<Begin Segment 9>

BF: What about, this may be hard for you to remember, you were, you were young. But in the prewar period when your family was farming in the Auburn area, do you remember understanding that there was discrimination? Understanding...

GH: Oh yes.

BF: What...

GH: Yeah.

BF: What do you remember from that?

GH: Well, discrimination was a way of life. I was going to school. I'm learning about the First Amendment, Bill of Rights and all that. Really finding that attractive. And I'm adopting it personally and appreciating it as part of our constitutional background, but knowing that this doesn't exist for us. We had, we had other restrictions. We have this as a kind of an ideal. Just like lot of the Christian ideals, you know. We don't, we don't treat the poor in the way the Bible says. I mean, that's like an ideal. And there's the way of life here, the true way of life. So we had a way of life that I'm noting, daily experiences of one type or another. It wasn't harshly discriminatory, but there was a class difference, opportunity differences. And that started from the time the immigrants came. Immigrants came with work permits -- Asian immigrants -- which said, in addition, only work, only work permit, and it says, "Not eligible for naturalization." And then as a result of that restriction, Oregon, Washington and California legislation, state legislation, they added, "Those who are not eligible for citizenship aren't eligible for owning land." That was an added restriction from one other restriction at the federal level. But if you compare to Canada, we -- and that was a loophole, I think. In retrospect, it was a loophole that the whites who were discriminating didn't realize, this loophole, and so they let children born to immigrants, not eligible, can become citizens. So we became citizens. In Canada, they didn't have franchise until 1949.

BF: I'm sorry, franchise?

GH: Voting.

BF: Oh.

GH: They couldn't vote.

BF: Oh.

GH: We could vote after twenty-one. So we can exercise that part of citizenship. We didn't, we couldn't get into civil service. There wasn't a law that said you couldn't, but we, we didn't have one. We didn't have a schoolteacher. In Canada they had one that they permitted because of a fishing village with largely Japanese kids. She taught there. But she became like a principal because of her experience, when they were having schools established with volunteers. Plus this one trained teacher. Lot of the high school students became teachers, teacher's aides during the war, in these little ghost towns that were revived. They didn't have this construction battalion establishing a community of barracks you know, like a army, except that it was kids and women and so on in one area, not just males as in those days. So we had this -- it was, it was one of the things that we learned to do. We can believe in certain ideals. And we were practicing that in some ways. Religion was like that. You talked about all these great ideals, ideals. And on Monday it was different. Lot of churches didn't follow the same principles on Monday, as on... you know they used a different law to foreclose on a widow with three kids. Get 'em out in the street 'cause they, she couldn't pay the rent. We didn't throw this law away. We just found an exception for that. And so we just kept these two things from clashing and...

BF: The reality and the ideal.

GH: Yeah, and so we had this discrimination, to Asians. The Native Indians were worse. And Asians added to the discrimination. And the blacks had it worse. But, so we knew there were gradations, and we weren't the worst ones. But we weren't in, in the boat with the whites.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.