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TI: I want to go back a little bit, because you mentioned earlier about spending some time in Japan?

MY: Yes.

TI: So can you describe that, when you went to Japan and why?

MY: The three brothers, of the three brothers, I was the youngest and Toshi was, my sister was not born, so that left my parents pretty free. Now, for a family to have children, it's no big deal, but if both parents are working, the young children, a three-year-old like me is around, it makes it difficult. Well, ostensibly, the three children were sent to Japan for a Japanese education. Well, you don't send a three-year-old for Japanese education in retrospect, so when you think through as an adult, it was really a nice built-in babysitter for our parents, for me to be sent to the maternal grandparents' village, where I spent five years, until age seven.

TI: And that worked for you, but your oldest brother, Robert, was about eight years old, seven or eight?

MY: He was six years older than I am.

TI: Yeah, so you were two and he was then about eight.

MY: Yeah, six, seven.

TI: And then for five years, so he was there kind of in very formative years.

MY: He was in the very formative years. Well, psychologically I was in the more formative years. His formative years were past. He was more formative years in terms of social mores, social culture, where he learned to become a Japanese. And this was in the late 1920s and 1930s, when Japan was in the beginning, if not middle, of the militaristic era. And so he really became indoctrinated to the Japanese culture to the point that when we were in United States for a number of years he faced discrimination at Commerce High School and in other places where there was a mix of Caucasian and Japanese. He was very active in the Japanese community and he faced discrimination in the non-Japanese community, so when the war was imminent in late 1940s, his decision was, "I'd rather be a first class Japanese rather than a discriminated, second class American," so with that he went back to Japan in one of the last ships to Japan. So this kind of illustrates his background.

TI: And I like the way you talk about the age, so he was at a time when a boy would be influenced by that, and so that really, being in Japan those five years, determined that.

MY: Yes.

TI: Okay. And how about you, those five years in Japan, how did that shape your views about Japan?

MY: Just like a normal child who was not influenced by any political issues except by social issues. I just grew up as a kid in a farming village in Japan.

TI: And then your other older brother, Albert, he was, like, in between.

MY: He was in between.

TI: And how did that time influence him in terms of his views of Japan?

MY: He could fit into both cultures very easily. He could manipulate himself into almost any situation. He studied music as a side issue at Polytechnic High School, and then because of that he was able to join the Japanese, the Nisei band which was part of the San Francisco Exposition that always used the band for the parades. And he was an expert trombone player. So that's one of the things I could show you how he was able to manipulate in both cultures.

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