<Begin Segment 11>

MA: You mentioned earlier that you just really enjoyed school.

KB: Uh-huh.

MA: Was this something that continued throughout high school? In general, did you enjoy learning and enjoy...

KB: I did, yeah, I really liked school.

MA: And what, I guess, the relationships with your teachers, did you have some favorite teachers that really influenced you or impacted your education?

KB: Yes. One of them was my journalism teacher. This was, I think, when I was a senior. I took journalism, and it was a male teacher, he was very encouraging, and I became editor of our school newspaper. He kind of encouraged me to go into journalism. And the other teacher was my language teacher; I took Latin. At that time, Latin was something that if you were going to college, you might have to have. Of course that didn't work out to be so, but anyway, that was what the thinking was. So I took Latin, and she was very nice to me, very encouraging. And I was talking to her one day during recess, and she asked me what I intended to do after I graduated from high school. And I said I wanted to go to college and I wanted to become a schoolteacher, and that's when she told me that, "Oh, you'll never make it because you're a Japanese," and that just shocked me. Here I'm Japanese, I'm different, and I'm not going to be able to become a schoolteacher. So then I thought about this for a while and decided, "Well, okay, if that's the way things are, I better go into some field where I won't have to depend on somebody to give me a job." And that's when I thought of going into medicine.

MA: That's interesting. So your teacher told you that you would, you shouldn't be a teacher because you were being discriminated against, or you wouldn't make it because you were Japanese.

KB: That's right. There was not this talk about how discrimination was bad. As I recall, nobody worried about civil rights or personal rights, and it was accepted. Not only that, but the married teachers could not teach. They had to be single; once they got married, they could not teach. That was for the females. The males, of course, it was alright if they were married. But the women teachers had to be single. And so this type of thing has really changed.

MA: Yeah, going back to what you said about discrimination, how would you characterize attitudes about discrimination back then? Was it sort of, it's just the norm?

KB: Yeah, I guess we were different, and so people thought differently about us, I don't know. I don't think I thought deeply about it.

MA: So when your, it seems like, then, when your teacher kind of told you that about your aspirations for becoming a teacher, what were your feelings after she said that? It seems like that was the first time maybe that you really kind of were struck by...

KB: That I was different?

MA: Right, right.

KB: Yeah, that I was different. And yeah, it bothered me a lot. I remember being quite upset to hear this, that I'm not sure that I realized it was discrimination per se, but here she's making me different from everybody else, and it gave me more of an incentive to prove that, "Okay, I can do whatever I need to do or want to do."

MA: Yeah, that's interesting because then you said that that kind of made you realize that you could do other things, that you could go into medicine, for example.

KB: Right, yeah. I said, "Well, I better go into something where I don't have to depend on an employer." It seems to me at that time, well, okay, a doctor is independent. I guess I should have thought maybe a dentist or something, or maybe there are other professions, but I just happened to come to my mind, that, "Well, yeah, a doctor is on his own." At least, that was my thinking at that time.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.