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TI: But in your gang, did you have, did you give each other little nicknames and things like that?

CH: Nicknames? You know, horse's mouth, anybody who got more nickname than I do, let me know. So I talked to that guy last year. Nickname, we had all kind of nickname. You know, I hate to say anything, but name is Oihe, and my father's name is Tahei. TA-HEI means a fart in Japanese. You don't know? Onara, onara, that, you better take that out maybe. See, onara, tahei, that's a big onara. And my name was Oihe, "ohe" means great onara. Big and great. Great, so they used to call me "Ohe," "Ohe." They skip the "i." Everybody, even today, they say "Ohe," "Ohe." That's why I used to hate that name. These guys used to tease me, "Ohe," and he used to hit me, I used to cry and, "Wait 'til you get older, I'm gonna beat the hell out of you," I used to tell 'em. But when they got older, became friends. "Remember that time you used to call me that?" [Inaudible] So we had Taratsugu Marumoto. "Taratsugu" means, we used to call him "Tara ketsu." Taraketsu Shimotani. "Tara ketsu" means "free okore."

MN: Butt.

CH: "Tara ketsu," "free okore." We had Rotten. He had smelly, what do you call that? Odor. What do you call that now?

TI: BO?

CH: Yeah. BO, body odor, his name Rotton. We had Soup, Soup, we had Snake, and we had four, Knucklehead, Triangle Head, Square Head, and Pinhead. And we had Horse. You know Horse? We had two Horse, not the Yoshinaga, two Horse, Kajiyama Horse, Matsushita. And we had, what else we had? Heji. Heji ite kure. We had Shonben, we had. Yeah, we had all kind of nicknames. Amazing. Everybody had nicknames, if I start thinking, man, go right down the line. We had about fifty nicknames. Tar, Tar, he was black, that's why. We had Sambo, Black Sambo we had. We had Osama, Osama Rie, his ear went like that, and we had Donkey Ear, too. Donkey, Donkey. We had a lot of nickname. Well, we didn't have too much fight, though. It's amazing. Well, kid time we had fight, but as we grow up, nice and peaceful place. But we were too sections: Kibei and Nisei, we play against, football against each other, baseball, each other, but when it come to judo and kendo, and swimming, we was all mixed. We want to get the state champion.

MN: So the Kibeis and Niseis got to, they... they were okay?

CH: Separated. Separated.

MN: Did they fight a lot?

CH: Kibei played -- no. Kibei played with Kibei, Nisei played with Nisei. Go to school, same thing. But we had special class for Kibei. Like my brother and my sister went to special school before they entered that regular school. They didn't, they can't, even when the war came, they didn't even know how to talk English. And stick around with their own group, Kibei. Omoshirokatta.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.