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TI: In my notes, you also talked about the World's Fair.

SY: Yes.

TI: Tell me about that.

SY: Well, every Sunday, the cleaners closed, so we would take, once a month, we would take a ferry boat, and we would go to Treasure Island, and at that time they had this water fountain with color, and we thought, that's the most spectacular thing you ever see in your life. I mean, now people laugh at that, you could see that in Las Vegas, you know. Then there was this one restaurant I recall. The cooks are up high, then once they finish their cooking, the dish came rotating around (a slide) and then they handed it out to the people. We never could eat, because we didn't have enough money, but I used to see the food, and I said, "Someday, I'm going to eat in a restaurant." And my mother always used to say the sanitation, the hot dogs are not cooked well, the hamburgers are bad, but in the long run, she was right, the cholesterol and the other stuff, which we didn't even know about. And, but the other thing that I noticed as a young man, a young boy, rather, that we went to the area where they had not only displays but they had the armament, the soldiers and the navy people from different countries, including Japan. And they had the cannons, and as a young boy, we saw a newsreel about these guns and weapons and tanks. Because of what happened in Europe, we wanted to see. As a boy, why, we grew up in the Cowboy & Indian era, you know, when we played, we played cowboys and Indians, except when we played with girls, they would play house, and I won't talk about that, but anyway, it depends on who you're playing with. I noticed the Japanese soldiers and the navy personnel were extremely nice, smiling, cordial, and they would have a great rapport with all of the families. And then later on, out on the marching field, they had people marching. And all of a sudden when the Japanese army came, and all the audience, majority were Japanese in that section, "Banzai!" " Banzai!" Well, monkey see, monkey do, as a kid, "Banzai!" We had no understanding what was going on in Japan, we didn't know that they were preparing for war, we had no knowledge. We just knew that, I always wished that, when I went to school, I wished I was a Caucasian, why do they have blonde hair and I have dark hair, slant eyes where they have round eyes, and so on. But as a kid, you're more sensitive to these things. But getting back to the World's Fair, it was something that I looked forward to.

TI: Going back to the, to watching the Japanese march, did, and you said "monkey see, monkey do," but how did you feel? Did you feel a sense of pride of, by being Japanese and seeing these Japanese soldiers?

SY: Well, you have to understand, when you went to a bookstore there's books about the Japanese army. As a kid you look for medals, the generals, and the high ranking officers and the privates and all the way down, different areas. And we didn't believe in the war aspect, but, because nobody wants to get killed, but if you look at these books, it was an honor to die for your country. Although I couldn't read the book, but the picture tells a story. When they carry bombs on their knapsack and go in under the tanks, or have, like, some kind of bomb, four, five people going into barbed wire so that the army could go through, it was not necessarily against the United States, it was anybody, it didn't matter what country it was. So we knew there was tension all over the world, not only the Pacific, but also in Europe as well. So I don't know why I remember that, but I did, I have never heard of anybody talking about that. And then when the ships came in, we would go to the ships and they would throw these long streamers, and everybody's happy on the ground, waving and so forth, and I used to think, well, gee, why are they so happy to leave the United States, and those that came in were happy to come in. And so, I don't think nobody ever thought of the war aspect, at least I didn't.

TI:Even before the war, though, I'm just thinking about, in terms of how you felt, in terms of, you said earlier how, because you went to a place where you were, like, the only Japanese, and most of your friends were white, whether or not when you were with the Japanese community seeing the Japanese military, and people are really proud of that, or, you know, they're yelling banzai, if that had any effect on you.

SY: No, no. I did walk all the way down to Japantown, because two of my cousin lives there, they're both sisters. A lot of my friends lived in Japantown, and so I enjoy going to Japantown, just to buy manju or whatever, and it was sort of a way of getting away from the house, being the only kid until I was fifteen, but all throughout the war I was the only boy. So I had to make my own friends, and so this is the way I associated with different types of friends. But when the war broke out, we were very patriotic to the United States. They had a wagon that recycled newspapers, and we made ten cents for a stack of paper, we gave them pots and pans and whatnot, but the one thing that is really disgusting was we would walk all the way down to Market Street and pick up cigarette packages and take off the tin foil and pack it into a ball. And for all these years I often wonder, what can you do with tin foil, because it burns, it disintegrates, and just two years ago, where I work, there was one gentleman, we call him C.R. Ramirez, he talked about, every time he hears a noise, airplane, he could identify the plane. And I says, "Because you know so much about the Air Force, what, why do they collect these tin foil?" He says, "Well, what they did was, these planes would go out and they would throw a bunch of shredded tin foils down, and the radar picks it up. And instead of one or two or three planes, they think there's thousands of planes coming." I said, "Oh." It took me all these years, over sixty-some years to find out what actually happened.

TI: That's good. Yeah, I didn't think about that either. Because you're right, you can't melt it for the metal, because it would just burn.

SY: No, but I always wondered about that.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.