<Begin Segment 35>

AI: But before that time, before World War II had started, before that, did you have some sense in yourselves as, a pride of being, having Japanese heritage, or positive feelings? Or, on the other hand, any negative feelings? And this is before World War II starts. Any sense of that?

TY: Well, I'm not sure. I think maybe you try to do the best you can, and not make, get into trouble. But I don't know whether I thought in terms of whether it would affect the Japanese community, in such. I think that maybe I might have thought that I didn't want to do some,- get in trouble because we'd be, it would reflect on my mom and dad. But beyond that, I don't know. I really --

JY: Yeah, we talked about that a little bit, and you know, like when I was really little, when I think about the days in Beacon Hill before the war, I can remember going to the grocery store down on Jackson Street where some good friends of ours owned a grocery store, I remember going to dinner at Gyokoken.

MY: Gyokoken --

TY: Gyokoken, the Chinese restaurant, yeah.

JY: It was a Chinese restaurant run by Japanese, wasn't it?

TY: Yeah, right.

JY: And I remember, and I was really little. And I can remember doing that. I remember she sent me to a, an art school. A class that I had absolutely no talent in art. And I, this --

MY: I did?

JY: Yeah, it was --

TY: Where?

JY: It was with -- what do you call it? It was charcoal.

TY: Charcoal?

MY: Oh, charcoal?

JY: Yeah, drawing with charcoal. And so I did that for a couple of weeks.

TY: Where?

JY: Someplace in Japantown.

TY: You're kidding. Boy, I don't remember that.

JY: Yeah. And, and a lot of our parents' friends were Japanese. So they'd come over, and it was just, that's just sort of the way it was. I never thought of it in terms of them being Japanese, and my other friends being, white and what have you. I just don't consciously remember --

TY: Well, Dad and Mom, because of Dad's prominence in the community, they entertained a lot.

JY: Yeah.

TY: And we had people over for dinner all the time. And they're mostly Nihonjins. People from the Japanese community. And so that's where most of the contacts were. Most of the people that Dad brought over for dinner. And Mother would be --

JY: And once in a while we saw his colleagues. It was the Spanglers, and so forth, but I just thought of them as being his boss and colleagues. But again, I don't --

TY: Beyond that.

JY: -- remember thinking of them as being white versus the rest of the people being Japanese, or anything.

TY: I guess we just weren't conscious of it, for some reason.

MY: Yeah, I think that unless you're thrown into the context of a all-, kind of a mix-, unless you have some people talking about it, and you're being different, or...

TY: Well, maybe being, maybe our type of lifestyle that we had was a little bit atypical of other Japanese Americans, I don't know. Do you think?

MY: It could be, yeah. I was just trying to figure out what it was that made us not too aware of how, how different -- well, you said that when you were in high school, you noticed how different --

JY: Yeah. That's the first time that I can remember --

MY: That was when you were in, at Hyde Park High School, when you were in Chicago.

JY: -- that was when I was a sophomore. I was telling them that when I -- the first time I can remember really being conscious of being different from other white kids -- because all my friends were white at that point -- was that we had a huge mirror leading out to the front door at our house in Chicago. And a couple of my friends would come over one day, and we were walking out to go someplace. And both of them were like 6'1" or so, and then I was like what I am now, which is about 5'4" or whatever. And I happened to be walking by the mirror, and I thought, "Whoa. I look a lot different from them." And it's really the first time that I, that it just struck me, that I wasn't white, I guess. I don't what it was. But just the fact that I just looked different, so much different from them. And this was after camp and stuff.

TY: Maybe just the, maybe just the height. [Laughs]

JY: Well, it could be partly that, yeah.

MY: "Oh, I'm so short." [Laughs]

JY: Yeah, it might have been that, I don't know. But I could remember thinking, gee I look, I'm just so different from them.

MY: And that was when you were sixteen years old? Already sixteen or so?

JY: Probably fifteen.

MY: Fifteen? Yeah, fifteen years old.

AI: And that would have been the late '40s in Chicago.

JY: Right, that was in '47, probably.

AI: After the war was over.

MY: So even as children, I think that it felt kind of, quite normal to us to, the intermingling of our lives with, because Dad, as we've, Dad's social life was very much in the Japanese community. Because he loved the Japanese culture. He was interested in song, and remember he sang? And he was interested in dance, and all the, all the activities of the Japanese community. But at the same time he worked with, his colleagues were all white at work. And so he felt very comfortable in both worlds. I don't think that he felt any -- and I think that that must have kind of rubbed off on us, too.

JY: Maybe so. That could be.

TY: I think you're right, yeah.

MY: We just felt, we just felt very comfortable in -- even if we were in, out of context in whatever the world that we were in. And feeling, talking about feeling out of place, I mean, I felt more out of place when I was in Japan.

TY: Yeah.

MY: You know, because the Japanese people were very vocal about how different, they call you Amerika-no ojosan, and they comment on your clothes, and they comment on your speech, and they comment on your age -- they ask you, on your appearance and so forth. So you were always constantly aware. Whereas wherever we were here, we were simply accepted into both the Japanese community as well as the other.

JY: Yeah, that could be. It's just a total unawareness of being Japanese.

MY: And our dad, our dad had a -- like Mom always said, he had this very amazing knack of feeling very much at home with -- he used to bring people, he would find people sleeping on the streets and he would tell them, "You don't have to do this." And he would bring them home for dinner.

TY: Yeah, I know he was bringing home lot of strange people when --

JY: Used to drive Mom nuts.

TY: -- unannounced. [Laughs]

MY: And drive them around, or loan them money. And Mom used to say that Dad really feels totally, totally at home with a hobo on the street, or with a king of some, she used to say that quite often. That he was one of these people who was very, very adaptable to make other people feel very comfortable with him, too. He, that his life was like that. He was very, very open to different kinds of people.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.