<Begin Segment 10>

DG: Why did, why did you think coming back was good?

BU: Well, coming back, you had all your school friends and all that.

DG: So you thought of yourself as American.

BU: That's okay, yeah.

DG: And so were you a foreigner there in Japan?

BU: Huh?

DG: Were you a foreigner in Japan?

BU: Yeah, well, they treated you like foreigners.

DG: What do they do to treat you that way?

BU: Ignore you or they beat you up.

DG: That's what I was wondering, if they...

BU: And my brother prevented that by beating them up. [Laughs]

DG: So you came back.

BU: Funny thing, though, you talk about that. I now got in my mind who beat me up regularly. The guy was called Numa, Numa. He used to beat me up all the time, but my brother used to beat him up regular.

DG: Fist fight?

BU: He just slapped him and hit him around. You see, he was taking kendo too, so he uses anything that, anything that hurts. But, you see, in school there is always what they call gakidaisho, bully, and he was, Numa was one of the bullies. And the bad part about all that was the fact that I'm looking at it backwards now. You see, Mother, when she took us, she took only American clothes back to Japan, no Japanese clothes or things that Japanese citizens wear. So I was wearing American clothes, Amerikajin, so they used to pick on me, beat me up. So, anyway, that's the life we lived back there, yeah.

DG: The girls, too?

BU: Huh?

DG: What did they do to the girls?

BU: Girls? I don't know about the girls, but girls -- I'm not so sure whether Hanna had more, more American clothes like I did. May have, but, you see, girls are a little bit different, I guess. Anyway, because she was a good, good athlete and she became top gal in the track team. She was, she was the best athlete in the whole state, the Yoshia state, Toyama-ken. She became number one, number one athlete in the ken. So I suppose that kept them off her back.

DG: So when you guys got in trouble like that, what did your parents say?

BU: Well, actually they never said a thing because Tom was taking care of it, my brother.

DG: That's your brother.

BU: He just beat them up.

DG: You guys sound like you're bullies. [Laughs]

BU: Huh?

DG: You guys must have been bullies, too.

BU: Yeah. It was a lot of fun, though.

DG: So you look upon that period of time as pretty much fun, you were saying.

BU: Yeah. You know what, I think because that period of time I think I act like a Kibei because the two years I spent there, because that was two years' time when Japan was extremely militaristic.

DG: So what does a Kibei think?

BU: Kibei... my mother had, my brother had no objections about invading, invading China, Manchuria, and Korea because 1910 Japan invaded Korea and took over Korea. So there was friction anyway, but, but then Korea, they took over Korea so that was good for them. So my brother, Tom, and the rest of the gang never thought nothing of it, I don't think. He never said anything.

DG: So you say being Kibei means that you learn how to be militaristic?

BU: You learn to be Japanese and in Japanese you follow what the leaders say.

DG: And Japanese is the superior country?

BU: So they think, but that isn't always true.

DG: But that's what they thought?

BU: Yeah.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.