<Begin Segment 4>

AI: Well, now, then what about the transition out of Crystal City, leaving Crystal City and going out to Cincinnati?

JY: Yeah, that was --

AI: How was that for you?

JY: That was a big move for, for a number of reasons. One is that when we -- you know, we moved to Cincinnati because my oldest brother and my sister were there, and then by the time we got there I think my brother was already gone to Boston and my sister was, was there, but she was busy with school and all that. And we, we stayed in the hostel that was being run by the American Friends, and, and I remember being there. In fact, it was a house kind of built like this one, in the sense it was -- it looked like it was a two-story, probably something built in the 19-, early 1900s kind of a building.

And, and so my mother and father were looking for some kind of employment, and all they could find was as domestic help. And they finally got a job as a -- I think it was as a butler/chauffeur for my dad and a maid/cook for my mother. And it was a very, very wealthy family in, in Indian Hills, which is a wealthy suburb of Cincinnati. So we moved there, and we were in the servants' quarters. And they, they were -- it was very degrading for my father especially, because he had never done anything like that. And besides that, the -- I can recall just hiding from the, from the woman, you know, from the wife because she was, to me she was just a mean old lady, and she apparently was not very good -- well, I know she was not very good to my parents because I could hear her talking to them off and on. And I know that they just hated that job, and, and they -- of course, my father was on parole at the time, so he was on parole and had to report to a parole officer, who depended a lot on what the employee said -- or employer said. So, and he held that over them all the time, and so it was just a miserable year.

As far as I was concerned, in school, it was fine. I went to school -- well, on the most part it was fine. [Laughs] I went to school in Terrace Park, Ohio, which was down the hill from Indian Hills, where we resided. And the first day of school, the principal, I remember, took me into the classroom, and he must have obviously told the students in the class -- this was a junior high, because I was in the seventh grade at the time -- and he must have gone in and told them that there was a Japanese boy coming and, "I want you to be nice to him," and things like that, so when I walked into the classroom I recall that all the kids were, you know, waving their hands and saying, "Come sit by me, come sit by me," and so forth, and, and I, I can remember feeling kind of over -- well, more intimidated than anything else by that whole experience. But once I got into the flow of things -- again, the fact that I played baseball and got on the baseball team and things like that helped me to kind of assimilate with the, with the group.

And there was only -- the only fight I ever had in my life was with a kid -- I, I heard for the first time where my brother was talking about getting in a fight with a kid, and the same thing kind of happened to me. He would just torment me. For some reason he just decided that he would pick on me. And, and the year of judo that I had really helped in that situation. And, and so he didn't bother me anymore, but I remember that there was a rumor going around that I had some kind of mystical jujitsu something or other that, you know, that only Japanese had or something like, you know, and I -- and it was hard getting rid of that kind of, kind of a stereotypical attitude that kind of went around the school.

But in the main, my experience there was really quite good, and I was -- we, we joined the Knothole League, and which was like the Little League, and played, you know, played baseball and things like that. So away from school it was fine, and it was only when I got back -- [laughs] -- to the, to where we, where we lived that, you know, I'd feel kind of... oh, it was just sort of a low-grade, degrading feeling about, about our situation that, that we were in.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.