business trip to
the United States and he decided to swing into Fresno to see
what was going on. So he shows up in Fresno unannounced, goes up
to the city hall, and wants to talk to them. And he doesn't
speak English very well. So city hall is going, who is this guy?
So they got ahold of the local Japanese American community and
they got ahold of a couple guys who could speak Japanese and
they called him and, who is this guy? So they talked to him and
he -- in fact, he thought these guys that came in to talk to him
were Filipinos at first [laughter] because they were, you know,
working the fields and whatnot around here. You get pretty dark.
And when he realized that they were, you know, Japanese
Americans, then they told him who was there. So when they found
out that he was from Kochi and that he was here and he was
trying to set, they put him up. They paid for a room at what was
then the Dell Web Townhouse for a week. So the city of Fresno
picked up the tab and housed him as a guest for a week in
Fresno. And so he got to walk, run around, and see Fresno and
talk to city councilmen and whatnot. And Fresno City said, you
know, yeah. OK. I think we should -- we'll set up the sister
city. [Laughter] So it was one man's effort to come to Fresno
and the local Japanese American community coming to the rescue
of the city of Fresno to set up the Sister Cities Program.
>> Carlene Tinker: [Laughing] That's a wonderful story. Well, I
know that you are hosting a group this July.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: And next year you'll probably send a group
over there, right? Is that ->> Ken Taniguchi: Right. That's ->> Carlene Tinker: That's usually how it works, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, lately that's been what the Sister
Cities Program has been doing is us hosting and them hosting us.
You were mentioning earlier about these schools. Holland
Elementary has a relationship with, you know, Kochi Elementary
in Kochi. But you know, it's so sad. They wanted to set up video
conferencing and whatnot but it doesn't work because of the time
difference. You know, when our kids are in school here, it's the
middle of the night over there. And then by the time they get
into school it's late in the evening here or in evenings over
here. So it's hard for them to have a timeframe where the two
overlap to be able to make direct communications that way. So
although they do communicate and there are some communications
still, I understand, pretty much by letters, it's hard to have - you know, in a modern age right now it's not letters anymore.
It's texting and videoconferencing. And so real time and they
can't really. It's not possible.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And of course, you know, before all the modern
technology took over and the junior high schools were also part
of that project. And I think some of the kids who went from the
elementary school carried it on. And the next thing you had
contacts with junior high schools. That's pretty much gone now
because they just -- it doesn't have the connections. I've tried
to set up something with the high school level.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK, Ken. There are a couple things I did not
ask about and I'm not sure how much you know about them.
Relocation -- you said, I think, both sides of the family were
in camps.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, in the same camp.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. How did that happen? Where were they
living at the time that evacuation occurred?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, both my father's side and my mother's
side were both living in the Los Angeles area so they both got
sent to San Anita.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And from San Anita they were all transported
to Granada or Amache.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. And what were their surnames?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Kimura and Hayashis.
>> Carlene Tinker: Hayashis. OK. And I recall -- I happen to
have been in Amache myself. You were able to locate the barrack
that they were in? How did you find that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, you gave me a directory so I looked at
the directory and I knew their last names. I knew their names so
I searched it. Naturally, my mother's side under Hayashis was
quite easy to find, at least my grandparents. There was just two
of them. My father's side, though, because my grandmother
married Kimura, I had to search under Kimura and Taniguchi. And
sure enough Masawo and Hana Kimura popped up.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Then I had to look for my aunts and uncle. And
sure enough Yasco, Tasco, and Iwoao Taniguchi popped up and
naturally they were all housed in the same unit.
>> Carlene Tinker: Is that right? Do you remember the barracks
number and the apartment number?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I've got it here but I don't. I'd have
to look it up. [Laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Let me see if I have them in my notes then.
