<Begin Segment 16>

TI: Before we go there, so when the war broke out, you were about nine or ten?

YN: I was in, at that time, I was in, finished being in the third grade.

TI: Okay, so you were --

YN: When I went to camp in the fall of Nineteen hundred and forty-two, I was in the fourth grade.

TI: So before you left, you were in third grade, I'm curious about the period after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and before you left, what was school like, Summit like, during that period?

YN: The, for my, my experience, the children did not know any more than I knew (...) we were still friends. The only thing of anything that might have occurred in my mind that things had changed was only at home. At school, I never (felt the hatred of my classmates).

TI: How many other Japanese Americans were going to Summit?

YN: In fact, I may have been one of the few. There were Chinese, one of my Chinese friends who I still know today, he had just come (from China), and I was his monitor or his helper. But other than that, maybe (...) one or two others. But Summit was not a school, Bailey Gatzert was the school for most Japanese Americans, or Maryknoll. And so it was another uniqueness that I saw another side of that which was the Pearl Harbor experience. I think it was much more clear in those that were tied more to the Japanese American community in that sense. Because I went to Japanese school, but that was in my neighborhood. I did not go to the one on Rainier and Weller, and that was the central school. I went to what would have been a suburbia (Japanese language) school.

TI: Okay, that's good.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.