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GY: Well, high school was, again, on the other hand, a time for adolescence in terms of sexuality, maturity. Some of the guys had girlfriends that was going steady. That mean -- going steady means, in those days, just holding hands, mostly. There was not too much sexuality involved, I think, as far as those outward kind of things that we knew. So it was kind of cute, going to dance and seeing a couple holding hands. But that was not too common. But that's what it meant to go steady in those days. And I was certainly attracted (to) young girls -- not old girls, of course. [Laughs] Girls, and they were cute. Not thinking too much about personality or anything. And I think it's mostly in terms of looks. This is not uncommon, certainly. Sex, sex was not a very -- sexuality was very downplayed. Certainly in the movies, we certainly didn't have television. And movies were very, very innocent, too. If there was any scene that had to do with a man and woman, I think it was a -- the scene in the Clark Gable movie, Clark Gable and who this other star was, where they had to share a room, and what they did was to very deliberately set up a sheet in between them, kind of thing. That kind of separation, and there was never use of any words that had to do with sexuality and sex itself. Those were very innocent times outwardly. But this is true of Niseis in general. Very conservative in that respect.

As far as vices were concerned, a few of us smoked cigarettes. Not too many -- our gang did not smoke any cigarettes. But there was something that we did that was kind of interesting. We bought pipes. (Ronald) Coleman, the movie star, and the elegant, handsome men, on the movies would be smoking a pipe. And we thought that was kind of fun, and we'd buy a pipe for a dollar, two, buy some tobacco and just little, little puff, just for looks more than anything else. It's interesting. My particular gang in high school never smoked.

I remember that there was no, none of us had dates except one of the members of the group had a date and once in a while we'd go out on (the) date, but he'd rather hang out with us. On a Friday night, because I worked on Saturday/Sunday, so on Friday night would be some time off. And he's the only one who had a family car which he could use, so we'd get together, four or five of us would get together. Well, we didn't do much. We may have gone to a movie, maybe, I don't recall going to a movie with them, but maybe, maybe to a skating party. One thing I remember was to go way out to the country. It wasn't that far. But anyway, to go see a girl out there, and she'd come and sit in the car, and we'd just talk, just talk. But that was the extent of it. One thing that I remember which I don't feel too proud about was, because of the boredom, we'd go to sort of drive around and find a very deserted place and see a parked car, and we'd -- not me, but some of the, couple of the guys -- I hate to use the word "gang" because it has connotations that are very negative, just a group of young men hanging out together. And because maybe the thrill of it. We didn't need it. Some, one of us would swipe a hubcap, take them and bring it in. And I don't know. I guess maybe it was just a lot of boredom. It's the thrill of not getting caught. Do that or -- but I didn't deal with that. I didn't want to hang out with, deal with that. But I was a part of the group, though. Or else once in a while, go into a store and somebody would swipe something, and bring it out.

Other than that, we didn't drink, we didn't go to brothels in high school. It was a pretty, kind of a quiet time. Parties because once in a while, we did a little dancing. And the skating parties I mentioned earlier. Birthdays -- there was no great celebration for birthdays. And on New Year's, I don't recall anything special on New Year's. I guess it was more of the Japanese foods, the gochiso that they made, mochi. That was kind of a nice part of the adolescent years.

In terms of, getting back to sexuality, it's kind of interesting that my mother one day slipped a booklet about this size about human sexuality in my, in my bedroom, which I shared with my grandmother, and this was later on, when, after my grandmother died, I had my own room. But it doesn't matter. I had a little set of drawers. May have been one, two, three, five drawers, top drawers. That's where I kept my cream pie. [Laughs] She had a booklet about this size about human sexuality. And I thought it was kind of neat. At that time, it was kind of shocking. I mean, golly. It's about masturbation and intercourse and all that and disease, et cetera, pregnancy. And I thought that was pretty neat for my mother to do that. She was aware of what was happening to me in terms of growing up. Yeah, I thought that was neat. And I never did that to my kids in terms of when they were growing up, although I did talk about menstruation and other kind of things. But... so I learned a lot, and I would take it out and read it a lot because it's just so intriguing, and it was arousing, too, those kind of booklets at that young age. In terms of dirty books in those days, we didn't have -- I guess the word is "dirty books." There's a lot of different connotations, but it's not like the very open -- what's that? Playboy, and what's the one that's in there? Hustler is what it's called? Well, it doesn't matter. Our pornography in those days was very, again, rather innocent, but they were called -- we used to have called, books called "Big Little Books." They were about, oh, about 4x5, and they were thick. And they were cartoon books, Dick Tracy, something like that. But we had these dirty books. And these Dick Tracy and they were all going into sexual kind of things, but it was not too, too graphic. But anyways, so they were somewhat kind of fun to read, as teenagers. And let's see. Human sexuality. Certain books, they had certain pages or chapters, they had something that had to do with sexuality and intercourse, somewhat. We'd sort of heard about it. Then if we found something, we'd share it. And earlier in, in those days, the only kind of nudity was seeing, that was seen was, you know, the rather easy to obtain was National Geographic magazines of, of primitive tribes, and, where the ladies would be exposing their breasts, but of course, in their natural setting, of course. And this was the early bit of human sexuality that, experience that we had. So the "Big Little Books." And, of course, there was no (porno) movies in those days.

Let's see. Oh, yes, of course, getting back to Seattle and the red-light district, the brothels, was again, introduction to human sexuality, too. Little by little, increment at a time, learned finally what was going on in those houses. And what was that question about -- oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I remember the story about, oh, yeah. I think it was someone saying that when these ladies would attract the attention of men, she saw only men going to these houses. And she thought it was very discriminatory on the part of the ladies, not knowing what went on. She thought how terrible it was, saying, how come the women don't go in? And that was kind of an interesting observation. Yeah.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.