<Begin Segment 15>

MA: I actually wanted to go back a little bit and talk about, so you were a senior in high school at this point, right?

GM: Uh-huh.

MA: When you were in school, did you ever feel uncomfortable or, because of your ethnicity? Or what was the reaction of the other students?

GM: Well, you're always, you're always uncomfortable. Because you couldn't pry from these people how they felt against you. Some came out openly, but you didn't know if they were telling you the truth, or just telling you because they didn't want to make you feel bad. But I think the natural, normal cause was they didn't like you, just because you're Japanese, and that's what hurts. Some of your best friends weren't as friendly as they were before, and you could feel it. And, and you didn't know why they weren't friendly, but they kept it to themselves more or less, I think. You're always on the defensive.

It's like one day I... later on, after the war, I went to a lutefisk dinner with my wife and kid, 'cause we were invited by a good friend of hers. And we went to this lutefisk dinner, and we walked into this Norwegian hall. [Laughs] Everybody looked at us: three Japanese coming walking into a lutefisk dinner. And I click back at that as something right before the war, all the people looked at you, "What the hell are they doing here?" [Laughs] It's just, it wasn't quite as bad, because at that time I was able to face anybody anyway, but, but I know it must have been awful strange for my son to walk in there and have everybody all of a sudden pay their attention to you without saying anything.

MA: Well, it sounds like, you know, just when you were in high school and after, after Pearl Harbor and everything, it must have hurt a lot. These people, Fife being such a small community, close-knit community, and all of a sudden treating you differently. I can't imagine how that must have been. Really tough.

GM: It's hard, I think it's hard to explain, because I think we all forgot that, really. It, I remember the day of the graduation. They gave twenty of us Japanese seniors a special graduation. And during that graduation, towards the end of the ceremony, Yuki Kubo, who was valedictorian, and maybe student body president, I forget. But anyway, she got up and presented the Fife High School with a big American flag by the people who were going away. And before she finished presenting it, she stopped to cry. And I was down on the middle of the gym floor in these nice, soft chairs, and when that happened, the whole school started crying with her, and she had a hard time finishing. But I looked around the all, balcony and the back and everybody was crying, I couldn't believe. And at that time, I got more, a better feeling how the community felt towards us. We were really sad, and on the fiftieth anniversary of class reunion, it was in Puyallup, and I took Yuki Kubo with me -- she was Fudge Shoji's wife now -- I took her with me because Fudge didn't want to go. And at that time, I told her about this incident, and I said, "Do you remember?" And she said, "No, I don't remember a thing about it." She forgot this whole incident, yet when I went to the class reunion, that's all they talked about, the kids. "I remember," they say. It was so touching that... and so some things you can't describe today, but those things did happen.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.