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BN: Then did you have a sense of growing up being Japanese? I mean, how did you, to the extent that you thought about it at all, what was your sense about Japanese in Japan? For instance, I remember, as a kid, being kind of appalled that my mom would be rooting for Japan in the Olympic games and that kind of thing.

AN: Not really. I was aware of it at times when, like with the war movies and when we would play war and I would be the "Jap" kind of thing. At that time, again... my friends were primarily kids in the project, so we were not... most of them were immigrants, so there just wasn't that kind of sense of, we just kind of accepted who we were.

BN: You were all in the same boat.

AN: Yeah, we were all in the same boat, we didn't know any better. So it was just a different, we all had the family issues, etcetera. No, it wasn't until junior high school that I began to get some awareness that I was, quote, "different" than the others. And also class differences in addition to ethnic differences, etcetera, became much clearer. Because before then, there just wasn't that kind of awareness of things.

BN: And then was there ever awareness of not being able to do things because of either race or class?

AN: Again, not until junior... what we understood life was, like elementary school, we had our bicycles, we would bike around all over the place. And we would just do whatever was available, we didn't have any money, so we would just go to kind of hang out and play in the streets, things like that. They were close to this Ballona Creek, so we used to hang out at the creek a lot. But yeah, that was kind of life. We didn't have any resources, we never went on trips. And most of the folks -- this notion of vacations was totally foreign to us. We never had weekend excursions, etcetera, so it was just like... yeah, I remember we went to the San Diego Zoo, and that was like the only thing I have a recollection of ever leaving Los Angeles, our home, is going to relatives' for dinner or some things like that, in Glendale. San Diego was the only time that I remember leaving and doing anything like that. Yeah, so it was kind of a different... we had a very sheltered, low-key existence. And at the time, because there wasn't any social media or a lot of television, so we didn't know that there was a bigger outside world. This is kind of what most people do. And then again, in junior high school, began to realize that there's people that have money that had different kinds of life experiences and the things that they were doing were very different than what we were used to.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.