<Begin Segment 13>

MN: Now, after you graduated from high school, what did you do?

TY: Well, I decided, what am I gonna do? I don't want to go to LACC, so I said, oh, here's a school just down the street from me, Metropolitan Community College. I went there. And I said, oh, I'll just secretarial science, whatever. So I went there and had no idea what it was all about, just, "Oh, I'll just go here, at least give me two years then." So I went there and I did other things. I did my classwork, but I found other stuff that I could do. I could do displays, stuff that I wasn't even getting credit for, but I worked myself into doing that so I could do displays and stuff like that. It was kind of fun.

MN: You're artistic.

TY: Yeah.

MN: Kind of like your mother, I guess.

TY: I guess.

MN: Well, your dad is artistic, too.

TY: Uh-huh.

MN: So after you graduated from there --

TY: I didn't graduate from there.

MN: Oh, you didn't?

TY: No. What I did was in 1956, I said, "Oh, I've had it with these people so I'm going to go into the service." So I went into the air force. And the thing about it is, that is goofed up is that I did not officially withdraw, which goes against your records. So I said, oh, well, not to worry, I'm already in the service, I won't think about it. And then when I came back out, I was going to reapply to join them, and one of the instructors there who was my instructor when I was going there four years previous, said, "Tak, you can't just jump in again because you didn't withdraw officially, so you have to make up the units that you screwed up on." So I said okay, so I did that. And it was easy enough. I had to screw up another half a year in order to finish up stuff I didn't do correctly, which was okay.

MN: Let me ask you, why did you decide to join the air force?

TY: My best friend, hakujin guy that I knew at Poly, we graduated together, decided he would enlist in the army. I knew I was not going in the army. I was not going to run around in the mud and all that kind of stuff, I already knew that. So I was not going into the army, even if he was my best friend, I was not going to do that. And it was interesting because it then gave me another option. I could go into the navy, I could go in the coast guard, I could go into the air force. I said, you know, air force is nice. First thing, when I went to recruiter, I said, "I don't want to fly a plane." [Laughs] So he looked at me like, "You're the first candidate for a plane, are you crazy? We're talking about millions of dollars here." And I said, "Oh, no." So he said, "Okay, well, there's other jobs that you can do, so fine." I didn't know there were other jobs, I just thought the flying thing was all they did in the air force. So that's how naive I was. So that was the beginning for me, anyway.

MN: Did you encounter any racism in the air force?

TY: I think I was a novelty because in my... I guess you can call it a squad, but I guess it'd be like a company in the army, I was the only Asian, in fact, only Japanese. And so I was a curiosity more than anything. And so it was kind of interesting for them because they didn't know what to do with me, the people that were in the service. There were blacks, Hispanics, and whites, but I was the only Japanese. And so for me it was like a learning experience. I knew that I had a speech impediment. Because what I did was, you know, most of the Japanese would come out of schools where they had just worked with Japanese, you know how rapidly they speak. We understand each other, but other people don't. So what I had to do was to take the time to speak clearly and slowly and I was able then to -- which was in some way good for me. Because here I was now required to speak slowly so other people could understand me, and I thought that was kind of good.

MN: Now, on your discharge paper, you were categorized, there was, like, only two categorizations. Share with us that story.

TY: Okay. When I started to... at that point I had already served four and a half years, and I didn't want to be going around doing craziness. And so the black officer who was discharging us said, "I see in here there are only two classes of people, Caucasian or negro." So I said, "Hmm, I think I'll put down Caucasian, that'll be okay." They discharged me with that. I thought, "You guys are so stupid. How can you even... 'Takenori Yamamoto' is Caucasian?" Well, anyway, on my discharge paper, that's what it says.

MN: So after you were discharged, and then in '57 you took this cross country Greyhound bus trip. Can you share with us some of the experience you had with the segregated bathrooms and the segregated restaurants?

TY: I think the thing about that was... this was in 1957 when I was being enlisted. I had known that they had these segregated bathrooms, but I didn't know how it applied to me. Was I white or was I black? And so I went to a couple of places in the South, and what I did was I'd always sit next to the rail that separated the black from the white when I was eating. Because that way I said, "Well, they can tell me to just go on the other side, no problem." But someone told me at the very beginning, "You sit on the 'white' side." I said, "Oh, the 'white' side, okay." Well, it was like... I don't know. I didn't understand how that worked out, but I figured, whatever. As long as I got my food.

MN: Did you ever have any problems sitting on the "white" side?

TY: No.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.