Densho Digital Archive
Friends of Manzanar Collection
Title: Bill Watanabe Interview
Narrator: Bill Watanabe
Interviewer: Sharon Yamato
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: February 8, 2012
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1003-9-27

<Begin Segment 27>

SY: And then San Fernando High School was, was primarily mixed racially?

BW: San Fernando High School was also one of the few high schools that was racially and ethnically mixed, and I thought it was a great experience. It was still fifty percent white, but there were maybe ten percent black, ten percent Latino, ten percent others. That doesn't add up, does it? [Laughs] But, and some Japanese, very few, there were a few Filipinos. I don't know of any Chinese.

SY: But Japanese were a minority, though.

BW: Japanese were a definite minority.

SY: So you...

BW: But again, amongst the leadership, though...

SY: Same situation. And your friends were primarily, mostly Japanese Americans, as opposed to... I mean, you had other friends, but were they mostly Japanese Americans?

BW: Right.

SY: You, so did feel more connected to the Japanese Americans?

BW: Yeah, I would say so.

SY: And then when you, when you graduated high school, did your parents encourage you to go on to college?

BW: No. They never said anything or did anything. When I was in the first grade I remember my mother looked at my report card, and I had one A and that was in reading. Everything else was like Bs, and everything was Satisfactory, nothing Excellent, as I recall. And so I remember my mother said, "Hey, you got an A in reading. That's the most important." I don't know if she actually meant that, but so I felt, okay, that's good. It was kind of funny. She never, she was not a "tiger mom" or anything. She...

SY: Generally positive with you.

BW: Generally positive. She did compare me with my cousin, Ken, who was the same age as me. She might've said something like, "Yeah, he didn't get an A in reading," or something. [Laughs] But basically they left us to decide for ourselves. My oldest brother, Kinichi, he went to UCLA, so he kind of set the, I think he set the mode for... and Kinjiro went into the Air Force, so he, he went a different way. But when I was growing up I thought, yeah, well, Kinichi's doing fine, I think I'll go to college too, but that was my decision. My parents never said anything.

SY: And did you find it difficult, going, getting, going from high school to college?

BW: Not, not... back then, California, going to college was the, what would you call it? That was the golden age. It was free. Free college, can you imagine that? And anybody could join, kind of. It's like they didn't turn anybody away, as far as I know. I mean, UCLA, okay, it wasn't automatic, but state college, practically anybody could go.

SY: And that's where you end up going?

BW: Well, yeah, I thought about going to UCLA like my brother, but somebody said, one of my teachers said, "Well, you can go to UCLA, but at UCLA you could be one of two hundred students." And then Cal State Northridge had just opened up. He goes, "You might want to go to Cal State Northridge 'cause there they have a class, average class size is like twenty-five." So I have to say, I was quite naive and kind of lazy. I never bothered to really check it out, so I thought, okay, state college. [Laughs] So I went to Northridge.

SY: And your parents didn't have anything, any say in it? They didn't have anything to do with...

BW: Not a word.

SY: With the proximity or...

BW: Nothing. They never said anything.

SY: So you could've gone to Harvard and that would've been fine with them, or somewhere far away?

BW: Yeah, or I could've not gone to college at all and I don't think they would've said anything. Just don't be a bum. I think bottom line, don't be a bum.

SY: They didn't care whether you went into the family business or not?

BW: Well, I think if we had, if I had said, "You know, I really want to go into the family business," I think they would've been happy about that, but they never said I needed to.

SY: It was doing fine without you, huh?

BW: Well, it was doing fine, and it was like...

SY: Were there other cousins, younger people that were interested in it?

BW: None of them were interested in it.

SY: So it was all still that --

BW: So after the kids grew up, eventually the farm ended. They sold it and that was it.

SY: And so your father and mother ended up selling, at what point in their lives?

BW: So around 1965 my father turned sixty-two so he decided to retire early, and so he sold his share of the farm. And so he retired at age sixty-two, and he did very well.

SY: And stayed, did they move into a different house?

BW: He did. So we had the farm -- this is in Lakeview Terrace -- and then the partnership had bought the farm and built the two houses, so he sold, or yeah, he sold his share of the farm and the house and took that, bought another house in Lakeview Terrace, and that's where they lived until he died.

SY: And you were already, were you still in college?

BW: By that time I was in college, yeah.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.