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BN: So you end up spending a couple months or so, something like that, right? Well, actually, close to three months they were in Cortez.

MT: Yeah.

BN: So you were pulled out of a school in Alameda and you now go to a different school in Cortez for a short time?

MT: About three months. And so I walked into... they have a schoolhouse. So I don't know why my father just dropped us off, I guess, if I recall. And I walked into this room and there was this big Caucasian man and he said, "What do you want?" And I said, "I have to enroll in school." Said, "What grade are you in?" I said, "I'm in the fourth grade." And he said, "Well, we don't have a fourth grade." We had two classes in every room, we had four rooms, big classes. We don't have enough people for fourth grade, so we've got to, you're standing in a room, the left side is third grade, the right side is fifth grade, which one you want to be in? So I said, well, I certainly don't want to be in the third grade again, so I said, "I'll go in the fifth grade," which I did. And then I was there for three months, and then we went to camp, we'd go to Amache. I'm amazed that the transcripts were all sent out, I still to this day, I don't know how they did that. But anyway, I'd go into camp, now I'm in the sixth grade. [Laughs] I went from the fourth grade to sixth grade in a year, but I thought that was pretty great.

BN: Now you're with older, bigger kids.

MT: Yeah, and I was a slow grower to boot, so I was always the youngest and the smallest in the class, all the way through.

BN: Who were these people that you stayed with in Cortez?

MT: The Morofuji family, and the Tsurumoto family.

BN: They're just friends of your father?

MT: They were friends of my father.

BN: Did you know them from before?

MT: I didn't know them. My father did.

BN: So you're going to a place where you don't...

MT: Don't know anybody. They had kids, they ignored you. And here I was getting discriminated in Alameda. You come to the country and now you're discriminated again. You're a city slicker. And the white guys would try to beat up on you, so you'd beat up one guy, and the next guy comes, he's bigger than, you beat him up and they get bigger, and pretty soon you're getting beat up pretty bad. And the Japanese guys just stand around.

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