<Begin Segment 25>

KN: Can you tell Tom how you would go visit Baachan in Little Rock, and how the white people would treat you at the beauty parlor when you'd get your hair done? 'Cause you couldn't get your hair done in camp, right? So remember you would tell me you would go to Little Rock?

RN: Uh-huh.

KN: How were the people in Arkansas treating you?

RN: They treated me all right, except the blacks, they didn't, they sure stepped on the black people.

TI: Okay, so the whites treated the Japanese okay, but the whites did not treat the blacks very well?

RN: No.

KN: Tell Tom about that bus ride that you took.

RN: Oh, yeah. There was a black guy, no, white guy standing, no seat. So he would say... that driver, he's driving that bus, looks up at that hakujin and said, "Hey, you. Get one of those black guys out. Take their seat." And that's how they did it, they were towards blacks. Very...

KN: But on the bus, didn't you go and sit in the "black section" of the bus?

RN: Yeah.

KN: And then what happened?

RN: They told me I wasn't supposed to sit there with the blacks. "You sit over here, change your seat."

TI: And so when you saw that, when you saw sort of the South and the segregated South, so, you know, the story about the bus driver telling the white person, "Take a black person's seat," or telling you not to sit back there, what kind of things did you think when you saw that?

RN: I don't know.

TI: Did it make sense to you? I mean, did you understand that world?

RN: Yeah, I understood, but how come they're so mean to the black people?

RN: Because they had "black" bathrooms, "colored" bathrooms, "colored" fountains. Didn't you tell me that you could really see the prejudice, huh?

TI: When you saw that, I'm thinking, so here you're in a camp, because you're Japanese, and then you're in the South and you see whites treating blacks in a mean way. Did you ever think about whether the Japanese were being treated as bad, or if blacks were being treated worse than the Japanese? I mean, when you saw that, did you think about, wow, the blacks were treated worse? Or did you think the Japanese were treated worse? Did you ever think about that?

RN: No.

TI: So if you think about it now, who do you think was treated worse during that time? The Japanese put in camps, or blacks in segregated South?

RN: Gee, I don't know.

TI: It's a tough question, I'm just curious if you had a thought about that. Having lived that and witnessed it, I'm just curious how you felt. I mean, when you think about this, would you have rather been in your shoes or the shoes of a black person in Arkansas in 1943, when you think about that? Who do you think had it worse back then?

KN: Do you think the blacks had it worse, Mom, or do you think our families had it worse?

RN: Black family.

TI: Yeah, okay.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2010 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.