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

AH: Now, just to backtrack a little bit, my first semester of college I went to Santa Barbara Junior College. My grades weren't as good as they should have been in high school. I was a really good and serious student up through the ninth grade, and after that, I got into a lot of other things. Not anything criminal, but I cut a lot of classes. I was cruising the drag and everything, playing a lot of sports, basketball and baseball, and things like that. But, you know, I took nothing but the college type of classes. I never had a study hall, I always went to summer school, I always took solid classes, I took all the sciences, all the maths. But, at that particular point in your life, you just can't get by without studying very much. So I didn't have the grades to get into the University of California. But I went to junior college and I buckled down, and I virtually got all A's and transferred after the first semester to UC Berkeley. And I went up to Berkeley, and I ended up living in a cooperative. The cooperative was a big type of living situation up there, and it was very affordable. You only had to pay about five dollars a week. The rest of your board and room was earned through your work in this cooperative. You each had a job, and as a freshman, when I went up there, what I basically did was to bus tables and wash dishes and do other things in the cafeteria. But it was an interesting cooperative. It was called Cloyne Court. It's still there, on Ridge Road in Berkeley. And I was just overwhelmed by being at Berkeley. I wasn't at Berkeley because I knew that they had a lot of Nobel Prize winners or anything; I was at Berkeley because they were in the Rose Bowl for a couple of years when I was a kid, and I was a fanatical sports fan. And I got to Cloyne Court, not because I knew anything about who lived at Cloyne Court, which was almost all Japanese Americans and Jewish Americans who were in the engineering school, because Cloyne Court was right next to the engineering building. I was in Cloyne Court really because I found out who had the best teams in intramural sports, and it turned out that Cloyne Court had won the UC Berkeley all-sports championship the year before. So I chose Cloyne Court for that particular reason.

Now, once I got there, it's like anything else. You get your head screwed on. Then I started to realize that the whole network of cooperatives was heavily dominated by Japanese Americans. And Berkeley itself was a co-op sort of community. And remember the camps during World War II had a big presence of the co-ops. And so a co-op for Japanese Americans was nothing new. That was rooted in their past. So I only stayed there for a half a year, but it was an extremely important half a year. Because the Japanese Americans that I had known in Santa Barbara, of those, two of them were living in cooperatives, one of them in my own cooperative. Now, this guy Mas Riusaki, who was studying botany up at Berkeley, was in another cooperative and I talked to him a few times. But in my cooperative there was a guy named David Yamada. And David Yamada was one year ahead of me in Santa Barbara High School, but he was the student body president. Now, if you think about that, this was in 1955 that he was the student body president. And see, 1954-1955, that is just about a decade removed from camp. So already, Japanese Americans were starting their movement toward different kinds of activities. David Yamada, I've never seen him since Berkeley, since 1957, but he has apparently written a history of Japanese Americans in Monterey that was sponsored by the Monterey Bay chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, and I own a copy of the book. So he was a bright guy, and I know he studied political science up at Berkeley. But he ended up doing this historical study, and I don't know anything else of what's happened to him. But I did get a chance to see him at Cloyne Court.

So I was up there at U.C. Berkeley for that half a year, but I never talked, either before I got through Berkeley or after I transferred from Berkeley to UC Santa Barbara in my sophomore year, to any Japanese American about camp. I didn't know anything about it until I was a senior in college. Now, think of this, I took a sociology course at UCSB. Two of the sociologists there had been affiliated during World War II with the UC Berkeley-sponsored Evacuation and Resettlement Study. One was Tamotsu Shibutani, or as he was known there, Tom Shibutani, and the other person was Bob Billigmeier. And both of them were in the UCSB Department of Sociology, but I didn't know anything about that, and I never took a course from either of them. But I took this sociology course, which was called "Minority Group Relations." They didn't have anything like Asian American studies courses then. This was as close as you got to it: "Minority Group Relations."

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