<Begin Segment 20>

[Ed. note: This transcript has been edited by the narrator]

TI: Okay, so after Washington junior high school, where did you go to school next?

SA: Broadway (High School). And actually, even there, I think we bumped into more Caucasians. But I think, I don't know what the population was, I'd just take a rough guess. I think most of the high schools had about two thousand (students). I would say a quarter were Asians at Broadway, and that kind of made things tough when Pearl Harbor hit. Because one of the teachers wrote in an editorial, you know, where you can write letters to, that she had to bend over backwards to be nice to the Japanese students, and that was a civics teacher.

TI: Say that again, so the civics teacher said she had...

SA: She wrote this little thing and I'm amazed she even put her name on it. But she wrote that they were leaning over backwards to be nice to the Japanese, which I thought, I kind of rather resented. I happened to, at that time, I think I was a junior (or) sophomore (...), and I was on the social committee, (...) I think I was running for vice president or president, and I lost that, but because of that, they put me (as a chairperson) on the social committee, which was a token thing. Because of that I was supposed to pin a corsage on this same teacher that made this remark, and I sure felt like sticking it right through her because I was so upset at that time.

TI: Because she felt that she was just doing Japanese students a...

SA: I guess they must have been told that they had to be nice to us regardless of their feelings, which (I felt maybe was racist).

TI: Okay, but because of Pearl Harbor, she harbored ill feelings towards the Japanese American students, and she thought she was bending over backwards by just being nice to them, or treating them just like a regular student.

SA: Yeah, instead of, that she had to be aware. And I thought that was kind of not a nice remark to make. But in view of the fact that it was wartime, I gather it was the feeling of a lot of people.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.