<Begin Segment 9>

MN: Let's go back before the war just a little bit, and I want to ask you about this time that your family, when you were about seven you moved into this new home and you found this toy popgun. What did your dad make you do with that?

RW: Well, first of all, it was not a new home. It was an old home. [Laughs] And it took a lot of fixing up, but my dad took me with him over there and we were looking at the house. It was empty, and I went over by the window and there was this little popgun that you stick the cork in the end, it's tied to a string and you shoot and the cork pops out. So I said, "Oh, Papa, look what I found. Can I keep it?" "No, no. That's not yours. That belongs to the people that lived here. Give it back to the boy." "Why can't I keep it? They don't want it." "No." He insisted that I return it, so as a kid it was kind of disappointing, but then it taught me, if it's not yours you don't keep it. You don't take something that's not yours.

So I learned a value there from him, and then I also learned, one day we were coming back from the movies and, Bat and I were coming back from the movie and my mother was out there on the sidewalk waiting for us, and she said that, "Junsa kita yo." "What for? Why? Why did the police come?" "They said you, you two stole some money from the service station," which is right around the corner. "We didn't do anything. We didn't do that." We'd never done anything like that. So then she said, "Well, come on. Got to go to the police station." So she took us to the police station and we went in there and there was a sergeant, the policeman was up kind of like a judge up above a big, high counter. And so my mom went up to him and she said, "My son, they steal something." So the sergeant says, "Oh, Mrs. Wada, no, it wasn't them. We caught the guy that did it. They're too small. They couldn't have reached that cash register, anyway. So thank you."

So then, again, I compare that to what happened in La Mirada, where we were living there when my kids were growing up, and the sheriffs came down half the block on this little street we lived on, they went over there, I guess, to talk to or arrest the kids there, and the father got in a fight with the sheriffs. And so I always think of that as compared to my mom dragging us to the police station and turning us in, whereas today people -- and I say today because it's been a while, but it's still today -- the parents fight the authority instead of making the kids understand that you don't do anything bad. And like my mother used to always use that, and I think that's gave me an inferiority complex with me that, "Oh, you're Japanese. Japanese don't do bad things. Redlands is a small town. They know who you are, so don't do bad things. Japanese don't do it." And she was always saying something like that, so I think that put that complex in me, that I'm Japanese. So we, even today sometimes I feel, like somebody's looking at me, I feel like saying, "What the hell you looking at?" you know? Because I feel like they're looking at me because I'm Japanese. But still, I think it had its drawbacks, but I think it had its values too, taught me what we're all about. And I think it goes, even like in camp, I think about camp, I never hear anyone talk about this, but I've always thought about in camp, how come we didn't have locks on our doors? Barracks weren't locked, nobody had locks on their doors. If they did then I don't know about it, but nobody locked their barrack and I guess they didn't see any reason to. Japanese don't do that. You know what I mean? So I feel like that's what my mother taught me, that... sure, we used to go around the camp and steal watermelons out of a patch and that type of thing, but it was not or never heard of anybody breaking into somebody's barrack while they weren't there.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.