Let's see here. Oh, I guess I didn't write them down. It's
something like nine ->> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I might have them right here. Hang on a
second.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, block 9L and block K. Does that sound
right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Could be. Let's see. I think I've got that in
this thing here. I think I kept that in -- let's see. Let's see
here. No, that's the ship's manifest I'm looking at [laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
[ Inaudible Comments ]
>> Carlene Tinker: Nine L and block 9K. Does that sound ->> Ken Taniguchi: You know, if you wrote it down, you probably
have it. Let's see. Oh, I think it is right here. Let's see if
this is it here. Kimura. Oh, my grandmother's -- my mother's -her name was Hide [phonetic]. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, Masawo and Hana Kimura were in 9L7B.
>> Carlene Tinker: Seven B.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And let's see if I've got the other one here
somewhere. I think I do. Oops. I must have misplaced it. Oh,
there I probably put it on my mother's side maybe.
>> Carlene Tinker: Now these were your grandparents, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right, my grandparents. Yeah. Here it is.
Let's see here. Hayashis. Yeah, Yoshioni and Hide Hayashis were
in 11K/10A.
>> Carlene Tinker: Eleven K ten A?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes.
>> Carlene Tinker: And I was in 11G/4C. So I was a neighbor.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: I didn't know that at the time! [Laughter]
Did you ever have a chance to talk to your grandparents about
their experiences? Your aunts? What did they do? Do you have any
ideas, anything about that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I know that my grandmother Hana Kimura
became rather a very good artist. I still have some of her oil
paintings. And she was in an archival photograph of the art
class. My grandmother is in the photograph. So I was able to -you can actually see her in the class in that old photograph.
And I don't know what my mother's side was doing. I know my aunt
on my father's side who was in camp -- Yasco was a very good -excuse me. Drink some water. She was a very good -- with her
hands.
>> Carlene Tinker: Be careful. That doesn't [spill on you].
>> Ken Taniguchi: She was very good with her hands and she was a
seamstress. And so they were -- I had got the copy of her clove
patterns book that she created in camp. In fact, I think it was
on display here at Fresno State when we had the ->> Carlene Tinker: Oh, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I know she was good at that. Later on in
life she was so good with her hands that she was in the early
stages of the electronics business putting together computer -well, microboards. She was so good at soldering that she was out
doing that when she was living in southern California.
>> Carlene Tinker: So they came back to L.A.? Is that right?
When they -- did both sides come back?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think so. I think they both came back
initially because that was an area they were familiar with. I
don't think -- there was really no connection to Fresno that I
know of. But somehow the Kimuras ended up coming to Fresno
apparently because they must have talked to people or something,
maybe in camp, and they said to come to Fresno. So they settled
in west Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: So that's how your mother was here. Is that
right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, that's how my father was here.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, I mean your father.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. I get that mixed up. OK. Now of course
because they were in camp they were able to receive reparation
monies, right? Or did they accept it?
>> Ken Taniguchi: When was that anyway? That was 1980s? No.
>> Carlene Tinker: It was -- oh you mean 88 is --?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, '88 was when they ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, that was a civil liberties act then.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: And then we got our money staggered probably
19 -- I got mine in '92.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, so all my grandparents were gone by
then.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I'm pretty sure. My aunts and uncle on my
dad's side, of course, they were incarcerated so I think they
did get it. In fact, I know my aunt up in Sacramento, Auntie
Tasco, she got it. Yeah, for sure.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, yeah. OK. Let's see. What else did I
want to ask you about on that? OK. So basically you made a
comment a little bit earlier about, you know, when something
happens you don't know exactly is it because I'm Japanese or is
it because of something else. Do you ever feel that you've been,
even as an adult, discriminated against?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know. You always put it in the back of
your mind sometimes.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Because it works both ways. Maybe I was picked
because I'm Japanese. Or maybe I was excluded because I'm
Japanese. You never can tell.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, that's true.
