<Begin Segment 29>

LH: Well when you came, when you came out of camp -- now that you mentioned looking different -- when you came out of camp, you said that in hindsight, you wanted to be as American as possible. Now was that an easy thing to do at Bainbridge, at the elementary school on Bainbridge Island?

FK: Oh, I'll tell ya... I think all the way through my schooling on Bainbridge High School, all the way through grade school through high school... I kind of felt like, that I really wasn't American. That I really had to really try hard to be American, because I don't remember getting anything at school about Japanese being American, or... I mean everything I learned in school was European-centered. I mean we learned about the Crusades, that was Europe. We learned about the Statue of Liberty, that was Europe. We learned about the Pilgrims, that was European. There just wasn't anything, anytime we studied, anytime we studied the Orient it was a foreign country. It was about silk being grown in a foreign country, that kind of stuff. And it was, so anytime we studied anything that might have to do with me, it was, it wasn't U.S. history, it was world history or something else. And at the same time, you knew America was what it was supposed to be, as far as freedom, and, and everybody being equal and being treated equal and so forth. So it was very difficult if anything happened, where if somebody didn't like me or if something happened to me, to be able to say to myself they didn't like me or they didn't treat me the same way as everybody else because I was different. Because you couldn't, I couldn't say to myself that the United States was that way, and people here would be that discriminating.

So it, but if you can't do that, if you can't say to yourself that people were treating you differently because of the way you look, then the only other alternative (you have) is they're treating you differently or treating you badly because you're a bad person. And, and that becomes real difficult. Because if you have to say to yourself they're treating you differently because of the way you look, and it's real frustrating because you feel like they can't do anything about that. So I tended to kinda push that to the background and tried to be as American as I could be. And, and at the same time, kinda doing a lot of wishing that I was American and wondering why in the world anybody would want to make me Japanese and why I had this big disadvantage of being Japanese. I know some kids had a tough time, with having their, with having their friends come over and meet their parents because they felt their parents were so different, so (they) tended not to have kids come over or, or to be embarrassed if their kids were doing something that, or if their parents are doing something that didn't seem very American. And I don't know if I ever really had that feeling, but at the same time, I know a lot of people did. But I know I had that feeling about myself that I wished I was, that I was not Japanese.

LH: So do you think that meant to you that you tried to push aside anything Japanese in your heritage?

FK: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think at home I was okay, if we ate Japanese food and stuff like that. But if we went anywhere else, I tried to be as American as I could be.

LH: In what ways did you show that?

FK: There certainly was no way I was going to tell anybody about the things we did at home, that were Japanese-y.

LH: Did you yourself tell your friends about camp?

FK: No, uh huh, in fact I. No, I didn't. I never talked about camp or became interested about the process we went through 'til after I got through college. And, sometimes I wonder, if the things we are doing now are actually helping our kids. Because you never know, because most of them, most of them don't get interested in this stuff until they get older. In fact that seems to be the case with a lot of the generation now. Although, it's interesting to me, because my son got his double degree in ethnic studies -- and they didn't even have ethnic studies when I went to school -- and economics. But then, I think he took every ethnic study he could, class he could find. I'm going, "Gosh we must have had some effect on him because he's doing that." So I, and I feel he's probably more grounded on who he is as a person, as a person of Japanese ancestry, than I was ever until I got to of college. So I, I feel like we're doing, we must be doing something, otherwise that probably wouldn't have happened.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.