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VY: Okay, so that means you probably spoke Japanese pretty well when you were a kid?

BT: Well, the custom was, also, from grammar school we would go to Japanese language school. So school ended about three p.m., so then after that we'd go to the Japanese language school and spend a couple of hours there and trying to learn Japanese and how to write the Japanese alphabet, phonetic alphabet. So the characters, kanji, so to speak. So we were doing that kind of thin, but it didn't, we were more, not paying too much attention. So as far as I was concerned, it really didn't help us. When we had to talk to our parents, we had to use Japanese, because they didn't understand English, so we had to do that, but we made a go of it, I guess, we communicated. But it wasn't a fluent Japanese that you would speak in a business forum or whatever, it was just enough to talk to their parents and so on, that's about it.

VY: Okay, so your parents spoke primarily Japanese?

BT: Yes.

VY: Did they speak more English later on?

BT: My father, naturally, he was, as a landscape gardener, he had to speak some language, and in fact, he worked as a gardener during the day, and then nighttime he would go wash dishes and so on and do that kind of work. Because he was the only one that was earning any kind of an income, because my two older brothers were in Japan during that period before World War II. So he was the only one. My mother had high blood pressure, so she didn't work, so he was taking care of us anyway, but she was busy doing that. So my father, I remember, would go to work at night after doing his daytime gardening work, and then we would wait for him to come back, because many times he would bring home cakes or desserts that he had at the, when he washed dishes and so on, and they gave him things to bring home. So we used to wait for my father to come home and have the goodies that he would bring home. Not every time, but then when he did bring it home... and my father was, in a way, a joyful kind of a guy. I remember him, as I said, sometimes I guess I acted, did backtalk or something, because I did something bad to where I was tied up in the basement. But not too many times, but most of the time was a happy kind of an atmosphere, as I remember.

VY: Did he say anything to you when he would put you in the basement like that, or did he just kind of do it?

BT: He just did it. I don't remember what I did to cause that to happen, but I do remember being put in the basement. And as I said, my mother would feel sorry for us, would come in. And my younger brother and I were the ones, and, as I said, my two older brothers were in Japan, so they weren't involved in that. I don't know what I did, but I must have been bad. [Laughs]

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