<Begin Segment 9>

AI: I wanted to return back to that "Bomb the Jap" play that you had with the kids there. Did you ever have any sense that you personally were being targeted because you were Japanese American, and --

RS: No, at that point I never did. No. And the fact is, when we got out of camp, and we went back to Seattle, one of our favorite games to play was "Kill the Jap." And right next to our back porch there was a sort of a play area. My dad had a lot of scrap lumber and we would rearrange that lumber to create these, sort of shelters that we sort of treated as shelters that would protect us from bombs that the Japs dropped on us. And I always remember taking turns with... in fact, John Horiuchi, who was -- Paul Horiuchi, the painter, lived right across the street from us. And he had three boys, Paul, John and Vincent. And they were my three closest friends. John, who was in the middle was the same age as I was, and so the two of us were probably closer than Vincent, the younger one, or Paul, the older one, although Paul sang at my wife and my wedding. But John and I used to always play "Kill the Jap" together along with the, another family was the Masumoto family that lived up the street, and there were two boys, Bob and, Bobby and Richard. And Bobby was my age. And so Bobby and Richard and John and I used to always play "Kill the Jap." And of course we would always argue about who the Jap was gonna be, because none of us wanted to be the Jap. We all wanted to be John Wayne, you know, because John Wayne was the biggest Jap killer. And so I actually have a photograph of that, of all of us playing war and having, you know, helmets and guns and all that kind of stuff, and taking turns being the Jap.

AI: Did you, in that young age, elementary school age, did you have that sense that, or had you had the experience at all of being called "Jap" by someone else, not, not your Japanese American playmates or friends, but someone who was not Japanese American, actually calling you "Jap" or seeing your folks being yelled at or...

RS: Well, the junior high, the grade school, junior high and high school I all went to was just riddled with that. Most of it was in pretty good humor. It was a completely different situation than today. I mean, I truly grew up in a multicultural neighborhood as well as schools. But it was, the rules were completely different back then. And we never used the "N" word in talking to black people, but we would use other words like "Jigs" or we used to call them "Night Trains" and things like that. And all you have to do is look at my yearbook and you can see all these references in there, and there were all these pecking orders between Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and so on. That was just sort of understood. And most of the Chinese were "F.O.Bs," and we let 'em know that. And we looked down on F.O.Bs, you know, "Fresh Off the Boats." But then, you know, there were a few A.B.Cs, the "American-Born Chinese" that were okay because they were closer to us. But there were a lot of Japanese Americans that were third-generation which put us pretty deep into the American culture compared to our A.B.C. friends and certainly F.O.Bs. And so, it was sort of ironic with the internment experience that it would be the Japanese Americans that would be singled out. We probably were more deeply invested in this country than any other ethnic Asian minority. So there is one incident I recall when we went back to, came back to Seattle, that happened in Cannon Beach, Oregon.

AI: Oh, excuse me, before we get there --

RS: Yeah.

AI: I'm gonna take you back to Chicago a little bit and then maybe we can work our way back up to Cannon Beach.

RS: Okay, okay.

AI: I was gonna ask about, since you had been, some of your earliest memories had been in camp where everyone around, almost everyone around was Japanese American, except for a few administrators and staff people, and then you moved to Chicago where it sounds like in your immediate living area, where your apartment was, and playmates were all white. Did you, do you recall noticing anything of that? Or do you think you were aware at that time about difference in skin color? Or --

RS: I don't recall being aware of it. That's not to say that I wasn't, because I've learned, over the years, that there were a lot of things that I was taught just to repress. If it was uncomfortable, or felt awkward, there were ways that, I think, Japanese Americans had ways of dealing with those kinds of things, and repressing them, or pretending that they didn't exist. And, just like the way our parents did with the whole camp experience, they just decided to erase it from their memory bank. Of course, I think that created a lot of problems as well. But nonetheless, they, it was a survival technique and it worked. And so I'm not gonna say that, we got to Chicago, that I was immune from realizing those differences, because I, I very well could've and just learned as a youngster how not to pay attention to that, because of the influence my parents had on me on a daily basis, you know. "Don't think about that." "Don't talk about that." "You shouldn't notice things like that." And, "It's bad for you," whatever. I mean, my life was just filled with those kinds of things for everything else, so why, why wouldn't it be, you know, if I said, "Gee, there are no Japanese kids around here," and I could hear them saying, "Well, that doesn't matter. Don't ever say that again, because that doesn't matter." But as I say, I don't remember that, specifically, so...

AI: Well --

RS: It's just like people ask me about the camp experience, how did I feel about that? Well, as a two- and three-year-old, you don't feel about that. The kinds of things you think about are far more immediate than that, like the fact that all my friends were around me all of a sudden. From that standpoint, I thought, whatever change this was, was for the better, because I can only see these people on certain occasions, not on a daily basis.

AI: So, before you left Chicago, though, your grandparents came and joined you? Is that right? Your father's parents?

RS: Right. After three years, they came out of camp and they came to Chicago. I don't remember that, but I do remember all of us getting on a train and going back to Seattle. 'Cause I remember, we stopped at Minneapolis to get my Aunt Hideko and Hideko was gonna accompany us on this train ride back to Seattle. And the reason I remember my Aunt Hideko, because I threw up on her. And we were in a train, and she was sitting across from me. And I remember I was train sick, and so sick that I couldn't tell anybody I was sick 'cause I was afraid I'd throw up as soon as I opened my mouth. And so, we're just riding along and all of a sudden I couldn't contain it any longer and I just threw up all over her lap. [Laughs] And I remember how -- you know, if a six-year-old gets humiliated, how humiliated. And I remember a few years ago I asked my aunt if she remembered that, and she said, "Of course I remember that." [Laughs]

AI: Oh dear, oh dear. [Laughs] That would be an indelible memory.

RS: Yeah.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.