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BN: Now, how old were you when you were, when you moved to Terminal Island?

WS: I think, first grade.

BN: So you started school there. And when you went to school, did you go to school with all the other Nisei kids?

WS: No.

BN: Separate? So you were going to a separate school.

WS: Right. Because we didn't live in Fish Harbor, they were two separate schools.

BN: Right. So was your school mostly, then, white?

WS: Mixed, Mexicans and whites.

BN: So there were relatively few Japanese.

WS: What?

BN: There were relatively few Japanese in your school.

WS: Right.

BN: Did you interact, though, with the...

WS: Fish Harbor?

BN: Yeah, the kids from Fish Harbor?

WS: Not much. They would consider us enemies, I guess.

BN: What about things like Japanese language school?

WS: Well, we didn't speak Japanese, so the parents enrolled us in Japanese school, but we didn't speak Japanese, we didn't understand Japanese, and we didn't, part of that group, so we didn't last very long.

BN: So even though your father was Issei, he spoke English?

WS: Yeah. He wanted us to learn Japanese, but we weren't part of that community.

BN: Did you speak English at home?

WS: Yes.

BN: What else can you tell us about your family's life on Terminal Island? School, you mentioned brief Japanese school, but things like sports or Boy Scouts, or anything like that?

WS: No. There's a mixed group on the north side of the island, so we had people from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and all over the place, Germany.

BN: These were your friends, were among...

WS: They were our classmates, we had a different school. That's the problem, we had separate schools.

BN: What was the name of your school?

WS: I don't know.

BN: I'm sure we can look that up. And you stayed there pretty much until the war came?

WS: Yeah. I went all the way through grammar school there, into junior high, seventh grade, and then the war.

BN: Was your junior high school now also on the island?

WS: No.

BN: You had to go...

WS: Take the ferry to San Pedro. Dana Junior High.

BN: I'm sorry, the name of it?

WS: Dana.

BN: Dana.

WS: I just started and the war broke out, and we had to move. I think they kicked us off the island.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.