Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Wesley K. Watanabe Interview
Narrator: Wesley K. Watanabe
Interviewer: Alice Ito
Location: Klamath Falls, Oregon
Date: July 4, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-wwesley-01-0011

<Begin Segment 11>

AI: Well, now I'm interested; you mentioned that, of course, in college it was such a much larger student body and a campus, what was the ethnic racial makeup there? You had come from where you were literally the only person who was not Caucasian. Now, going on to this college campus, what was the, the situation there? Were there many other ethnic or racial minorities?

WW: There were other racial minorities there, however, it seems to me I didn't really associate with some of those people. In the house within which I lived, it was pretty much all Caucasian, except there was one person that, of Japanese descent also, who came from a nearby community, not too far from West Chicago. And... yeah.

AI: So, so once again, you were not really in contact with a lot of other Japanese Americans.

WW: No, I was not.

AI: Well, I wanted to ask you, again, a similar kind of question, which was did you perceive much prejudice, or feel that you might have been affected by some kind of discrimination during your college years?

WW: I didn't believe I was there. There... well, some occasions, perhaps, where I might sense -- maybe it was more myself feeling that there might be some prejudice. I was just maybe in a bit of, a little leery. I do recall going to a barber shop once, and the barber, the man there, the barber, commented on how well I spoke English, and he also commented, "Well, you don't have a --" his, his word was, "you don't have a twang." And he himself sounded like he was from the South. You get down to Champaign-Urbana, and it's amazing how different the people sound. It's not that far south of Chicago. So just little incidents like that would pop up occasionally.

AI: But other than that...

WW: Other than that, I felt no prejudice or pressure from anyone within college, from professors, or anyone like that. I felt like I fit right in. 'Course, I was used to fitting in, having come from a small community where there were no other ethnic groups, really, so to speak.

AI: Well, that's very interesting to me, because really, your, your family moved to West Chicago so relatively soon after World War II, and the fact that people didn't, may not have been in contact with any Japanese Americans before you arrived, I was thinking, well, perhaps they might have felt some negative, maybe even be hostile, because of, there was so much negativity about Japanese during the World War II. But it sounds like that didn't affect you too much, or if it did, if it was there, it wasn't real blatant.

WW: I don't believe it was, no. Of course, when we first got to West Chicago, I was so young that even if sometimes people had said something, I wouldn't have been sophisticated enough to really understand what they're hinting at, or saying, really.

AI: Right. Well, now as you were getting older, in your college years, did you think that you might have difficulty getting accepted to dental school because of discrimination in, in education?

WW: No, I didn't, that didn't occur to me. I didn't think I would be, and apparently I didn't. So, yeah, that didn't pass my, pass my mind.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.