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BN: Was going to Japan, that was your first...

BS: That was my first trip there.

BN: What was your impression of Japan? It was only a little over a decade after the war.

BS: Yeah, I was only about twenty-three, twenty-two or something like that. It was a mind-blowing experience. It was the first time I've been in a situation where everybody was Japanese. And one of the things I learned was your first language stays with you somehow. Because I was put in a situation where I was working with a lot of Japanese locals, and they all spoke Japanese, and very few of them knew any English. And so I had to communicate with them over a period of about two or three weeks. A lot of that Japanese I knew as a kid came back to me, and by the time I got through my six months there, I was speaking quite fluently. In fact, I would be in casual conversation with some of the locals, couple of them would stop me mid-sentence and say, "Where are you from? I'm trying to place what prefecture you're from, because you have the strangest accent." But when I returned to California, I called my mother long distance, and I just automatically started speaking to her completely in Japanese. And she was floored because she couldn't believe that was me, because she had never heard me speak that well in Japanese. But after about a year, I lost most of that, because you forget the vocabulary.

BN: Where in Japan were you?

BS: We were first in Yokosuka, which is near Tokyo. And then the first three or four months were spent there, and then the last two months, they transferred us to southern Japan, to Sasebo, that's another navy base. Yokosuka and Sasebo are both U.S. Navy bases.

BN: And then you came back for a year and then you graduated, and you continued directly into a master's?

BS: After I finished my master's, I was hired by the Boeing company and spent two years in Seattle, I worked for the Boeing company. And at that time I decided I would go on for PhD because I wanted to go into teaching. And so I applied to several schools and was accepted by MIT and Caltech, and decided to go on to Caltech.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.