<Begin Segment 8>

TL: Did you and your sister have, were you worried about other things about school or fitting in, being accepted?

HN: Yeah, we were kind of worried because we couldn't speak the Japanese language that well. And after we went, got into school, well, Yanai's a small town. It was. It's a city now, but it was a small town. And I guess we were kind of big compared to the Japanese children there because they were kind of shorter than us. And they kind of looked at us, and said, "Amerikajin," which means American. But they didn't really make fun of us that much. I guess they kind of got used to us. They were kind of curious. They wanted to know about America and this and that.

TL: What were they curious about, like what it was like there or what you ate?

HN: They were curious about, oh, they were curious about everything. And, well, I think it was because we had that piano for a while. That was before the war. And they wanted to come in, play the piano 'cause hardly anyone owned a piano over there in Yanai. And kind of made friends that way. But I guess they were kind of, thought, how America was. And we used to tell them we could go to movies any time and we could, the food that we were able to eat, like milk and ice cream, things like that. Because in Japan the milk was warm. You couldn't get cold milk. And not too many people had refrigerators or anything. And well, they ate rice. And we told them we had to eat bread and meat and things like that. And in Japan they didn't have too much meat. They ate fish. And, gee, I can't think of anything else.

TL: Was the food kind of a little bit of a shock for you 'cause you'd grown up eating --

HN: American food.

TL: -- what your father made for the restaurant.

HN: But my mother used to cook some Japanese food for us, too, especially during the New Year's in America. She used to make all the New Year food. So we knew what sushi and sashimi and all that was. So the food, that didn't really bother us, the Japanese food.

TL: Sometimes other young people like yourself who went to Japan and then stayed a long time, they talk about realizing how American they were, even though they were also Japanese. And I'm wondering if you or your sister ever talked about that or thought about that?

HN: Oh, we always talked in, in English to ourselves.

TL: To each other?

HN: Yeah. But we always said, oh, we want to go back to America after we finished high school. But then the war started, so we didn't, we didn't know how long the war would last, but we always used to talk about going back.

TL: Is that how you maintained your English? Because I know that some Japanese Americans said after a while they kind of stopped using it altogether.

HN: Oh, no. My sister and I, we always spoke to each other in English. That's how we probably didn't forget our English.

TL: Did your mother mind that? Did she insist that you always speak Japanese to her or, she didn't talk about that too much?

HN: No, my mother, she knew her English quite well, too, since she had to waitress at the restaurant. So we spoke English or Japanese to her. But they were teaching English before the war in high school. So quite a few of the kids had, they used to ask us how to read and write in English. But after the war they stopped teaching English. The war started in '41, so I think we were, must have been a sophomore when it started?

TL: When you say that the Japanese schools had been teaching English, do you mean that your mother might have learned some English that way, too, or are you just thinking of your classmates?

HN: I think -- I don't know when they started teaching English in high school there. It must have been, gee, I don't know. It must have been in the '30s. But it was, it wasn't the American English, it was a British English 'cause I know the teacher, if we kind of had that American accent, he kind of corrected us because he wanted us to talk more like the British. But otherwise the writing was the same, except for spelling. They were a little bit different, some of the words.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.