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[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

AH: And then, growing up, so I can bring this closer to the Japanese American experience, this represents the first time I had any kind of encounter with people of Japanese ancestry. The only encounter I had before was through the films. Talk about a movie-made America; my consciousness was movie-made. Because I'm born in 1938, so when I first started going to the movies, it was during World War II. So the movies I'm seeing, for instance, are where the Japanese are the evil foes of the Americans. Almost all of my uncles and some of my aunts were in the military. So both of my grandparents' houses had, you know, the insignia of the different branches of the services. And I had all of my relatives coming by to kiss my brother and I goodbye as they were going off to war and then coming back from war. So it was very patriotic. But what I'm seeing is Japanese, mostly pilots, during World War II films, and the kids there at the movie theaters are on the edge of their seats, cheering every time the quote/unquote "Japs" were getting killed by the Americans. I mean, that was my introduction to people of Japanese ancestry. Now, when I get out to California, the schools that I'm going to and the clubs that I'm in, whether it's the Boy Scouts or the Boys Club or anything else, there are people of Japanese ancestry, Japanese Americans, and they are kids who had been in camp, had been young in camp, they were my age or a little bit older, and some of them were Nisei and others of them were Sansei. If they were Nisei, they would have been, of course, young Nisei, if they were Sansei, they would have been the older part of that generation.

So Santa Barbara never had a large Japanese American population. In fact, most of the Japanese Americans in the Santa Barbara area were there because they worked on the estates. Santa Barbara has two millionaire colonies flanking it. To the south is Montecito, which a lot of people have heard about because Montecito has these wealthy families that have lived there from time immemorial really, and then Hope Ranch, to the north. The most famous person in Hope Ranch that most people have heard of in recent years was Julia Child, who had lived there at the end of her life. But the kind of Japanese Americans that were living there then were like Frank Chuman's parents. Frank Chuman, the celebrated Nisei lawyer and legal historian, was born in Montecito, and his parents worked on an estate in Montecito. So when the Japanese Americans got excluded from the West Coast and incarcerated in the camps, this was very hard for the labor flow for the wealthy people. So when the war was over, unlike a lot of other areas that did not want the Japanese back, the Santa Barbarans very readily welcomed them and campaigned to get them to come back to Santa Barbara. So they had sort of an open door policy.

Of the two Japanese Americans I knew very well when I was growing up who I would consider close friends, the first one was a guy named Masayoshi "Mas" Riusaki. He was two years older than me, and he was in the Goleta Boy Scout troop, also. He was an exemplary Boy Scout in a troop that didn't have too many exemplary Boy Scouts. I could tell you stories about the Boy Scouts; it's where I learned just about every vice possible. But he was not a person that modeled this vice-like behavior. He was also a very good athlete and he played first string on the Santa Barbara High School varsity basketball team. There was another Japanese American named Alan Asakura, whose dad was a big shot at the Gila River camp during World War II. Alan Asakura, who I did not know personally, played third base on the Santa Barbara High School varsity baseball team. My other close Nikkei friend was Norman Nakaji, who graduated from Santa Barbara High School in 1956, like me. Norm's dad was a dentist. That turns out to be important because later on he would be my dentist. I didn't have him as a dentist then . . . my mouth was going bad, really bad. I came from a lower-middle-class family, and most of the dentistry that I had was really bad. The best dentist I ever had probably in the range of people I had through going to clinics and the like was Dr. Campbell's. Dr. Campbell's was an outfit known for its affordable dentistry. But it was almost like the scenario where the patient's legs are up in the air and the dentist is yanking the teeth out of his head. But I did go to these clinics where there was charity done by the dentists; they would go to the local junior highs and do that. But here I finally got to go to Dr. Nakaji when I was a senior in college.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.