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And then I was going, from their house, I was going for New Year's up to my friend's in Koriyama, Fukushima. And that really was the most amazing experience because, again, they were very old-fashioned. Her mother made kimonos, made hantens sewed by hand, and that was the first time I experienced making mochi. Because between being Catholic, going to Maryknoll, we never did that. I never saw it, never experienced it, so they did it in the backyard, pounded the mochi, and her mother made these amazing flavors with nuts on them, the mochi, fresh mochi, which I never had before, of course, amazing cook as well, foods that I hadn't had. And her father was a Yochien principal, so he'd ride -- old man, drive in his bike to school. But I came to their house, and the evening that he was at a bonenkai, end of the year party. So I'm at their house, and they had never seen a Japanese American, and she said, "Oh, my parents never met... they're going to be very surprised, they've never met a Japanese American." So their father comes home, he's drunk, of course, after bonenkai, and I just remember him coming in and looking at me and saying, I don't know if he said, "You are," or "anata wa," but he said, "You are Nipponjin." He said it like five or six times, real, like, "Nipponjin," in a drunken voice, and so I guess because he expected something different.

And I spent a good week or two there, it felt like we spent a long time there, and it would snow, of course. And I did the traditional thing of going to different homes, we'd visit some of her friends, we visited and had the Japanese new year's food. So I became very close to their family, we'd go there for the holidays, go skiing there up in that area, and then actually participated in her brother's wedding when he got married, I was the person that poured the tea, or sake, that was sake. Yeah. And I've stayed close to her. I don't know if I'd say close to her, but whenever I go to Japan, I see her, even though it may have been years between. Like the second time I went to Japan was really twenty years later, and we still got together. And we lived together in my last quarter in Japan when the school closed. So like here, in the spring of 1969, the school closed down and we were given a choice: come back, you won't lose anything, you stay, you won't lose anything, it's your choice. You're still a student. If you choose to stay, you lose out a quarter, which I did, and I had to do an extra quarter at Berkeley. I said I'm staying, I'm not going to go home yet. So I stayed in Japan, lived with my friend in a six-and-a-half tatami mat room, and I was teaching English, so I did learn some responsibility. I was aware of my parents, it was not cheap being in Japan. So I taught English all through. So I taught a young woman that was working at Sony, I would go there and her mother would cook dinner for me and so I had nice, good food. I taught Keio students, I taught a couple businessmen, had conversations with them. So I had different jobs teaching English throughout the time I was there.

And then with my friend, we traveled about three weeks to Kyushu on a hundred dollars. I always like to say this because she didn't have a lot of money, nor did I. So we said if we can do it on a hundred dollars, we will do, we will travel around Kyushu. So got our backpacks, we made musubis, we got on the train that was not the shinkansen. A lot of stops, by the time we got to Beppu, we were sick and tired of musubis so we threw them all away. Said, "We have to eat some real food." So we traveled around Kyushu, all the way around, and that was another great experience. But I also learned that, because I was so damn... not shy, I wouldn't say the word... well, I guess I was shy. But because I was Japanese American, I didn't speak Japanese. So then I'm the fish out of water in Japan, and because I looked Japanese, very Japanese, and I could kind of get away with acting Japanese, but I couldn't speak, so I really hesitated to speak much. And so I would rather be lost for two hours in the train station at Shinjuku than ask for directions. Because every time I opened my mouth to ask, it'd be like, either, "What's the matter with you?" Like either being yelled at, or, "Oh, you're American," then it'd be like a different kind of reaction. But either way, it was so uncomfortable. So I didn't really learn as much Japanese as I probably could have, because I didn't speak as much as I should have. So I listened a lot, so it's kind of like children, babies, how you learn language. You listen a lot, so I listened a lot, and I think I picked up how people use it. So my Japanese sometimes is more like rough. I'd be thinking about my, "Oh, yeah, that's what they would say, 'ikuzo,'" stuff like that. So I would kind of think I'd want to say that, be like, "That's not quite a proper thing to say," but in my mind, I'm thinking these things. So I think I actually learned a lot, just that I didn't speak it.

BN: And then you mentioned the school closed down in the spring? Why did it close down?

KN: They went on strike. So there were strikes all over Japan, and I would see like Nippon Daigaku, they'd jump on the train with all their banners and stuff, and then they'd jump off at Nihonbashi or whatever it was, the stop, and it'd be like... but I was not into politics. I was writing back and forth to my friends that were in Berkeley, and I have to look back at these letters, because they were telling me what was going on. I mean, I left Berkeley at a time that there weren't a lot of political... well, maybe there was, I didn't see it. My world was pretty tame. So they were writing about this stuff, was like, I don't even know if it even registered what was going on. I know they were involved in some of the stuff and had differences. I know when I came back, it was like they had been alienated. There was some alienation among my friends because of what had gone at Berkeley, because one, it was rather conservative, and their friends were very more political. So I know that there was that going on. So they were telling me a lot was happening at Berkeley. So yeah, there were strikes. And then I was supposed to come back in June, so I was all ready to go back about a week before, and I said, "No, I want to stay a little longer." That was actually when we did the trip to Kyushu. I just wasn't quite ready to come back, so I stayed a full year. It was like September to August, and my sister would always say, she always accused me of being very self-centered. Because my family was waiting for me to come back, and eager for me, and I said, "No, not coming back."

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.