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MN: When you got older you started to attend the Onodera Gakuen instead of the Chuo Gakuen, but Onodera Gakeunis a girls' school. How did you get around that?

BK: Well, it was, Onodera Gakuen, the teacher, Mrs. Onodera, son was Ray Onodera and Ray Onodera and I were classmates, going to junior high school, and so we were, Mutt and Jeff, we were together everyday, playing baseball, trying to play basketball. And so I would go to the Japanese school and he and I were in class with Mr. Mayeda, the teacher, and he would teach us, the two of us, so I went to Onodera Gakuen and paid, had the, the gessha or the tuition paid to Mrs. Onodera. She came from a very well-known family in Japan and they were on the high navy classification, and so when the war broke out they were very, very concerned because of relatives that were in the higher echelon. But they couldn't communicate because of the war, but they came from a very high, highly recognized family.

MN: Now, you graduated from Hollenbeck Junior High in 1941 and then, I was looking at your yearbook, and then next to your photo you have this nickname, Casanova. Can you share how you got this nickname?

BK: [Laughs] Oh, well, they picked nicknames when you graduate. Some people have nicknames. And I don't know why someone put down Casanova, but they thought I was good-looking. [Laughs] I was very timid. I was no Casanova, but they put names on people and that's how I got that. But that's about the time I started using the name Bruce. I would write Teruo B. Kaji, and I used the Batman, you know, Bruce Wayne. So I started using "B," and, I don't know, I was well-known in the Jewish circle because Fred Schwartz and I were very good friends. He's Jewish kid. And after hours we'd go up to his home and we would be practicing broad jump or high jump or whatever, and we got along fine. So he was always well-liked by the Jewish girls because he was a very good-looking Jewish boy, and he used me as a messenger to take his love notes to all of his girlfriends. I don't know why, maybe that's why they called me Casanova. I had no, I had no, no sex drive at that age. Jewish kids were very advanced. Not me. I was slow in growing up.

MN: Well, you had a very, a good relationship with the Jewish Americans because when you entered Theodore, Roosevelt High School you were with the Wabash Saxons. What was that?

BK: It's, our relationship, Ray Onodera and I, we were in sports together and played basketball, and we signed up for the Roosevelt sports team and they had classifications. A was varsity, B, C, and they had even a D team for basketball and that's the real shorty guys, like I was barely five foot then in high school. And Ray was a little older, but he was a little awkward and we were tenth graders, but we were very active in sports with a bunch of Jewish kids. And so after hours as we were growing up, since we were about the same size as some of the Jewish kids, they invited us to play at the Michigan (Soto), Michigan gymnasium. So Ray and I would walk into this Jewish gymnasium past the Jewish mothers who would look at us, and they knew we weren't Jewish, but it didn't bother them, (afterwards) they got used to seeing us. We would go up there and play games, basketball game with the other Jewish kids. So we had a good relationship.

MN: So was it you and Ray, the only Japanese Americans in the Wabash Saxons?

BK: The Wabash Saxons was a team name. They had other names for the individual teams, like the Blue Jays (...). The Wabash Saxons was (also) an area up in Boyle Heights where most of the Jewish kids lived, and Wabash was another street past Brooklyn. And then a group that we were playing adopted the name of the street, Wabash, and then the name Saxons, so they used that in some of the activities and that kind of stuck to the teams that we played with. It wasn't every specific team, but if we were gonna go play, says the Wabash Saxons are having a meet or something, and we'd go to the gymnasium to go play. We got along very well with the Jewish group.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.