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MN: Now, I'm gonna, I want to kind of ask you, how did your morning start at grammar school? Can you take us through how you, you went to school?

JD: The schedule of the school? Well, we gathered in the center of the village where we all lived, Sunabashiri, about a dozen people gathered all at one time, and we had a lunch box, pack on the back. Oh, sometimes we didn't have bag; we just had a furoshiki, a book, and a lunchbox together, wrapped it, wrapped it in a furoshiki and that was our baggage, and we took, carried that, marched to school. Sometimes we'd sing and sometimes we do not. We had to cross a river, one river we had to cross, quite a, quite a wide river, but, of course when it rained the river will rise so we had to be very careful, and it was a concern of my grandmother one time that the river rose, so she came with me to make sure that I won't fall into the river. I did fall in, but what happened is the river rise and we have a plank, just maybe two feet wide plank we have to cross, and the water is right below the plank, it's rushing right below, so you try to concentrate your eye on the plank, but the water running there you get dizzy, you get pulled into it. So I fell in one time, my grandmother jumped in with me and she saved me, so there was one situation like that, and I was grateful to my grandmother for saving me. But, and then sometimes the plank would get, the river would rise high enough, and the plank is connected by wire so that they wouldn't wash away, it'd just drift to one side and get, and when the water goes out it'd get pulled back and put back into place, so sometimes they couldn't cross the, the bridge at that point, had to go much more further upstream, cross the solid bridge to get back home. But I don't remember, we didn't have that too frequently, just once in a while.

So we got to class schoolyard and we assembled at the schoolyard, wouldn't go to classroom. First we go, get all assembled by class group, and then there'd be a leader of the group who'd call attention to everybody, and then bow to the principal, and then we also had inspection of our fingernails, make sure the fingernails clipped and clean, and there's an inspection of your pocket to take out a handkerchief, make sure it was a clean handkerchief in your pocket and no, no ornaments on yourself. And see, I remember the girls used to have, they don't have a pocket, so they used to pin their handkerchief on their clothes. Boys had a pocket, so they had handkerchief in the pocket. And then we'll, after a simple exercise and maybe announcement of the day each one will go to their classroom. We'd take our footgear off, put it in the box, shelf that we had outside and then go to each classroom, some upstairs, some downstairs. It's a two floor building. We open the glass sliding door, move in and an assigned seat, and then wait for the teacher to come in, and the teacher will come in by themselves. When the teacher come in, close the door, the leader of the class would say, "Attention," everybody would stand up and bow. We'd all bow to the teacher and teacher said sit down and everybody'd sit down together. This was the way, and you wear a uniform. And then the lesson would start at that point. And as hour go by we'd go to, assigned to different classes, music class or social class, P.E. class outdoors, and so forth. Again, gym was a very heavily taught or very appreciated exercise. They had gymnasium, running, or P.E. class of a sumo type. We didn't have judo, but we had sumo type exercise, pushing against each other. Once a year in autumn we have the undoukai, or the, where people will get together and participate in various sport activity, and red and white group will be separated so we have competition against each other. And again, once a year in May they'll have a Girl's Day and then there's a Boy's Day in April, but in May we had to have long distance run around the village and we had to run barefooted, too, so your foot had to be pretty strong. And at first I had a very bad time because, coming off the shoe to barefoot my foot was very soft and tender, I was getting a lot of cuts and bleeding at the time until it got very firm, so that was a very difficult time for me at the beginning, to get adjusted to that. Let's see, otherwise clothing, it was a little different than the uniform that students had, but somehow the school accepted it, so I lived through that way. And for, not all the students are rich, so they came in different attire, but basically they were in uniform. There was, we had a lot of Korean students in there, Korean Japanese, I noticed, but I didn't, I don't remember any Chinese students. It was Korean Japanese was basically... and sometimes they'd get taunted, being a Korean Japanese, you'd get pushed aside. But we tried to treat everybody fairly. Yeah.

MN: Now, was this, you know, this, all this very strict regimented life, was that part of Japan's growing militarism?

JD: Yes, I think, it's, it was a pattern that probably hadn't changed since my father went to school there. Lunch was a certain hour and the noon hour would be lunch program. There was no hot tea. I don't know what we drank. I think we just had water for tea. And there's no way, stove in the classrooms were very cold. Tried to close all the windows so that cut the wind out from the classroom. The teacher had the privilege of their, they ate their lunch in their office, so they had tea, but student didn't have tea, I remember, just water. It was cold rice, water, rice for lunch. And everybody was the same, so we endured it. We were just lucky to have a lunch period.

MN: Actually, I do want to ask you about the growing militarism in Japan. Was that very obvious in Hiroshima?

JD: No, I think it was very typical in, whatever school you went, it was all standard, a standard system. And then we faced the Emperor in the morning, of course, before entering the classroom. Everybody'd saikeirei, which is toward the Emperor, and they'd bow.

MN: Were there soldiers on your campus?

JD: Hmm?

MN: Were there soldiers on your campus?

JD: No, no soldiers, just the teacher. And teacher, the male student teacher wore something like a uniform, some of 'em did. But more during, during the war it was more obvious to wear uniform, but during the peace time, when I first attended, the teacher was black, black clothes like university student uniform. The women students were more free, I think. They wore more loose clothing, skirt, you know.

MN: Now, while you were going to school, before the war started, were you able to contact your mother in the United States?

JD: No. There was no communication we had, and we, we had a communication from the Red Cross in summer of, early summer of 1942, and the message was a telegram saying my brother George, at age of eight, passed away in Tule Lake camp. And my father looked at it, he couldn't make sense of it. "What do you mean 'camp'? Supposed to live in Sacramento." And that's when we start to realize that they no longer lived in Sacramento, and there was no other way to find out what the camp meant. I don't know if my father knew more, but they sent to us, didn't relate any more than that, and couldn't write anyways.

MN: So just that one correspondence from the Red Cross?

JD: Yes, that's all.

MN: So, and you weren't able to go through the Red Cross and try to communicate --

JD: They, I don't know how we got, I think it got delivered to us through the mail system somehow. And I thought that very unusual. We could write to the people in the service, Japanese service. My uncle, as I mentioned, was in the Japanese service, so we used to write to them, but we couldn't say a word or send, it was just, said a general, general address and them from there they distributed it, so there'd be no information from either way, where they are, what they are doing in the service. Just saying they are well and nothing more, not much more we could say to each other.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.