>> Ken Taniguchi: But it's always in the back of your mind
because having gone through the negative part of it, you always
kind of wonder. You know. I think I told you one of the reasons
why I'm a Dodgers fan was when I was in grade school -- I'm a
big baseball fan. And the Giants and the Dodgers moved to
California in 1957. And that was about the time when I was about
-- well, it was '58 when I was, when you about start playing
ball as a kid.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And I wanted to play ball. I wanted, you know,
to go to Little League and the whole bit. And there was a lot of
kids back then that were still pretty hostile to me and they
wouldn't let me play ball. They said, we don't want the Jap on
our team. So you know, maybe I wasn't very skilled but and so I
thought -- you know, initially you think it's because, you know,
you're just not very good but when they interject that into it,
you said, oh maybe it's not because I'm not so good. It's
because of who I am. And those kids that were saying those kinds
of things that were mean to me, you know, they were all Giants
fans. I was going to be a Giants fan like everybody else in
Fresno, you know, because the Giants were being promoted here.
And if you know the Mason-Dixon line, so to speak, between the
Dodgers and the Giants was pretty much the Fresno County border.
So everything north of Fresno was Giants territory. With the
gentleman's agreement, everything south was Dodger territory. So
and the Giants had to -- you know, the Fresno Giants were here
back then. So everybody was going to be a Giants fan, I was
going to be a Giants fan and Willy Mays, the whole bit. And then
these kids come after me and I said, the heck with you guys. You
know, I'm not going to be fans of a team that has you for fans.
So I became a Dodger fan.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh. Oh, that's interesting. You said the
dividing line was at the end of ->> Ken Taniguchi: Fresno.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And you know, and I'm glad I became a Dodger.
You know, today is Jackie Robinson Day. Today is the day Jackie
Robinson broke the color barrier with the Dodgers in Brooklyn.
And so when I -- as I became a Dodgers fan I started to read
about the Dodgers and realized I picked the right team. This is
the team that broke the color barriers. This is the team that
was going to be more inclusive.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I was very happy that I ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, you made a good choice.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I became a Dodgers fan. And then -- then
even later when as time progressed and the Dodgers won the World
Series in let's see '59 and I had the last laugh of all these
Giants fans because, you know, my team wins the World Series.
Your team, you know, they beat the Dodgers in '62, I think it
was, in a one game playoff and they went to the World Series and
they lost. You know? I said, haha! You know?
[ Laughter ]
We can win it, you guys can't. You know?
>> Carlene Tinker: Well that's interesting because I have a
friend who grew up in Fowler which is south of Fresno and she's
a Dodger fan. I didn't know that was -- maybe that's why.
[Laughing] I don't know.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know but I just know that my story is
why I'm a Dodger fan is because I had to face that kind of
hostility and so I gravitated to the opposite of those people
that I detested and ->> Carlene Tinker: That's right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So I became a Dodger fan.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: Now you've got your iPad -- I guess that's
your iPad. And you were going to show me some pictures.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I was trying to.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It's pretty tough. I can't get into the photo
albums that I wanted to. I can show you some things here. Like
this is my grandfather on my father's side.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh!
>> Ken Taniguchi: This is Kosaburo Taniguchi [phonetic].
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: OK. And then this is my Auntie Tasco.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, beautiful.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. And this is my Auntie Asco. Like I said
by this time they were -- you know, this was back in the states.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yes.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I wish I could get into my other photo albums
because they had much more interesting photographs. It just
doesn't seem to want to open up for me. I've got pictures of me
[laughing].
>> Carlene Tinker: Well, we like to see those too!
>> Ken Taniguchi: This is an interesting one. No, that's not.
That's just my dad's buddies in Japan. Let's see here. Well this
is -- this is even dated. This is my birthday in 1953.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh.
>> Ken Taniguchi: That's me in the middle. And you can see that
the kids are there. The neighbors' kids are Hispanic and then
there's some Japanese kids so --
[ Laughter ]
Let's see if I can -- if I can get that other thing to open up
it would be so much more interesting. Let's see if I can [try to
log on] one more time to see if I can get it to open up at all.
It just doesn't seem to want to open up for me. It looks like
these are opening up very slowly.
