<Begin Segment 16>

TI: Let's start back at going to school, and talk about how that was for you and your brothers and sisters.

JN: As I said, I was eleven, they put me in, I think it was in the third grade. I couldn't communicate with anybody. People would say something, I didn't understand, I would just smile and shy away. This was going on for a while, but slowly, you started learning sound, or how they were speaking, and you start trying to copy, and that's very hard. I was not improving fast enough. I was older than most of the kids, and so they skipped me to another level and things got even harder. Couldn't write, I couldn't read. Couldn't even talk to anybody. I just wanted to quit, I didn't want to go to school. But we kept going, slowly, slowly. What made me keep going was besides going to school, at the church where a lot of activities going on, that kind of balanced it out, made me happy. Go to church on Sunday, we started our new boys club, new basketball team, new drum and bugle corps, it was fun. It was getting to be fun, and that kind of balanced it out for me to, wanting to speak the language. Because not everybody was Peruvian Japanese, these were local kids, Sansei probably. And listening to them, how to speak the language, slowly, I'm trying to catch up, but never enough.

TI: And how did Japanese Americans treat you? Because you, for many of them, you were very different, right? You didn't speak English, and you spoke Spanish and Japanese, and they probably didn't understand. I mean, did they even know where you came from? Did they understand about Japanese Peruvians?

JN: No.

TI: And so how did they treat you? What did they think about you?

JN: You know, many people didn't even know we were from Peru. And not speaking English, they never made fun of us. But I would go along with them, I may say a few words that they said before, but never exactly. And things I had said before, if I say, "How are you?" at the time, if I said, "How are you?" I would say, "How you?" "How you?" If I can communicate it was okay, but most of the time it was hard. You can't communicate by speaking that way, because you don't know how to pronounce the word right, especially "R" or "L." Even now, I still have problems with my "Rs."

TI: But were you ever in a situation with maybe a Japanese American where, because of the situation, you spoke Spanish? And then they would say, "Oh my gosh, Jimmy, how do you know Spanish so well?"

JN: No, Spanish never came out. But later on, if we talked about that I came from Peru, they said, "Oh, did you?" I mean, this is way, way afterward. Well, the story that I like to say was funny, I think I said it before, but after going to grammar school, junior high school, high school, and I went to City College, but I was not improving, my major was commercial art. So I decided to go to a private school. I saved all the money working at the, doing paper route, import/export. And so I got into Academy of Art, and one day it was a friend that would ask me, "Hey, Jimmy, you're Japanese?" "Yeah." "How come you're speaking English with a Spanish accent?" And I said, "Oh my goodness, I still have the accent." So I tried to correct as I was growing up.

TI: But when they asked that, what did you say? He says, "Well, why do you speak with a Spanish accent?"

JN: Yeah, well, I did tell them I'm from South America, Peru.

TI: And what did he say?

JN: Oh, well, they're all, they were all pretty much in age, after college, you're not seventeen no more. There were times like that. So I remember, "Hey, Jimmy, how come you don't have a girlfriend?" I'd say, well, you didn't make any excuses, but they thought I was too picky to find all the prettiest girl, so they brand me picky. But the real reason was my English is not far enough, especially if I spoke to some girls. Guys, it's okay, because they swear, you could cover it up. But when I approached some girls, I would shy away all the time, especially one to one. As a group it was okay, but they branded me as picky.

TI: But it was really because you were shy or embarrassed of your English.

JN: Oh, yes. But people didn't make fun of me, they never. So Konko church was the place where, it was a community for everybody to get together, and people from outside would come. Well, in fact, there was a basketball court that we played. Every day we played basketball. And somebody'd show up, we became friends, it was part of that basketball team. Oh, that was a very popular area. Mr. Fukuda did a lot for us. He said he was going to sponsor us, find a job for us. Well, what he did was he found somebody that wanted to, somebody that he asked to sponsor us, and it was Mr. and Mrs. Bill Nakahara. They're not living anymore, but they were the ones who sponsored us. Otherwise, we wouldn't know where we ended up, Japan or Peru, I guess, but nobody wanted to go to Japan or Peru. Well, now we want to go to Japan, I go to Japan every year now.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.