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PW: Okay, so your family moved to Oakland and you're a young teenager. Can you tell me again, so where did the family move into? Was there a home?

EH: There's always a home for the minister, and then they call that the parsonage. So the first place we moved was to Oakland, in the west part of Oakland. And so right next to the church there was an apartment that we lived in, and we lived there for a couple years. So I started... when we left, I had finished in Cambridge, that was the last place we lived in Massachusetts. I finished the eighth grade there, so we came, in the summertime we came out to Oakland, so I was going to start the ninth grade. So there was a, we called them junior high schools in those days, not middle school. But there was a junior high school called Westlake in Oakland that I went to, so I did the eighth grade there. And then the next year, because that was only one year, and then the ninth grade I went to high school. And the first high school I went to was called McClymonds, which is in West Oakland. And at that time, West Oakland was primarily an African American area. And the academics at the school were not as strong as my parents thought I needed. So they decided that we should move to another part of Oakland. So the church stayed the same, but we got an apartment in East Oakland, and so I switched to Oakland High School as my school. So I went there from the eleventh and twelfth grade at Oakland High School, so we moved to East Oakland for that.

PW: In both of the high schools, who were your friends, and what kind of things did you guys like to do?

EH: Okay, well, once we moved to Oakland, most of my friends were from the Japanese American community, either through the church, but we also had friends that went to the Buddhist church. So that became my social group. And so even at Oakland High School, there were a few Japanese Americans there. But most of my friends were from the church and other social groups, and not so much from the school. I did make a few friends there, but nothing that came out of longtime friendships. They were all just for those periods of time. And then so I graduated from there and then I went on to college.

PW: Before we go on to the college part, I'm curious to hear, what kind of, what did you and your friends do for fun?

EH: Mostly things connected to the church. We had a, the church had a basketball team in the Japanese league, so we played basketball against other churches or other... the Boy Scouts also had teams, and so we played in that Japanese league. And then all the other activities surrounded around the church when we did things. Summertime we'd go to camps and things like that.

PW: Did the churches still do picnics at that time or undokai?

EH: I think we had picnics. And as I said, my dad liked to camp, so we would go camping. He would form a group from the church, and we'd go to some national park or state park and camp for a week and things like that, or the rest of the things were things involving the school. Some dances, I remember. A lot of them were, like the local churches would have a social thing and a dance, so we would go to some of those.

PW: Did you go on dates in high school?

EH: Yeah, a little bit. I had a girlfriend for a while, but mostly it was single. But the group at the church, it was coed, so there was always girls there, too.

PW: I meant to ask you this question way back, but what was the primary language that you spoke at home and what was the primary language you spoke with your friends?

EH: English.

PW: English with your friends, and how about at home?

EH: Home, my parents spoke to each other in Japanese. And they spoke a little bit to me in Japanese, but there was a Japanese language class at the church on Saturdays or Sundays. And I went for a little bit, but at that time, I just wasn't that interested in that. And now I regret that, because I wish I had learned more Japanese. In school, I took, my first language that I took was Latin because my parents encouraged me to do that. So I took Latin, and in junior high, I took Spanish, and in college I took German, so I learned a little bit of each. At the time, I never developed an interest in it, so I just learned what I needed to learn for the next test, and that was it. But looking back now, I regret it. I'm glad to say my granddaughter now, who is in high school, is taking Japanese, and I'm very proud that she's doing that.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.