<Begin Segment 34>

LH: And you had mentioned that actually although you didn't have any direct connection, you had a lot of friends who were living over at the hostel, at the language school as a hostel.

FG: Right. I used to go there and play with... some of the people I was going to school with lived there. And it was kind of, it was kind of eerie and yet it was kind of fun because then these were the very same hallways that we were supposed to walk quietly through and we were running [Laughs] and people were living in the classrooms. And I don't know. I think with children things aren't, nothing is very strange or odd. It's just different and I think that my memory of it is that this is great. I know this place. I feel comfortable because this is where I used to go to school. And you naturally look for all these little corners that you knew when you were in school and to see if the doors opened or not. A lot of times the doors didn't open because they were locked, but for us, the ones that didn't live at Nihon Gakko, I think it was a lot of fun.

LH: So you didn't think anything differently of the people that actually lived there at the Nihon Gakko.

FG: No. In a way, they were lucky because they had more space than most of us had at home.

LH: Really?

FG: Yeah, because you have all the whole school. You could run up and down the stairs. Children like to run up and down stairs, right, up and down hallways, and you don't have that in your normal home. But I didn't think, I kind of thought they were lucky because they had so many things. There are so many nooks and crannies you could get into, you know yours at home. And actually I think that I thought -- right or wrong -- I thought they were lucky to be living there 'cause then I had other friends that were living in hotels, and the hotels were a little less desirable. Because what you do, is I go to see my friend Alice and you have to kind of walk around the people who are drunk and sitting in the stairways. And it smelled. They smelled. The hotels smelled real bad. They had a funny smell and then they were kind of dark and...

LH: Just wasn't as comfortable or as homey as the hostel or the language school.

FG: Yeah. I thought the language school was great. I did because then so many of my friends lived down on First and Second Avenue in the hotels and that was another way of life, nothing wrong. It sometime kind of scary 'cause the men kind of lurched around and they might fall on top of you because a lot of them were drunk, transients.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.