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TI: Okay, so I'm going to go back to school. So we talked about school, it was roughly a few Japanese in a class of thirty. We mentioned that there was a Japanese language school also in Gilroy. So when would you attend Japanese language school?

SY: Saturday.

TI: Oh, just one day?

SY: Yes.

TI: Okay.

SY: So it was a whole day, so we take bento, you know, take their nigiri. [Laughs]

TI: And who would be the teacher? Did the teacher come from someplace else or did the teacher live...

SY: No, they're living nearby. There was a house beside that school, and they were living in there.

TI: Okay. Oh, so you guys didn't have to go as much. I mean, a lot of communities, they would go to Japanese language school every day after regular school.

SY: No. When we were younger, we used to go to Japanese school almost every day.

TI: But that was a different place.

SY: Yeah, different, different place.

TI: So what did you do after school if you didn't have to go to Japanese language school? What type of activities did you do?

SY: We just went home and did our homework and played outside, that's about it. My father was pretty strict, he wouldn't let us go to any school functions.

TI: And so when you played outside, what were some of the games you would play?

SY: Oh, we'd play tag and jintori. I don't know if you've heard of that or not.

TI: No, we, I used to play that a lot when I was a kid, yeah.

SY: Oh, you have? Yeah, we played jintori. And my brother made a bar, you know, and we used to hang, play on that bar. That's about it, I guess. I remember my two younger brother and I used to play war, you know. [Laughs] We played Japanese soldier. [Laughs] And then they say, "Bang," and oh, we fall, and they come and say, "Daijobu ka?" We used to play that a lot.

TI: And so when you were growing up, you said 'Japanese soldiers," so was it through your parents or something that you kind of knew what the Japanese...

SY: I don't know what that was. [Laughs] I don't know what made us do that, but we just, you know... well, we played chanbara, too, you know.

TI: I was wondering if maybe at the dinner table or something, maybe your parents talked about what was happening in Japan and what they were doing.

SY: No.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.