<Begin Segment 5>

TI: Now, in those early years, just growing up, what kind of things did you like to do growing up?

LH: Well, actually, I think... if you speak of the summer, I remember just going swimming in Lake Washington at every opportunity. The family was, were readers, so I know that I always joined the summer reading class. And the one I particularly remember was the Yesler library.

TI: I think they call it the Douglass-Truth Public Library, is that...?

LH: I don't know, I don't know.

TI: Good.

LH: And, you know, I remember playing a lot of games with neighborhood kids and, you know, being from a large family, playing indoors with the family during rainy days, whether it was Monopoly or whatever it might have been.

TI: Well, how about your friends in these early days? Do you recall who your friends were?

LH: Yes. Interestingly, many of my friends, I would say almost exclusively Caucasian, even though I knew a few Nikkei, shockingly, after the war, wouldn't associate with me, and that was all because of, you know, the propaganda that we were Japanese. And that's why I emphasize to everybody, "Stop calling yourselves Japanese," because Nikkei still do so. And, you know, something else is going to occur again, and they won't differentiate us from the Japanese-Japanese, as I call them. Even though I, I'm proud of my ancestry and my culture, and I served many years in Japan and think the world of Japan historically and as a people, we are not Japanese.

TI: So explain that a little more. So this was after the war, you were telling your friends that, that they should stop using that term, "Japanese," in terms of self-describing.

LH: Oh yes, oh yes, absolutely, because I guess it continues to this day, and it was just more so then. Because in those days, it was, you know, the Grangers and the Daughters of the Golden West, and the Hearst newspapers, they called everybody "Japs," and as you may or may not know, the Issei were not allowed to become U.S. citizens period until the McCarren Act was passed in 1951. And so they were accused of having Japantowns and living exclusively among themselves, generally. But in many ways, they were forced to. And they weren't allowed to own land, own property, own houses.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.