<Begin Segment 10>

MA: So once you got to high school, which high school did you attend?

GM: Fife High School. Fife all the way from first grade through the graduation.

MA: I'm curious about, you know, high school is kind of a change for a lot of, a lot of young people. How did the Nisei students fit in with the rest of the, of the other students?

GM: Well, like I said, Fife High School was thirty percent Japanese. And the Japanese kids were, most of 'em were in the honors classes. They were pretty smart kids. They worked on the farms, they went to Japanese school, worked on the farms morning and night, and studied. And they kept their grades up high. And then they were involved in the sports. Especially in Fife, sports was one of the main things, and on every team, the football, baseball and every sport, they were just about the largest group of any team. And most of the teams might have as many as half, half of 'em Japanese. So those activity, and... and when it came down to who's going to be the valedictorian or something like that, the Japanese would place real high in that area. And then the, going to school with other kids, they're very popular. A lot of 'em were quiet...

MA: The Japanese American students?

GM: Yes, uh-huh. We were very popular with the other students. We didn't hold back like in the city schools, which were larger and all they did was study and go home. But we interacted with the rest of the kids in the school, so it was a different atmosphere.

MA: Yeah, it sounds a lot, you had quite a unique experience from the urban city Japanese American experience.

GM: Yeah, because of the fact that we knew everybody over a big area, and we went to school and grew up together. And that makes a difference. It's ignorance of the white people that didn't know you, was where the problem came. If they knew you, they supported you. So even right up to the last days, they were behind us.

MA: You mean the last days leading up to...

GM: Yeah, last day to go, before going into the camp. Many of 'em, whites, looked at it as something that's got to be done, and there was nothing they could do about it. But as far as trust and things like that, they trusted us because we went to school together for years and years. The discrimination is, it's different in a big city. And I think Fife High School should be proud of the Japanese, which they are. And, because they served our country very well, as far as going into the service and doing things, and a number of Japanese kids that got killed. So a lot of the time, I didn't even know what discrimination was. As a person, as a person, not as a Japanese, people look at you and, and give you an ugly face or something like that. You can't tell if that's discrimination, because they may do that to somebody else that isn't Japanese. If you look at it in that sense, you didn't know if you're being discriminated against or not. It's when they come out verbally, then, then you know.

MA: Well, that's great. That's really interesting. You have a really interesting perspective.

GM: There's other things, too, you know, that, at the time, to me, we lived in a police state, which meant that, in my opinion, that you couldn't say anything, because it wasn't a free country. It was, if you said something, and if somebody didn't like it, they could throw you in jail and you didn't have any recourse as far as going to court or anything like that, because nobody cared. It's not like today, where there's laws to protect you and everything, and if something's wrong you could go to court. But in those days, they'd laugh at you if you made any remarks, especially if you were Japanese. 'Cause people just didn't trust you, and for anything you might say or do, they just throw you in the can and forget about you.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.