<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So, Jim, when you're kind of like growing up, when you're playing with your friends, what are some memories of the type of things that you would do in Los Angeles?

JY: Well, it was extremely friendly, kind of, of neighborhood. And whether you could go walk into any house, any neighborhood house that were Japanese, and never knocked on a door, you just went in. Always welcome. Most of the homes were very bare, and if we went into the kitchen, it was usually almost like a bench-like seats, and the cover was uniformly, in those days, sort of like now would be plastic with a sort of oilcloth with some colorful patterns on it. So that was, no fancy decorations in the homes that we went, most of the homes we went into.

TI: And when you went to your friends' houses, would you oftentimes eat at different places?

JY: If there was food there, I guess we participated, yes.

TI: And how about your interactions with the parents of your friends? Did they oftentimes talk to you?

JY: Oh, they all knew you, and they would talk, call me by my Japanese name, Nobuo-san. So I recall, that name just came out to me that that's what they called me, the older people called me.

TI: Now, did you have a sense that they were all kind of, you know, I think of Hillary Clinton when she says "it takes a village to raise a child." Did you have a sense that the community was helping to raise you, that they were kind of watching you and taking care of you?

JY: It seemed like one big, nice neighborhood. It's a very warm memories I have of that neighborhood.

TI: Now, was the neighborhood predominately Japanese, or were there other races?

JY: Yes, there were other races. In fact, primarily we got a sense of the diversity of people. Next door was a Negro couple, and across the street was another Negro family. And then across, just directly opposite was a Filipino man that was married to, he was married to a Caucasian. And in those days, we just basically knew that to be married wasn't allowed, a white man and an Asian -- a white woman and an Asian. And so it was unique, but we never gave too much thought to that. And then there was the, next door there was another similar couple, and they sent their children to our, my father's church. And one of the children still come to the same church, so that would be seventy years, eighty years later.

TI: So growing up in a diverse neighborhood like that, were your playmates also diverse, or did you hang out with just the Japanese?

JY: I would say they were mostly Japanese, because this Filipino family, their kids were much younger. And there was one more interesting Filipino group. So there was this mixture on this street of different races, and we knew the situation. So we knew that they couldn't, they didn't have ladies, women to marry to because Japanese were such a closed society. And the two houses further down was a row of flats in which Filipino men lived. But they had a joint undertaking of a livery service, Cadillacs, and they had uniforms, but they also had among them, amongst six of them, two women who were Caucasians. So occasionally we were seeing some little excitement going on in that area. [Laughs] But we just took that in stride as the way the world was.

TI: Well, I'm curious, did the Isseis, how did they view... because you were in such a diverse neighborhood, how did they view the Filipinos or the African Americans? Did they have sort of generalized or stereotypical views of these different groups, and if so, what were they?

JY: There wasn't much talk about that. But from the way they interacted with each other, in spite of the fact that there were these different groups that surrounded us, there was no intermixing of social activities with them, except for the kids. We would go into the Filipino person's home, of course.

TI: That's interesting. I forgot to ask, what neighborhood was this?

JY: This was called Uptown, bounded by the two major streets at that time, was Western to the west, and to the East was Vermont. And the main street that ran through, between these two streets was Tenth Street, which eventually became Olympic Boulevard at the time of the Olympic games in the '30s.

TI: And your father's church was in this area?

JY: Exactly, yes.

TI: What were some of the games or activities you could remember as boys that you would do in this neighborhood? What were some games?

JY: Well, of course, we played on the streets, a little baseball. But the ones I remember best is we looked forward to Christmas and maybe some present. I was focusing on football, and one year somebody got a football, so we played football in the street. The next year somebody got a helmet, one of these felt helmets, there was one felt helmet. So we would exchange these, take turns wearing this helmet. So it was that kind of a thing. And when we played football, kids from little more distant areas would come and play with us. And we'd think up different kind of games that engaged us all.

TI: Well, in a similar way, so you had kids from other neighborhoods coming to yours. Did you explore the other neighborhoods around Uptown?

JY: Not too much, except when we became adolescents, of course, sort of spread out a little more.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.