>> Carlene Tinker: I think that's partly because we're in this >> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, here we go. Here we go. I got some stuff
here now.
>> Carlene Tinker: Ok.
>> Ken Taniguchi: These are my -- this is my father's side. This
is my father as a cadet in the Japanese Merchant Marines.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. Very typical haircut there.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Let me see if I can find something more
interesting here. Oh [laughing] -- I told you my father and this
gang at the elementary school. Remember when he was -- see these
are the boys. [Laughing] These are the rough kids.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, these are the gangsters. [Laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: These are the gangsters in elementary school.
That's how old they were. [laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Was that a very common practice to try to get
the group to learn English? I wonder how their communities did
that.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it was
something unique to Fresno or not but you know ->> Carlene Tinker: I'll have to ask.
>> Ken Taniguchi: See, this is my father when he got here in
Fresno. That's what he looked like.
>> Carlene Tinker: This is your dad?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My father, yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, see, you don't look like him. Do you
look more like your mom?
>> Ken Taniguchi: [Laughing] Maybe I do. I don't know. Of course
maybe if I showed a picture of them older, maybe --
[ Laughter ]
See this one's even got the date on this one. This one is a
photo inside of our mom and pop grocery store back in 1954.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I don't know if this is getting on your camera
or not but ->> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. That was over on ->> Ken Taniguchi: Merced and C Street.
>> Carlene Tinker: Merced and C.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Maybe the other one is going to open up now.
Let me see what happens here. So I've got -- oh. Like I said, I
was a troublemaker here. Here's a -- oops. That's me in the
middle with my cousins. [Laughing]
>> Carlene Tinker: Who's the adult?
>> Ken Taniguchi: That's my dad.
>> Carlene Tinker: What?
>> Ken Taniguchi: My father.
>> Carlene Tinker: Your father. OK. And where is the place that
you're standing?
>> Ken Taniguchi: This is probably Roeding Park, I'm guessing.
>> Carlene Tinker: Where?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think this is Roeding Park.
>> Carlene Tinker: Roeding Park?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah I think so.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think it's Roeding Park. I can't tell for
sure. I mean, it's a park someplace. It could even be a park up
in Sacramento because that's where my cousins were. These were
my cousins from Sacramento and my sister's right there. That's
Jane. She's right there. That's my -- that's the second born.
>> Carlene Tinker: Second born, OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Let me see if I can find -- [Inaudible]
something interesting out of here. Oh, there's more of my -I've got so many shots of my father in Japan. He's ->> Carlene Tinker: I don't remember where they were going to
school. Were they in Wakayama Ken when your mother and father,
when they were ->> Ken Taniguchi: My father was in Asumi.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, and the other one was Saitama.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, Saitama. Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Saitama.
>> Ken Taniguchi: In fact, my father's childhood friend who's
still living is, his name is -- his last name also happens to be
Taniguchi but he's not related. His name is Fukuzo Taniguchi
[phonetic]. And this is my dad and his buddy Fukuzo Taniguchi
back in school. So my dad's in uniform and Fukuzo is not. That's
them back in Japan back in the 1940s.
>> Carlene Tinker: 1940s, yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: OK. And then my father -- let's see. I've got
a picture of a more recent photo of those two guys together
here.
>> Carlene Tinker: Now, your mom is still alive, right?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes, my mom is still alive.
>> Carlene Tinker: But your dad passed when? Two years ago?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, about two years ago.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Let's see here.
>> Carlene Tinker: How old is your mom now?
>> Ken Taniguchi: She's 91.
>> Carlene Tinker: Ninety-one.
>> Ken Taniguchi: See, there's the same two buddies together -so my dad and Fukuzo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Good.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. So they kept a lifelong friendship to
the very -- literally to the very end. The last voice my father
heard before he passed away was Fukuzo.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. I was able to get a video sent from his
daughter to -- Fukuzo sent a video of himself talking and my
father had got it at about midnight. And I was able to get it to
my brother who was at my dad's bedside that night. And I told
him, you got to play this. And my dad was out of it. You know,
he was -- he didn't appear to be conscious but he was still
alive. And I said, but you know, even though he's not going to
see it, you should play this. So he did and he could hear his
voice. And he could hear his buddy telling him, you know, hang
in there, you know, you got to get better. We can still go hang
out together, that kind of thing, you know. And it was about 15
minutes later he passed away.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh my.
