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AI: Well, and as they were growing up there in, in the Denver area, do you think they had any experience with any sort of prejudice? Or did you recall ever talking to them about any issue about being Japanese American? Or --

JY: Not really, and that's the whole, my whole time period of life where we, we really had no Japanese identity. My whole world was, was a Caucasian world. As you can imagine, the air force world is, you know, not only Caucasian but male-dominated kind of a society. The neighborhood where we lived, both in Dayton and in -- of course, in Dayton they were too young anyway -- but in Colorado, especially in Denver, it was a completely, you know, there were probably a handful of Asians in the neighborhood or even in the school that they attended, so they lived in a pretty much of a all-white world, too. About the only contact they ever had with Japanese culture kind of things was when we'd go down to some kind of a like an akimatsuri or something that was being held down in downtown Denver. And we used to go shopping at the grocery store down there for Japanese stuff. So other than that, though, we lived, we lived a suburban kind of life. And, and even myself, you know, I, I don't recall more than once or twice anybody at work ever asking me about, about camp or the subject even coming up. And, and so my, my Japanese American-ness just kind of not there really. Just -- and, and something that just never occurred to me.

And I, I can recall in later years asking my sons about that, and, they'd say, "Yeah, there were a couple times when somebody'd say something about that," and they usually referred to like Chinese like "Ching Chung Chinaman" or something. You know, that kind of stuff. But they didn't recall much. They, they also swam in high school, so they had kind of a certain circle of friends, so... and they were probably a little bit insulated from, you know, the environment where things like that might have come up. Or probably they were in too much of a polite society, if you will, for that kind of thing to, to crop up.

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