<Begin Segment 9>

MA: So I guess then, did you speak Japanese or English at home, or both?

GY: Well, primarily Japanese. My mother would always say, "Uchi ni oru no dattara. Narutake Nihongo o tsukao yo ni shite kudasai." So we were forced to speak Japanese. A lot of the words I didn't know, of course, I spoke English. But it was a mixture anyway, English and Japanese.

MA: Did your parents speak English at all?

GY: Not too much. Even my dad, with all these years behind him in the railroad, still spoke, to my way of thinking, poor English. I didn't, I never mentioned anything like that, but when I think about it, I kind of believe after all these years, he should have been able to speak a little bit better. However, when I think of all the other Isseis, it was in the same boat. There were a couple of 'em that spoke real good English, but I guess it just, the way circumstances went, our parents encountering the Caucasian population where they had to speak a lot of English. They, they managed, real broken English as it was.

MA: So when your mother was running the hotel, did she manage okay interacting with the customers then?

GY: My mother had a worse time with English, but she got along with the customers. The customers were quite loyal, they would come in, go out, come in, this could happen several times a year depending on what type of job they had, but they always remember my mother. They would give her small presents, just be nice to my mother. One, I do remember one Nisei across, they ran another hotel across the alley Trent Alley, and I remember him, someone slapped his mother. And he used to be a former boxer, semi-pro boxer, a good boxer, gutsy boxer. And he fought under a different name in Japanese, Nisei. However, anyway, he hit this guy and threw him down the stairs from the second floor to the first floor to the ground floor, and he punched him. Being a boxer, he just hit him. And he actually threw him out, onto the sidewalk, and well, that was understandable. Anybody that would hit my mother, it, I thought the way he did it was rather interesting, the way he spoke of it. [Laughs]

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.