>> Ken Taniguchi: It was like he was waiting for closure, you
know.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: So it was -- you know. I thought ->> Carlene Tinker: Was your dad here in Vintage Gardens too?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yes. That's where he passed away at. But it
was, like, so poignant. It fitted. You know, everything -- he
lingered for like two or three weeks, you know. And pretty much
unconscious and kind of comatose state. But he heard his buddy's
last words and then he was able to go. So it was kind of nice.
>> Carlene Tinker: That is something.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. Let's see here if I can find that -- I'd
like to show you a picture of our store if I can find it here.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: For some reason, this was not just -- this
page does not want to open up for me. Maybe I got it in my -No, those don't open up either. Hmm. It must be a slow
connection. It's having trouble loading it, it looks like.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: At least I got part of this stuff opening up.
[Laughing] Let me see if I can find -- Maybe that one. Hmm.
Yeah, it looks like right now I've got sporadic pictures that
are popping up on here for me. Let me see if I can go down all
the way down to the bottom down here and see if anything else
popped up. Well, I've got pictures of me and fish as always.
[Laughter] Let's see.
>> Carlene Tinker: Why don't you show one of those? [Laughing]
>> Ken Taniguchi: This was -- that's me and my little brother
down there. These are albacore.
>> Carlene Tinker: How old were you at that time?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Probably about, I'm guessing about -- my
brother's born so he was born 12 years after I was. So he looks
like he's about, probably about four years old, I guess, in that
picture. So that would be ->> Carlene Tinker: So you were 16.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Beautiful fish. I've caught a few
myself.
>> Ken Taniguchi: They're not much sport to catch but they sure
are good to eat.
>> Carlene Tinker: What's that?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I said they're not really a hard fighting fish
as far as I'm concerned but they are sure good to eat.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carlene Tinker: Well, I'm not in the same category as you but
I found them very fun to catch. [Laughter]
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah. OK. Yeah, unfortunately I can't get the
other pictures to come up for me. I would have loved to have
shown you the store. I have pictures of the store that I was
raised at, the Columbia Market. I've got that in my album here
someplace that won't come up for me.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Well thank you for sharing those. Let's
see. I think I've covered what I intended to cover -- what your
life has been like as a citizen of the Fresno area, San Joaquin
Valley, and some of your experiences. Is there anything that I
have overlooked and you might want to add to kind of round it
out?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, just living in Fresno it's kind of
interesting how we got -- it seems like there's two distinct,
separate Japanese communities going on right here because you've
got the agricultural community out there which has a different
lifestyle. And I play golf with a bunch of, you know, guys my
age, maybe a little older. They're, you know, they're Sanseis.
But their life experiences are so much different than mine. You
know, they grew up with other Japanese Americans. I didn't
really except for my relatives. I didn't have the connection. I
probably would have if I stayed in Japanese language school or
you know if we were with the Buddhist church or Japanese
Congregational Church or something. And I did go to those
churches as well. But my mother was so trying to get us involved
in American culture, I think it might have gone into the extreme
the other direction. My brothers and sisters, they don't have
nearly the Japanese American experiences that I had growing up.
When I first went to Japan when I was 16 with my brother Brian - Brian is the one that's the Stanford grad. He's the smart one.
[Laughter] Let's just say he's the one that was able to take
advantage of the situation better than I was. I don't know if I
would have been able to do as well academically as he did. But
you know, my brother Brian graduated valedictorian of Fresno
High School. And but he also had -- it's also kind of funny that
we went through grammar school together at the same school. And
my mother was the longest continuous PTA member at Roeding
Elementary because my little brother David was 12 years behind
me. So she has an unbroken chain of membership in the Roeding
Elementary School PTA from me all the way to the end of my
little brother's time there. So that's a long time to be a
member of a PTA. But my brother Brian was so good in school
that, you know, the teachers all remember him for his academics.
