<Begin Segment 5>

TI: So you're living down on First and Washington. Which elementary school did you go to?

KT: I went to Bailey Gatzert. Bailey Gatzert, Washington junior... well, at that time I was at Washington, it was called Eighth Grade Center, seventh and eighth grade only, it wasn't a junior high school.

TI: So that's a pretty long walk from First...

KT: Yeah, we used to walk from First and Washington up to Jackson, about a mile away, it was Twelfth Avenue.

TI: And then did you attend Japanese language school also?

KT: Yes.

TI: And which Japanese language school did you attend?

KT: The one on Weller Street, Fourteenth and Weller.

TI: Okay, so another few blocks away from, you had to go up there. And so describe like a typical day for you starting from the morning when you're at the hotel and going to school, Japanese school, returning. What would your typical day be like?

KT: Well, I guess in the morning, we would walk up to Bailey Gatzert school, and have our classes there. We would get out...

TI: But even before then, would you have breakfast?

KT: Yeah, we had breakfast at home. I don't really remember what our breakfast was. One thing I remember is when my brothers and sister were going to school, they were only given a ten cents allowance to put in the school banking system. When my brother Mas and myself were going to school, we were given twenty-five cents to put into allowance. And I think I went from twenty-five cents to fifty cents that I was putting in weekly into the school savings bank.

TI: But starting off again in the morning, so like breakfast, who, would you make your own breakfast or would your mother make the breakfast? Do you remember that?

KT: I think my mother made breakfast most of the time, and my sister may have started to help after she was much older. Those two primarily for breakfast, and then we would go to Bailey Gatzert. And after we finished Bailey Gatzert, which was around three, three-thirty, something like that, we would go down to Japanese language school and stay there, and that was an hour class. And then when we got out of that Japanese language school, I guess it was about six o'clock or something, we'd walk back home.

TI: Wow, so that's a long day for you.

KT: Yeah, it was a long day.

TI: And during the day, for food, what would you do for food? Like at lunch...

KT: Oh, we would take lunch to school, yeah.

TI: And would you also pack like a snack between regular school and Japanese language school, do you recall?

KT: We may have, some days, but I really don't remember too much what we did for snacks. We had some money, so I guess we went to the school because I remember buying ingamoi or something like that, ginger, you know.

TI: And what kind of student were you? If people were to talk about you at Bailey Gatzert, how would they describe you as a student?

KT: At Bailey Gatzert I would have been described as a very quiet, shy guy. I really didn't react socially. I mean, I was socially, I was immature, I think. [Laughs] It wasn't until I got to high school that I blossomed out. I think even in my freshman and sophomore years, I was pretty shy. And I think it was junior year at Hunt High School that I started to get more socially conscious. And by the time I came back and I had, went to high school, senior year in high school at Broadway High School, I was acclimatized, I started to blossom out, I guess.

TI: In terms of your studies, how good a student were you?

KT: In the grade school, I was slow, I think. In fact, I know I was slow because we used to have a split class. It used to be called 5-A and 6-B, meaning the slow sixth grade students were put in the class with the very smart fifth grade student, and we were all put into the same class. And even though our studies was kind of partitioned off, the fact that I know the classmates I had at sixth grade, and I knew they were all slow. And so I figured they classified me as slow. But then by the time I got to high school... and my senior year in high school -- well, actually, in Hunt High School, I was doing pretty good academically. And then starting in my junior year, things started falling in. Math became, was a struggle for me, but after my junior year, something happened. All the things, the concepts started to sink into me. I understood what I was doing. So once I understood what I was doing, I was an A student, yeah.

TI: Good.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.