<Begin Segment 31>

TI: Okay, so Min, at the end of the last segment you had just talked about how disillusioned you were. This, this memo and how, how angry you were about these things, and how in some ways, even after the, after you left Amache, it impacted you in terms of your studying habits at UCLA and things like that, where you just didn't study as much as you normally would. And seemed like it was a tough time for you, right after the war.

MT: Well, coming, there were several things that happened, good and bad. You have tremendous persecution complex at that point because you know that everybody hates you. You just know that everybody hates you. Americans hate you. You're the bad guy. We were the scapegoats, and so... people don't feel that way about Italians, they didn't feel that way about the Germans. We were the bad guys. The Nazis, yes, but not the Germans. But Japs, yeah. We were Japs. So those were difficult times. I had a chip on my shoulder. Any time somebody looked at me kind strange I would think they don't like me, not that I looked different so they're lookin' at me. Had a real chip on my shoulder. When I first went to school, that was about the beginning of October 1945, I left at the end of September, so I missed about a month of school. I went in there and I was thinking, oh boy, I wonder what's gonna happen to me? Are they gonna, some of these guys gonna jump me and beat me up? I didn't know what's gonna happen. You just have the apprehension. But you go to school, you have to go to school, so you go to school. And I went, first class I was assigned to was a homeroom and I went to the, the room and the teacher was in session. He called me. He says, "Want you to meet a new student. This is Minoru Tonai." And suddenly this burly guy comes running up to me and grabs me, hugged me, said, "Oh, Minoru, I'm glad you're back," hugging me. I don't know who this guy is. I said, "Who are you?" He said, "I'm Bill Padveen." Oh. He had grown up so much. I knew him in junior high school. I went junior high school before I went to camp in Los Angeles, in Mount Vernon Junior High School, and I happened to be able to play, make baskets, so I was on the school, the class basketball team and we came in second place in our, in our grade. And what they used to tell me was, "Hey, look --" I was just medium height for that time, so they would say, "Stay under the basket. We'll get the ball to you." So I'd get the ball and make the basket. And so I was the star of the team 'cause I was making all the baskets. Well, the other guys were good, but they were bigger and they could get rebounds. I could, I wasn't as good as they were. I was okay, but I wasn't that good. So, but, so people would, would not give me a hard time. They were, they were really nice to me. And then this guy Bill Padveen was in our class and one day I was out there and some guys, and he was the kinda guy that was kinda loudmouth. And people were pickin' on, and one day there were these bigger guys were pickin' on him. He was a little, tiny guy and he was pickin' on him, so I stopped him. I said, "Leave Bill alone. He's okay. Just leave him alone. Don't, don't pick on him." And I saved him. I didn't think much of it. Well, he remembered that, so when I came out of camp now he was, played halfback on the football team, was second string at that point. No, he was a -- yeah, then next year he became first string, but he was at second string at the time, so he became big, burly guy. He wasn't tall, but he was burly, and so I didn't recognize. He had grown up. And, but he remembered, and so he, and it was a relief to me that he was so friendly to me and that he didn't harbor any ill feelings toward me. And, and then I was on the playground and this other guy comes up to me and says, "Oh, I'm glad you're out of the camps." He said, "You don't remember me because I joined your class after you had left," and he was, he was McGuire. And I said, "Oh." Nice guy. He was athlete. He was a good guy, very nice guy. He was a leader in the, in the class and stuff, and so that relieved me. Then I ran into another guy, another guy in my homeroom came up to me and he said, "My name is, is Vidmar and I'm so glad that you're out of the camp. It was such a wrong thing to do." Wow. He has a slight lisp, but he said that. He was an all-city free ex man, athlete, and he's saying that, so it was a big relief of that. There were some people that made some snide remarks. There's no question about it, but, or wouldn't have anything to do with me, but when you had these guys saying those kind of things to me, I was, I was really relieved on that. There were only six of us in our class and we used to eat together, in my class. Six Japanese males, we used to sit together. Maybe it was a little bit more. I'm sorry, there was more, because... little bit more. There were six in our graduating class, boys, boys and girls, but I think there might've been as much as eight, eight Japanese in my high school.

