<Begin Segment 20>

SY: And so the bird was really, because I didn't have -- there were times where you can't find friends. The weather was too cold, it was raining, people didn't want to come out. Sometimes I'd go to see my friend maybe five, six blocks away and he can't come out for some reason or another, so you start looking for different friends. And eventually, my next door neighbor was a girl, so she would entice me to go on a walk to Shoshone River or whatnot, so she became a girlfriend, but I didn't want to tell anybody because, you know, it was kind of embarrassing when people started teasing. But the embarrassing thing about it was she wrote a love letter and put it in our mailbox, and my mother never told me, and we went to the mess hall and while we were eating lunch, she stands up, with her loud voice, she reads this letter: "Dearest Shigeru," and then signed by this girl. Everybody in the mess hall could hear it. And I think, I look back now, being a single mother, she did not want me to get associated with a girl, and, especially having a child, because she went through hardship for many, many years.

TI: How did that feel? That must have been incredibly embarrassing for you.

SY: Embarrassing for the peers, not the adults. I could care less about the adults, because the adults would just kind of laugh, and that's it.

TI: Right.

SY: But the peers, was the one that you didn't want to know, because they're the ones that talk.

TI: And so after your mother read this, what did you do?

SY: Well, I was embarrassed, and, obviously, some of my close friends came up and wanted to know more about the relationship and everything. And at that time it was, "Hey, let's break up," you know. My mother was successful achieving what she was determined to do. And I remember there was one girl in school, she had these bug eyes, she was dark, and I did not like her, and she would say, "I love you." And I didn't want nobody to hear, because I didn't want my peers to know that she liked me, because, if anything, you don't want that girl to be associated with me. So I had a ruler in my hand, I says, "Well, I'm gonna let this go if you say that one more time." Well, accidentally, it hit her head, and she started crying. The more I apologized, the more she started to shake and cry, louder and louder. And I thought, oh my gosh, I says, how could I make her stop? Well, eventually, I didn't say I loved her, but I said, "I really like you," and then she quit. But there was another girl in my eighth grade class I really liked, but I was too embarrassed to talk to her, and so I used to be a clown in that class, with the hopes that I could get her to talk to me. And there was another situation where Sam Yamoto, his real name was Masaji. And I said, "Hey, you know," I says, "I think the Buddhist church has the most girls going to it." I said, "Why don't we go to church one Sunday?" "Okay, let's go." So, it was a blizzard, and, from the lower Block 14 to upper 14 (an open space) -- it's less than fifty yards or, I don't know exactly, enough for a baseball field -- we go halfway, and (Sam) wants to lay down and sleep.

TI: This is out in the cold, the blizzard?

SY: The cold, the blizzard, yeah. And we're dressed appropriately, and I keep lifting him up. I said, "What are you doing?" And he just wanted to lay down, so I drug all the way back to the boiler room and then we stay there for an hour or so, and then he went home. And when I visited him his mother said he had frostbite on his cheek and nose and toes and so forth. Well, years later I belong to the Baron's Club in San Francisco, it's a social club, and I said, "Hey, Sam," (said), "You remember the time we were going to go to church and you wanted to sleep?" He said, "You're the guy." He said, "The doctor said you saved my life." I said, "What do you mean?" He says, "If I laid down and slept, I wouldn't have never got up." I said, "I did?" So here's a little, young teenager saved another teenager's life without knowing, until years later. That's how cold it was, but we never thought about cold as cold, you know. Hypothermia is probably what he had, which we didn't even know about.

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.