But they remember me as the Taniguchi. So my mother's always
cracking up that, you know, teachers would say, oh yeah Kenny
was such a great student and la-da-da-da. And she's going, they
got you confused with Brian. [Laughter] You were not the great
student. He was but you left a lasting impression. [Laughter]
>> Carlene Tinker: Well what does Brian do now?
>> Ken Taniguchi: He's an executive for Chevron.
>> Carlene Tinker: OK. Well you said that -- correct me if I'm
wrong. You said you were not as Japanese as some of these guys
you play golf with?
>> Ken Taniguchi: No, I think I'm more Japanese.
>> Carlene Tinker: Oh, just the opposite. OK.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Right. Yeah. They're -- you know, I speak to
them and they all say something in Japanese but the inflection
is like a caucasian would speak. You know, they don't say the
word like I think the word is pronounced but because they've got
-- they've Americanized it so to speak. And so I'll hear them
and I go, OK. You know, I'm not going to say nothing but, you
know, that's not the way I was taught how to say that word. And
they will string something together and it's pretty much like
listening to -- which I was used to in college. I took Japanese
a little bit in college and the other students would be speaking
conversations. The conversation part of the class they would be
speaking and it would be very consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel -very staccato.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You know? And I'd just rattle off something in
Japanese and it's -- you know, since I'm used to saying it, it
would flow out. So you know, that's kind of how the guys I hang
with -- they tend to speak that way.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. Well that leads me to a question. Why
are you so involved? Do you think -- I don't know about your
siblings. Are you more involved in the Japanese American
community than they are? Why do you think that is?
>> Ken Taniguchi: I think -- well, I know they all are to a
degree. My little brother maybe not so much and Jane maybe
somewhat but more because of church. She goes to the UJCC -United Japanese Christian Church. Brian probably because he's a
globetrotter. And his Japanese is probably better than mine
because he has to use it more for travel. Although when we were
-- like I said, when I was 16 I was in Japan with him. He'd have
the vocabulary but I'd know how to string the sentences
together. So we were kind of like a tandem team in Japan. I'd
ask him, what's the word for [inaudible]? And he'd tell me. And
then I'd ask the question, you know. So we'd wander around Japan
and he'd be kind of like my dictionary and I'd be the one
talking.
[ Laughter ]
My sister, Kathy or she actually uses her middle name, Keiko.
Everybody knows her as Keiko. She's involved. A lot of it has to
do with her children. Now, there's an interesting thing there
because of cultural distinction. Well, the problems with the
generation -- now we're talking yonseis there. But she married
an Italian American, Viacona. So her kids are half Japanese and
half Italian American. And her son had problems. He was, both my
-- well, let's see. I think they were -- yeah, both my niece and
nephew were born in California. My niece, she seemed to be able
to, I don't know, maybe merge better or she was better adapted
at it. But my nephew had real problems. He had developed
behavioral problems in living in Santa Fe, New Mexico where my
brother-in-law was working at the university over there. And he
got into trouble. He got into some serious trouble over there.
His mother, my sister, was at wit's end about what to do about
this problem. And we were wondering, you know, which way his
life was going to go. So she sent him -- he was able to get a
GED, I guess and get into the University of Hawaii. He went to
University of Hawaii and all of a sudden it's like he flipped
the switch all of a sudden. I guess the culture -- my sister
didn't realize how much he was being stigmatized by being half
Japanese in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
>> Carlene Tinker: That's interesting.
>> Ken Taniguchi: And so that's where his behavioral problems
were coming from. But when he got to Hawaii where you have a
much more of a blended society over there he felt more accepted
and he actually became more receptive to his Japanese side. In
fact, he's in Japan now.
