<Begin Segment 10>

So when I'm invited... now I was in a, an exception. And I guess they used, they must have had me in there as a token...

BF: An exception to...?

GH: General discrimination. I was in high school, one of the elite clubs in high school, the high school YMCA, or the "Y." Well, it was men, because it was in the boy's club. We belong, I was invited, it was elected in, you see.

BF: To just be a member?

GH: Yeah, the membership invited others that they wanted to maintain themselves. So I was in there and I got another friend of mine in while I was in. So I had a friend with me. I had other friends too, but I had difficulty on dates 'cause I, we weren't free to date. I just considered it as off limits.

BF: Non-Japanese?

GH: Yeah. I had, I think I had friends that I could have invited. And she would have accepted. I don't know if people would have felt comfortable there, but... so I get somebody. And we had twin girls, my friend and I had twin girls that we used to date, who was outgoing and pleasant and so on. And we actually -- at least I did, I started going with this girl for about a year. In fact, I'm related to that family now. I didn't marry one of the twins, but if I didn't go to university, I don't know, I might've married one of 'em. We, we carried on after I was in university for, you know year or so, letters and so on. But your contacts -- if you don't maintain your contacts, the friendship drops, becomes infrequent, and then none contact. Well that sort of thing happened and, so we -- during World War II I found that I couldn't easily keep this apart. In fact, I had to face it. And I had to then say, "No." I had to say, "No," in certain circumstances. But each time, only when I, when I faced it and I couldn't -- like I was, I was going along with curfew restrictions. I thought it was wrong. But it wasn't wrong in the sense that that kind of discrimination didn't exist. We had it in all sorts of things on this side. But, officially it was wrong. And usually, like restrictive covenant, they always had it rationalized one way or another. To let it exist, "Well that's, we still, that's not part of the practice but it's accepted if it's a private practice, like, that's a private home." So they kind of called it private. So you can do that on a private contract, but not on public. Later on, after World War II, you can't, you can't do things in private that is not accepted in general. That, so even the general rules became more intermeshed. It became more difficult to discriminate.

BF: Uh-huh.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.