<Begin Segment 8>

SY: And before that happened, before Pearl Harbor, did you feel like you were being discriminated against at this workplace?

YM: No, no.

SY: Not at all?

YM: Nothing like that at all.

SY: Although you felt that at the school, right, because they, they wouldn't let you take certain classes? At the trade tech school.

YM: Well, yeah, that was sort of behind, in our mind, that they wouldn't accept everybody, but there were quite a few that did go there and they had all kinds of, you know, hairdressing, trade, and sewing, and others, but most of them wanted to go to the dressmaking design school. But I didn't know until we went there that they were gonna allow us only to take certain classes. We just thought we'd go through the whole, whole curriculum.

SY: So do you remember the classes that they wouldn't let you take?

YM: Well, it was, of course the top is design, so in between there's draping and there's whatever else. And I was, there's even kind of a position called copier -- I didn't even know it existed -- which is you go to all these department stores and wherever else, look for designs and make copies or adapt whatever it is you get your ideas, and I didn't even know that kind of a position even existed. But anyway, they said this was it, so that's why we left.

SY: So they wouldn't allow you to take the design classes, or were --

YM: No.

SY: No design.

YM: They just told us that that was it. I had four classes, I think, but, so we didn't even know what was happening.

SY: I see.

YM: I just know that we didn't, I don't know, we didn't know, we're not sophisticated enough to know everything when we go into it. It's not like today. Maybe your parents know about it or whatever; we're just innocent little, you know. We just go... [laughs]

SY: Yeah, you didn't have anybody to show you the way.

YM: Right. But we do know that some people, there were quite a few Niseis that applied there, and after we left there we realized that somebody went there, whoever else went there, so it was a popular school if you didn't go to college.

SY: I see.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.