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AI: Well, then what do you recall from your youngest days when you first realized that you were different from the hakujin classmates?

RT: See, I don't think I realized I was different. My situation was a little different from the other Japanese Americans because my mother was a Nisei. And of course, we were raised in a family where both languages were spoken, but we were raised with English being spoken all the time. And when we went to school, we just considered ourselves as American. And we didn't differentiate, I didn't differentiate between myself and a Caucasian classmate. I guess I realized fairly soon that I wasn't exactly Caucasian, and of course, we found out for sure when the war broke out. But before that I am sure that someplace along the way you get exposed to attitudes, and of course, prejudices. And you learn from that. So we absorbed that, but on the whole I was more friendly, more close, to some of the Caucasian kids. Well, girls would hang out together and I was more friendly with the Caucasian girls than with the Japanese American girls. And I don't know if it was because of the cultural difference: simply because the Japanese American kids were coming from families where their parents were the Issei, and in my case, my mother especially was a quite outgoing Nisei. Yeah.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.