<Begin Segment 8>

MA: Let's talk a little bit about your trip you took to Japan when you were young.

GM: Well, I went to Japan with my mother, because my mother wanted to bring my daughter -- my sister back to the States. And she failed on that, but while I was in Japan, we went to Hiroshima and we were supposed to be there for six months, and I think we stayed there a little over a month. But the reason was that those Japanese kids fought with me every day. They chased me around and called me names, and...

MA: Why were they fighting with you?

GM: Well, you know, I understood why they didn't like me, because it happened here in the States, and that is when a Japanese kid comes from Japan to this country in those days, all the kids used to make fun of them and fight with him because he was different. Well, when we go there, into a rural neighborhood, you're treated the same way, and all the kids would call me Chosenjin, and the word Chosenjin means Korean. And Japan is very discriminatory, and the Koreans were the top of the list with the Chinese as far as them not liking you. And so they called me Chosenjin and chased me all over the place, and I chased them, and there was always a fight every day. And my mother couldn't stand it, so she decided to come back.

MA: So originally, your mother went to Japan with you to go get your sister, who had been living there for a while.

GM: Yeah. But I learned a lot of other things, too, traveling in Japan at that early age. I went by many schools, and I found out that these kids in school all wore the same clothes, they were very regimented lives. But they all carried a stick and marched up and down the schoolyards like little soldiers. And those were the warriors in Japan in 1934, so I kept thinking about that, because of the fact that in our country, we didn't act like soldiers. We played "cops and robbers," but we didn't act like soldiers and had to get up and go to school and march up and down the streets like soldiers. And being out in the farm country, I guess you might look at it like cows. All the cows get herded out to the field, and they get all herded back into the field as a unit, you know. And you're, you don't have that liberty that we had, that we could do whatever we wanted to do. Where the kids in Japan had to do certain things, and it was not do you want to do it, or not, it was you had to do it. But because of the punishment that I took while I was a kid from those kids, I hated Japan. And when the war broke out, of course, I had, didn't feel sorry for them at all.

MA: So that trip was very influential in your life, it sounds like.

GM: Yeah, I think so, yes, uh-huh. I still remember, even to this day, how it affected me.

MA: You were... so you went over to get your sister, but you actually didn't end up bringing her back with you?

GM: No, uh-huh.

MA: Why is that?

GM: Well, she, my sister was old enough now to know that if she came out at the top of the class, that she could go to the best colleges and be, well, the different type of class they have in Japan, if you went to the best college in Japan, you're in a higher class of people. And I think that's what she was trying to get, and she attained it. So when she got out of the college, I noticed that those friends that were much richer than they were had to look up to her because she came out of a better college.

MA: So education was very important to her.

GM: Very important in Japan and to the person, if you want to get ahead, yeah. You got, the better your education, the better your jobs are. It's not like that in this country, but in those days, it was very important that you get a good education. When you grow up, you had to rely on what you did in your younger days. In this country, we go to school because we have to go to school. We go to college, a lot of 'em go to college because they want to play around, and others study real hard, and they might come out of college with a good degree and everything, but it doesn't guarantee 'em a good job.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.