<Begin Segment 6>

TI: Tell me about your friends. I mean, who did you hang out with growing up?

JT: Well, you know, this community was, comes under Marysville. Whatever... Marysville was the center of the community, and if you didn't live in Marysville, you was somebody that was out in the boonies. We were left out. We weren't one of the good guys. You had to be living in Marysville. Even people in Yuba City, which is just across the river of Marysville, they were not as good as people that lived in Marysville. And one of the papers that I showed Barbara about this lady that, she lived in Biggs. Biggs is about three miles north of here. And she says the same thing I said, that we were discriminated against because we lived outside of Marysville. And so most of my friends were Caucasians, not Japanese.

TI: And how would that discrimination... so you were kind of like country folk. How would they discriminate against you?

JT: Well, they didn't want to associate with us. Being country folks or farmers, basically, the whole population that that time, probably ninety-five percent had something to do with agriculture. There was, sure, a few (merchant) people, but basically most of 'em were in agriculture.

TI: And so your friends were mostly white, Caucasian friends.

JT: Yeah. The schoolkids that I went to school with, yeah.

TI: But in the city, Marysville, were there very many Japanese in Marysville?

JT: (Yes). At one time, in Japanese, they started the Japanese school. And they had as much as two hundred students. So if there was three or four student, children in the family, well...

TI: Close to a hundred, maybe, families or something there.

JT: (Yes). We had big families on those days, yeah.

TI: Maybe fifty families then. Did you ever attend Japanese language school?

JT: (Yes), we had, every Saturday, half a day, my father and my mother wanted me to learn how to speak Japanese. And we was growing up in a peach orchard. So if we went to school, we didn't have to go to work. So that was the gist of my education of Japanese. I went to school because I didn't have to go to work. I didn't go to school to learn how to speak Japanese or write, read or anything. It was a half a day off. So Japanese school, I went to, but I didn't learn anything.

TI: And when you went to Japanese school, was that with the other people outside of Marysville? You went, you said, like a Saturday, and did the town's kids go a different time? How did that work?

JT: Well, the Japanese school in Marysville, they had evening classes after school every day. The Japanese school in Gridley was just on the weekend, and it was just a half a day. We got our books and we opened the book in class, we closed our books when we got home. Next time we opened the books was next Saturday. So we never, never -- at least, I'm talking about myself now -- but never opened the book and studied. I just, to me, it was a half a day, half a day off. 'Cause we had, you know, a large family, and everybody worked. We did that as we was growing up.

TI: So where did you get a sense of Japanese culture, a sense of being Japanese? If you didn't really do much in Japanese language school, were there other places, either your family or other places?

JT: Well, you know, my father and mother were first generation, and they spoke Japanese. When we were growing up, before school, we spoke Japanese. But once we started going to school, we gradually turned the Japanese over to English and we lost our language. We don't speak Japanese. I don't understand Japanese. I can understand some of it, but very little. I guess that's the same with all cultures, that I know some Spanish kids that do the same thing, they can't speak Mexican or Spanish no more.

TI: So it sounds like it sort of kind of dissipated for you over time. You started maybe speaking Japanese as a kid, but then over time as you went to regular school, started doing work, it just sort of...

JT: That's the way it was, yeah. You know, we could talk to our parents in Japanese because that's how we learned to talk. And as we got older and started going to school, we spent more time with the Caucasian friends than we did with the mother and father. Even the younger brother or older brother, they went to school before I did. They come back and speak English, we know that we're going to go to school, so we were trying to learn English from them. And then when we finally went to school, yeah, we were able to talk English before we got there.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.