<Begin Segment 3>

TI: So tell me about school. So were you able to go to school on a regular basis?

RH: Yeah, I was able to.

TI: So tell me about your classmates at Modesto?

RH: I had some good ones and bad ones, but I got a long pretty good with most everybody mostly because athletically I was pretty good. And I played basketball well and played baseball, didn't go into football that much. I guess I was just too weakling, I was skinny as a rail, really was, ninety-eight pound weakling, one of those things.

TI: Now were there very many other Japanese in your class?

RH: Oh, yeah... no, wait a minute, not so much in my class but in the different class that we got together.

TI: So like just in your class, how many other Japanese would there be?

RH: Maybe one, one other Japanese.

TI: And how many people, students would be in one class?

RH: Oh, about thirty, twenty-five, thirty.

TI: And what would the other races be in your class?

RH: There were Hispanics there, mostly white.

TI: Now when you went to school or before you went to school, what language did you speak at home?

RH: Mostly Japanese, yeah, I had a rough time. A lot of the kids did because they spoke Japanese at home and they couldn't mix in with the English and stuff like that. My mother spoke a lot of English to us but my dad wanted us to speak Japanese to him. So needless to say, I didn't speak to him very often.

TI: It sounds like for two reasons, one he was very strict and you're kind of afraid of him and two, it sounds like your Japanese wasn't --

RH: That's right, it wasn't very good. But I speak to Buddhaheads today and a lot of them say, "Yeah, your Japanese is pretty good," but I don't think so.

TI: Well, so going back to when you had to learn more English in school, how did you do that? How did you learn English?

RH: Well, just by talking with everybody else, but I had a rough time.

TI: So it was really just being thrown into that?

RH: Yeah, well, I guess you wouldn't know because you didn't have to go through that but yeah, it's hard to do two languages that are so different that, because I think in Japanese your subject comes first and then your other words come later, description comes later.

TI: Right, so the whole grammar structure is different.

RH: Altogether different.

TI: Now how about your younger siblings, did they have that same problem?

RH: I'm sure they did but by that time it was a little bit easier for them, my sisters especially, because most of the speaking we did at home was English. We had, at the new laundry, we had a lot of people, Niseis working there and they all spoke English 'cause they had to converse with my mom.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.