<Begin Segment 7>

TI: So let's go back, when you said you had his conversation with your father, he wanted you to go back to Japan so that the family ties wouldn't sort of get, disappear. How did you feel about going to Japan at this point?

JI: Well, I wasn't too wild about it. I was, I was wrestling for UCLA, and I thought that's gonna interrupt that. And the other thing was... well, I guess I didn't object too much because I figured I wasn't doing too much as a student anyway. I, but I didn't feel ready to go to Japan; I wasn't prepared. But we had, I went in the company of a guy about my age who was from Imperial Valley, and they were our parents' oldest friends. And he was the son about my age, they had several children, more than we had. Almost all girls except for Oliver. He was the only boy among, I think, seven girls at the time. And I remember going over on the boat, he kept saying, "Oh, you'll like Japan 'cause it's a man's country." [Laughs] Surrounded by seven sisters, I suppose being a "man's country" was important to him, but I thought, "A 'man's country'? What a stupid perception." [Laughs] But anyway, I could understand him. But anyway, we went together, and he had, he had gone earlier and he was a student at one of the schools, Waseda, I guess he was a student at Waseda.

TI: Before we do that even, why do you think your father chose you to go to Japan?

JI: Well, 'cause I was not working, other brothers were working. And well, my oldest brother was married (...). So the others would have been much more adept, they... for a while I read and wrote Japanese better than they did, but they spoke better Japanese. Well, for one thing, my oldest brother worked for the import company, and then after the war he became partner of a wholesale fruit and vegetable market in L.A. And my other brother, I guess he returned to California after he retired from working at the Bank of Tokyo in New York. And so he spoke Japanese better than I did. But I remember when I came back from Japan, he said something to a guy who was, had people work who were supposed to meet him, hadn't come to meet him, and he didn't know any English. And so my brother said, "Anzen desu ne?" instead of "Zannen desu ne?" And anzen means it's very safe and secure. [Laughs] And the guy looked at him, and he meant to say, "It's a terrible dilemma for you. It's too bad." So at that point, he didn't know as much Japanese as I knew then, and I didn't know a heck of a lot after two years, because I went to Keio University, which was... and the only Japanese they taught was tenth century Japanese, Makura no Soshi, and you know, Japanese that was very difficult for Japanese students. It was like learning Beowulf, really a foreign language.

TI: And so was the intent for you to go back to Japan, while you were there, to attend school? I mean, was that the thinking?

JI: Yeah. I couldn't just go to Hiroshima and meet my family and freeload off them. So I, it would have been better if I had gone to middle school or chugakko, high school, or whatever, rather than university, because then I would have been forced to learn Japanese. And people who did that knew Japanese much better, learned Japanese much better. But the only guy who was slower than I was in learning Japanese was, this was before we took the exam for the university, we went to kind of a prep school run by the foreign office, and this was for foreign-born children of Japanese abroad. And the only guy who was worse than I was was a guy from Java who only knew, who only knew Dutch. [Laughs] And he, he got to be good friends with a lot of the Hawaiians, and he learned pidgin English, which did him no good. And Dutch and pidgin English, and he was drafted into the army right off the bat.

TI: Which army? The Japanese?

JI: Japanese army. It was, so I wondered how he would survive there. Probably learned Japanese pretty quickly after that.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.