<Begin Segment 18>

AI: Did it ever enter your mind that you might want to go into music, that that would --

GY: No, oh, no.

AI: -- even be a possibility?

GY: No, no. That's another world. That's another entirely new, unattainable -- I didn't even see a, an Asian... fireman, for example. You know, white kids, as babies, the kids would say, "I want to be a fireman," kind of thing. But we didn't have these -- these desires. We didn't see any of those. To be a musician is, I -- it was just so far out of the scene of my mind that I didn't even think about that. It was just fun to listen to music. And I didn't think about the great discrimination against black musicians either at that time, listening to music, because there was a great division, again, between the black musicians and the white musicians. Although you had great bands like Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the big bands, the, and you heard of, from public -- not public, but the radio itself. Popular ones were Glenn Miller especially. It was, and they didn't play jazz. It was just more dance music. But that was pop music. Even today, there's a division between the black music and the, in terms of... well, there's a little bit more fusion now, of course, but some division between white musicians and -- vocalists, pop stars, and the black ones, too. There's a division there. It's been going on for a long time. Those days, it was much deeper. And the black records were called "race records." And you rarely saw them in these regular, mainstream record stores. You'd have to go to special stores and buy these records. And they were not played over the regular stations, so we didn't hear that music very much. (During the '30s and '40s, popular American music played by white dance bands such as Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey was what was heard over national mainstream networks. This music included both live performances and recordings. Nisei, generally, were thus exposed to the above with only a few aficionados discovering the excitement of jazz played by black musicians and orchestras.)

Again, so the future, again, was very much, there was no future except -- for me. I'm sure there were other Japanese American families where the parents were a little bit more forceful in saying the American kind of thing. And there were others who did go into college. My best friend, John Tanaka, did go to the University of California LA -- UCLA. I don't know what his aspirations were, but he'd go, and he'd say, "Come on, George, let's go to UCLA." Said, "Oh, what for?" Man, I had this whole mentality -- it was a paranoia, I guess, self-imposed on my part, but somewhat in terms of reality, too. So that's how I felt.

AI: Well, and then not too much time passed between '40 and '41.

GY: No, that's right.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.