>> Carlene Tinker: I'll be darned.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, he went to -- he graduated from
University of Hawaii. He started studying Japanese. My mother's
delighted that he writes to her with some Japanese stuff and
he's studying organic farming in Japan right now. He'll be there
until the end of the summer, I believe. So you know, his
experience at being “happa,” you know, you can see that there is
the problems out there for that generation out there that have
to learn how to fit into society being of a mixed race.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah. That's interesting. I'm thinking about
my father who was “happa.” OK? And in the '20s and '30s he
suffered a lot of discrimination and I'm surprised to hear that
even now that's a problem, you know, for your nephew and ->> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, and I don't think it's just Japanese. I
think it's any kid who come from a mixed race background. Yeah.
Yeah.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. Yeah, that's true. I don't mean to say
it's just unique among us. But being a marginal person and you
know, I keep hoping that we have grown away from it but
unfortunately ->> Ken Taniguchi: I think that the current society right now
it's raised its ugly head again big time and that's this.
There's one of the things that -- and then you asked me about it
and why I'm involved with JACL and whatnot. I think now is a
time when you need to really step it up.
>> Carlene Tinker: That's right.
>> Ken Taniguchi: You need to be actively involved. You can't
let this be put off to the wayside. You have to confront it head
on.
>> Carlene Tinker: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's
why I tend to be more vocal than I used to be. And I think it's
a time for everybody to step up, you know, and not just Japanese
and Japanese Americans.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Yeah, I've turned off a few people that were
used to be my friends who I've had to confront because what they
were saying was unacceptable. And I pointed it out to them and
some of them really have stopped talking to me. You know? And
like I say, OK, that's fine. You know? I was trying to point out
something but if you're going to -- if that's your attitude,
well you know what? I'm going to keep correcting you whether you
like it or not. So if you don't want to hear it, I can
understand why you don't want to talk to me anymore but that's
OK. You know? I've done my job.
>> Carlene Tinker: Yeah.
>> Ken Taniguchi: I just want to keep it in the forefront. So.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right, right. Well, thank you very much, Mr.
Taniguchi. Just to summarize, you are a Sansei born in Fresno
and you had a rocky start as a student [laughing]. However,
you've overcome that because you've become a successful lawyer
and have done that very well in the public defenders office and,
you know, ultimately became in charge of that. One of the things
I like to conclude our interviews with is a question to you.
What do you think your legacy will be? How would you like to be
remembered?
>> Ken Taniguchi: Well, I guess that I did my share to maintain
the community standards that make Fresno a welcoming society for
everybody, that there is justice for all, that the rights of the
US citizens were defended by me, and that hopefully people will
-- a little side note here. The public defenders office back in
2008-9 during the recession was in danger of being abolished.
And -- which I thought would be a travesty for our justice
system in Fresno County. And so I had to make some hard choices
and I had to do some major battling during that period of time
to keep the public defenders office alive. And I'm so glad I
succeeded. The public defenders office right now is flourishing
beyond where it was when I took office. In fact, they've added
more and more staff to it. It's probably about as healthy as
it's ever been. And I hope that that was partially because of
all the effort I put in to raise it to that level that the
electeds could understand that this is an important
constitutional right that needs to be cherished by our local
community and make sure that, you know, all people have a fair
shake in this community.
>> Carlene Tinker: Right. A right to be protected. I appreciate
your statement here. I think in your role not only as a public
defender but also in your role as a member of the Kochi Sister
Group, the JACL, and so forth, you've done a lot and are as much
appreciated by the community in making sure that we're
recognized, that we have our place in history. And that is one
of the ultimate goals of an oral history project like this. We
want to share your story and also have it part of our history so
other people can know what you went through and what others have
gone through. So I thank you today. Your story is very unique.
I've enjoyed interviewing you. I hope you have enjoyed it as
well. And obviously people who will see this will enjoy it as
well. Thank you very much.
>> Ken Taniguchi: Oh, you're welcome.