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TI: Now, so before the war you spent quite a bit of time in Japan. Do you, do you have very many memories of Japan?

RM: Yes.

TI: So tell me some.

RM: Some interesting ones, like, 'course, Hawaii's always been warm and, and in a Japanese school there's a period for exercise and I'm trying to remember the term for that. [Laughs] It doesn't come to mind, unfortunately. You know, undou, but it wasn't that. It was, they had a more formal term for that, but every morning you had to get out in the, in the open areas and exercise. And I'd be shakin' because, I mean, jeez, that was like forty degrees weather, fifty maybe, but nothin' much better than that. If we're lucky it might go up to seventy, but here it's eighty degrees all the time, so I was shaking. And the instructor, very rigid, almost military for training, would say, "Mori no konnyaku." [Laughs] All the other kids would laugh. They thought it was funny, but, but that's very heavy in my mind. Never went away. [Laughs] If I think of any other thing I will try to remember that, but I did learn, by the time I got home to Hawaii, way ahead on math, that kind of thing. And again, the exposure to language was probably very strong, yeah, because we didn't, we hadn't been learning kanji at that time, but hiragana, katakana we were already practicing. Although you can't, I can't write anything now, but...

TI: Well, but how about your English abilities? When you came back to Hawaii how good was your English?

RM: When I got back to Hawaii on the last, before the war, in other words, about like 1939-ish, I would say -- in fact, 1940 is when we came back -- the last time we came back I, the only English words I could remember were "yes" and "no," and the rest was all Japanese, but I got along on just "yes" and "no." This wasn't Punahou, It was a preschool, I think. And of course my sister, I never talked to my sister about it either, because she was running into the same problem, and of course I never realized that she was having problems 'cause at that age you only think about me, you know, what's happening to me. [Laughs] Yup.

TI: When you got back to Hawaii in 1940 or so, who were some of your friends that you would hang out with?

RM: I really didn't have any local friends at that particular time. The first friend that I remember was a Hawaiian, little Hawaiian kid named Percy, and Percy Torres and I were best of friends. That's the name that comes up. Then after that it's, course, it's all school friends that I remember.

TI: Now, in your neighborhood, Wilder Street, where there very many other Japanese in that neighborhood?

RM: There was one real bad kid... now, he chased, he'd come down the street and he'd yell at me, goin', "Nya nya nya, your father's one spy," so I'd have to chase him back up, and I wasn't a big kid. It's kind of amazing if you look at me now because I'm pretty tall now, but at the time, up 'til sixth grade, at Punahou, just an example, I was the shortest in class and by tenth grade I was second to the tallest. I sprouted in between. But you're talkin' about those days when I was still the shortest one in class, and I could, I could pick up and run after this big Portuguese kid and chase him down, put him arm locks like Tarzan used to do, because we used to use, we used to read Tarzan books all the time. That was how we kept ourselves entertained, playing Tarzan up in the woods.

TI: And this was because people teased you. This was after the war had started and they're teasing you about what happened to your father or your, your parents.

RM: Yes. There's a lot of speculation about that. In fact, it's written up in some of the, some of the cheap narratives of Pearl Harbor, but --

TI: Before you go there, let's, I want to do some more prewar stuff, and then we'll kind of segue into that.

RM: Okay. [Laughs]

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.