TI: And which high school was this?

MT: Dorsey High School. Susan B. Dorsey High School in the southwestern part of town. And I lived, and if you lived west of Arlington, again, you went to Dorsey. And a lot of the people that lived around there all wanted to go to the same school where most of the Japanese were, so they went to Poly High School and they would change addresses and stuff and go there. Other people were supposed to go to Manual. A lot more people were supposed to go to Manual. The reason why there weren't too many Japanese, Japanese in Dorsey was because of restricted covenants again. They still had restricted covenants after the war. It was slowly breaking down, Japanese were breaking down that, and in reality what happened, Japanese broke it down and then started moving west and the blacks followed behind them. Now it's, now the Hispanics are following behind the blacks. But anyway, that was, those were some relief points. In fact, some of these, these McGuire and Vidmar used to tell me they joined these boys' club, service clubs there, and I thought, oh, I'm, still have this persecution complex, said I don't want to be rejected, so I didn't join. And they kept after me, but I still wouldn't join. Then one day I got called into the office and I said, "What did I do again?" Boys' vice principal and I said, oh, he's the guy that gives discipline. He said, "Congratulations." I said, "What did I do?" Well, they didn't have enough people in this honor society, honor... it's a, not just an honor society. You had to have certain kind of grades, but you couldn't join this, this organization called Knights -- they had Knights and Ladies -- and they asked me to, he said, "They voted you in." They didn't have enough people, so they wanted more people, so they voted me in. I was shocked 'cause these were the guys who were trying to get me in. These were the leaders I thought, some of the people were the people I thought would reject me so I didn't join the organizations. And this was the honorary, the honor society, the, the top organization in the school, and that's when I realized, wow, I shouldn't have been so persecution, have such a persecution complex.

TI: Do you, do you think people were going out of their way to try to get you in to some of these things, or do you think that was just a natural process that you, you should've been in these things and, and it was just natural to go in there, or yeah, or some of these friends were --

MT: I think it was just more of a natural development. They liked me. I did well in school and you know. And I... and they thought I'd be an asset to the thing. I don't think they were thinking that, that this was a way of repaying us or anything like that. I don't think the people thought like that, yeah. I don't think so.

TI: Okay.

MT: Yeah, I could've joined the Lettermen Society 'cause I lettered in B football, but I didn't join that either, so it's, I think kids were just nice to me. They were just nice to me.

TI: So I guess what you found was that it wasn't as bad as you, you were thinking it would be?

MT: Far from it. At least among friends. You'd still get side remarks from other people, you'd get things happen to you and discouragement of doing things because they said, well, they won't have anything to do with you. Socially you didn't go out with them, 'cause they had their own sets of friends, and I felt awkward with white girls and stuff like that, and that's what, that's what most of these organizations had. None of the Japanese girls were ever involved with any of these organizations, none of them, the three in my class. So socially I wanted to be with the Japanese. I felt more comfortable in that situation, so that's what I, that's what I stayed with. And we had other social organizations that we created after the war. One was a church, a group that, called Saturday Nighters, where different high school Nisei boys around our age all gathered together at a church basement where this man wanted his daughter who was at a school that did church that didn't have any Japanese and wanted her, to associate with Japanese, so got permission from the church to use their basement rec room to have our meetings once a month. And so through the process, since she was from our camp, she got hold of, we got hold of people from our camp to come there and then we met some girls who had a high school, who were schoolgirls at a high school, one high school far away. We got them to come and they got, she got her high school friends to come. Her high school friends got other high school friends. And so we had this thing called Saturday Nighters 'cause we met Saturdays. And to this day we're still friends, and some of the people married. So it was a, it was a kind of a, we had a kind of a shield to keep from, away from the discrimination or any kind of... we knew each other, and then we were teenagers and having Japanese girls there was, was fun. We couldn't dance at that church, but we would go to other places to dance.

TI: So you had these ways of, of coping or, or coming back in.

MT: Yeah.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.