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TI: So during all those travels, especially in places like San Diego, maybe Honolulu, there are significant Japanese American populations, especially in Honolulu. I mean, did you ever come across members of the Japanese or Japanese American community?

JS: Oh, sure. [Laughs]

TI: So tell me about that, yeah. I mean, Honolulu, for some people, they don't realize how prominent Japanese Americans are, I think, in Honolulu. San Diego, not as much, but Honolulu there are a lot.

JS: Well, the whole West Coast has a very large population of Japanese Americans. And growing up, as a kid, I had friends who were Japanese American friends. And as an adult, I had friends, I had people who worked for me who were Japanese Americans, so I knew quite a few. Of course, living in Hawaii, particularly being a student in school, the school that I was in, the high school I went to out there, it had a very high percentage of non-local people, it was about 50/50. Because it was a new school and it was situated by Pearl Harbor, and so you had a lot of military dependents, from the Navy, from the Air Force, and from the Army. They had Hickam, Fort Shafter, and Pearl Harbor there. So we had about fifty percent military brats, and about fifty percent locals. And, of course, a lot of the locals were Japanese Americans.

TI: And so this was Radford High School?

JS: Radford High School. Named after Admiral Radford.

TI: Okay. And how did the locals get along with the military? I mean, 50/50 is kind of, so it's a fairly wide balance. To the point where sometimes they would kind of stay with their own, right? They would stay with locals or in the military, or was there a lot of mixing back and forth?

JS: Well, there was among kids, not so much among adults. And that sometimes translated and caused its own problems in the school setting. Because it was 1957, '57 or '58.

TI: Yeah, you graduated in 1960. Or at least that's when you started the University of Washington, so, yeah, probably late '50s.

JS: Yeah, it was late '50s. And half the Marine Corps base there had been in World War II, and a lot of them had been in the Pacific and so they'd get their boys on Friday night and they'd go out and get juiced up, and, "Let's get in a fight." So it wasn't all wonderful, but by the same token, at the kid level it wasn't nearly as bad as it was at the adult level.

TI: Well, and I didn't think about this until now. So this is the '50s, like mid- to late-'50s, World War II wasn't that long ago. World War II was a war against Japan, the local population, there were a lot of Japanese Americans, was there any kind of racial tension between the military and Japanese Americans because of that?

JS: This is just my opinion. In the first place, most people who were in the military couldn't differentiate a person who was a Japanese American from a person who was Samoan, you know.

TI: Or Chinese American or...

JS: Chinese, Korean, Filipino, yeah, gets a little tougher, but that's just a fact. So it was more military folks, and of course, the brass didn't like that at all, but they weren't out on Friday nights. But like I said, as far as the kids went, it was not much problem at all. Everybody was friendly, and in that school, because we had such a high percentage of non-locals, it was fine, we never had a problem. It wasn't a Canne school or it wasn't Punahou or something like that, it was regular people going to high school.

TI: And especially people from Hawaii who would see this, they would understand that, public school, not Punahou or Iolani.

JS: Iolani.

TI: Yeah, Iolani.

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