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BN: I'm just trying to get a sense, were most of your friends and stuff other Japanese Americans or were they largely white?

LH: Well, for family outings, we often went with the Matsunagas and the Hirokawas. So they were friends of ours, so we were connected 'til the very end of their lives with the Hirokawas and the Matsunagas, we still have the connection.

BN: So they're like family friends, or your parents were friends?

LH: Yeah. So when we celebrated New Year's, that would be with those families. Sometimes Christmas, Thanksgiving potlucks. But my school friends were all white. So basically I had this whole childhood growing up with white people, basically.

BN: So the schools you went to were largely...

LH: Very un-diverse.

BN: ...largely white.

LH: Yeah.

BN: Were you involved in the other Japanese community institutions, either church or sports leagues? You mentioned briefly Japanese school briefly later.

LH: No, no, not at all.

BN: Even though your dad was active in the community?

LH: Yeah. My mother was really standoffish. And even... we did things, of course, with my uncle Harold and auntie Edie (Horiuchi), and they lived in Denver, pretty far away in Denver, in the southwestern side of Denver. And he's famous as a skier, he was inducted into the Colorado Skiing Hall of Fame. They have trail named after him and a memorial to him in the mountains. But my mother was always sort of standoffish with them, too. So I had these talks later with my auntie Edie and uncle Harold, we sort of sorted through that. My mother is like this sort of central figure that never really... she kept us apart for some reason, I don't exactly know why. But even my auntie Chiye was, she was a very generous woman and she took care of my other cousin, my two cousins, Horiuchi cousins, Barbara and Jeri. But I think my mother did allow her to take me to places with them. And my poor auntie Chiye was the one that ended up taking care of the (Horiuchi) parents in camp. She took care of the parents in Denver and she remained single because they wouldn't allow her to marry the man that she really loved when she was younger.

BN: Okay, so then the Nakata relatives were mostly in Seattle. Did you visit or make trips to Seattle?

LH: We went back and forth a little bit. Like once we took the train, I remember, when we were little, I was about three. Oh, yeah, that was when I was three and Makoto was five, we went back to Seattle and stayed with our relatives. We stayed with Uncle Mike first, I remember, because I took this walk when I was three years old, my brother had mumps or something like that. And my mother had left me to take care of him and I was three years old or something like that. I was three. And I decided I'd had it with it, so I walked over to my auntie's house, which was a mile away. Somehow I found my auntie's house at three walking. My cousin John is, like, "Here, I'm going to show you." You went from, like, Uncle Mike, he drove me, he went from Uncle Mike's house down to where he was... I remember being at the top of the hill and going, "I'm not sure I'm on the right path here." And then I kept going, and I went down two blocks. And I recognized this picket fence, and my brother and my auntie were sitting at a picnic table talking, and my cousin John was running around the yard in his diapers. So he told me that. He said, "You walked that." Why would I do that? I don't know, it was pretty crazy. So later, I didn't come back as often. Like I remember one time, my mother was really upset because I had an AAU meet and I refused to go. So I stayed home, I was like eleven or twelve or something.

BN: Stayed home by yourself?

LH: I stayed home by myself, yeah, and went to the meet.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.