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TI: In addition to regular school, let's talk about Japanese language school. Did you, tell me about that. Where did you go? How was that structured?

MT: When I was in the first grade, just got into first grade in Terminal Island, I registered to go to the Japanese school, Sogi Gakuen in Terminal Island. It was a Buddhist church and it, they had Japanese classes there. And the teacher told my mother at that time, says, "Oh no, he should not go to Japanese school 'cause he's already having difficulty with English and this will make it worse." So I was kept out, and when we moved to San Pedro, then I went into the Japanese school and so the kids from San Pedro that, that were basically not Terminal Islanders, we went together to Saturday and went to Japanese school. Whereas the Terminal Island people went every day for an hour or so or whatever it was that they go. So we were Saturday school people and they, so we were in with much older kids and things like that, the same class 'cause they were behind, even further behind than I was. So that's how we went to school there, but my mother, being, with her background, she determined that we were not learning properly, and particularly being in Terminal Island, the influence of the language that influenced, the Terminal Island dialect, it was not helping the situation any. So she found this other school called Kanputo, this town of Compton, which was actually a rural town then, a white town with, and they had a Japanese school there in midst of some poultry farms. And this was, the principal was Endo. Endo Sensei, he was the principal there and he was from Tokyo. And the day we arrived there, he said that, "From now on you cannot speak your family's dialect. You must speak standard Japanese, Hyoujungo, because in America people come from all over Japan and as such, if you spoke your dialect they may not be able to understand what you're talking about. So from now on you have to speak the standard Japanese," which was already in the textbooks, but conversationally we were not using it." So he made us change and it was, it was the greatest thing for me because I'm able to go anywhere in Japan and they would understand me, whereas if I spoke Wakayama-ben people would not understand me in most parts of Japan. So that's the one thing that happened. This was a school that was considered the best Japanese school in Los Angeles area. In fact, after the war I found out that this was a school that even Northern California people would use as example. One fellow would say, "Oh, you went to Compton?" He said, "I went to such and such and our principal said we're as good as Compton." This was before the war. So we were the measure that everybody measured against, so I would now say that we're probably the best, we were the best Japanese school in America, whether it's true or not. [Laughs]

TI: So tell me a little bit about how it was structured, in terms of how large were the classes, who were the teachers?

MT: We had, we had two stucco buildings that had multiple classrooms. I was trying to figure out how many classrooms we had, must've been about three in each building, two or three. In each building you had, each classroom you had a class, the same, we were taught same grades. I presume that the highest grades were multiple grades 'cause as people dropped out, because they had classes beyond elementary school. And there was another building, if I recall, that was a frame building next to it, one of the older buildings, and in it the first students went, I went in that building originally, classroom originally. And it was, it was a nice facility, very nice. It opened, it was, they were perpendicular, the buildings were perpendicular to each other except it was not attached on any part, so in the quad in front of it they had, it was lawn, and so we used to eat lunch there and as kids we played football and things like that on the place. They had a walkway all over, a sidewalk all around that. And way off to the side, to the east of that, they had some old trolley cars sitting on blocks there and then we used that for special occasion to, or to use sometimes as a classroom. We wanted isolation, they want to do that and they would do that. And also to, we would go there to play sometimes. Some guys to torment some kids, some of the guys did. I didn't do that, but I, some kids got tormented there. And then off to the south of the, of the building, the building where one was facing, one was facing the east side, the other's facing south, then beyond that was a playground and where they also had a dais, a little riser that the principal always stood. Now, what, what was unusual about this thing was that every morning when we came to school, of course we had to go by car. My father, because he had a business and he had a lot of flexibility, he would take us to school, and Mr. Kamiya, who lived several blocks away, had a, has a wholesale house on the San Pedro docks, a fish wholesaler, so he couldn't go in the morning. But he would then, so my father would take his three children and us three to school, then Mr. Kamiya would pick us up in the evening. When we got to school we got out of the car in the parking lot and we walked, we had to walk past the principal's home, which was attached to one of the buildings. We walked past it, we'd turn and face the door, and we'd bow and would say in Japanese, "Kochou Sensei ohayhou gozaimasu," or "Mr. Principal, good morning," to the door. And then we'd walk to our classroom, sit in the classroom until the bell rang. The bell rang, we would file out to the playground by class, in rows, and then he would sit on, stand on the dais and then he would read to us whatever's happening today, if something, and whatever he wanted to do, and also at the end we would do exercise, Japanese exercise. Then at the end we would file, single file back to our classroom and we'd sit there, then the teacher came and then we would start the session. So very, very Japanese.

And that was where, in 1940 when we were, when we were, (autumn), probably autumn '40, when he said he received this letter from, from the Prime Minister Tojo saying that, "You Niseis are Americans and you should be loyal to your country." And we were, all were kind of shocked about that, that he would say something like that. It was only after I... then I, during the war, in camp, I thought I misheard it. Came out of camp and I talked to my friend, like Jiro Takahashi and Bob Oda, and they said they heard the same thing, so it was true.

TI: So this, this letter, was this a letter that went out all the Japanese schools?

MT: I'm not sure. I'm not sure. He said he received this letter, and he said this. I would suspect if it got to ours it must've gone to all the Japanese schools. I would suspect, unless for some reason he had some special relationship. I don't know. And so I couldn't fathom this thing. I said, why would he say something? And it's only when I got older and I realized that Prime Minister Tojo actually was a general, he was a military man, and they go by the bushido code, and bushido code said you must be, primary thing that you're supposed to be is loyal to your lord. Lord means country, because once the Meiji era started it no longer became a lord, it became the country. So for us, we have to be loyal to our own country.

TI: So in some ways it could be viewed almost as a premonition that war was coming and he wanted the Niseis to know where their loyalties needed to be.

MT: Yeah. I would suspect that. I would suspect that. And that all fits in, and I've known people have, who have quoted that. I've read people, the MIS people, as interpreters trying to get prisoners to give up and when they were challenged, when he was challenged about why he as, as a Japanese American were fighting for the Americans he quoted the bushido code and they understood.

TI: Interesting. Good.

MT: And so that was, it's all part of that. In Hawaii, as I understand it, actually the foreign minister of Japan spoke and said that to the Hawaiians in Hawaii before the war.

TI: Interesting.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.