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AI: Well, that's interesting to me that they sent you to Japanese school and they did want you to learn that, the language and be able to read and write Japanese, but also it sounds like your father, like you said earlier, wanted you to be very much American. And so, I was wondering, did your father and your mother talk to you very much about being American or being Nihonjin?

RI: No, I don't think so. Since, since there were so many Japanese families all around us, the whole neighborhood was Japanese, and our friends were Japanese, we might have talked to ourselves, but I think we were more anxious to become Americanized. We were more anxious for the other Caucasian kids to think of us as gradually becoming more Americanized. So sometimes, almost as though we wish we were Caucasians. That maybe they were the better class, or they were better than us, and we were trying to be more like them. I think that most of the Niseis, my generation, didn't want to emphasize their Japaneseness. But I don't know. I don't think I was too much like that, but then there were some kids like that.

AI: About what age do you think you might have been when you first started noticing this difference between you and the Caucasian children?

RI: Well, probably when I started school, because even our school was predominantly Japanese. When I look at my graduation picture, about two-thirds are Japanese. And there, and my class only had about twenty kids, but there was, there were two Chinese and maybe two or three Caucasians and the rest of us --

DG: Who were your best friends?

RI: My best friend? Was Sumiko Nishimura, well, right now she's in the nursing home with Alzheimer's. But she was my best friend. However, my best friend, her family was more Japanesey, I guess. When she was eighteen they, their families agreed to have her marry another older guy. And so instead of staying in school with me for the extra half a year she stayed out because actually her high school was ended. And then for commencement, in June, she came, came to the commencement, but she was married. So...

DG: What did you think of that?

RI: Well, I don't know, I thought it was weird -- not weird, but, I sure didn't wanna be like that. I didn't want my parents to do that. But apparently her parents were more Japanesey and wanted their eldest daughter married off. Well, it must have been an agreement between two families.

DG: Probably early on.

RI: Yeah, because that family had four girls, too. And our family had four girls. But fortunately my father said, "Well, girls or not, you're going to college." So that was nice.

AI: He did?

RI: Yes, because, well, fortunately my father believed in education. So he told us early on that we, we are to go to college and yet all around us, our next door neighbor, the eldest boy didn't go to college. A lot of the older, I mean, the boys in the families, some were allowed to go to college, but women, no. Girls were not supposed to go to college. So I figured that my father was pretty liberal. But most of the families needed their kids to go to work and help with their, their finances. But I think that since my father was in business, there was no problem. Because I don't remember ever feeling that we were real poor except during the Depression. You know, I thought we were poor, but actually, when I look back on it, we weren't having any trouble compared to other families because my father had the business and we always had food, because of the restaurant business. And so --

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