Densho Digital Archive - Bob Utsumi Interview (denshovh-ubob-01-0009)

<Begin Segment 9>

MA: What about at school, like the day after Pearl Harbor? Did you feel like students treated you differently?

BU: No, the kids didn't. No one said anything, we had an assembly, and the principal got up and spoke. And, you know, gave a talk, don't take it out on us type of things. I don't, specifically, I don't remember, I do remember the assembly, but I don't know exactly what he said. There was, a kind of interesting story here, in our class at Westlake, my homeroom class was divided with, by alphabetical order, I think we had three homerooms with our class. And in our group was a kid, black kid I grew up with, Milt Ritchie, and also in the classroom was Virginia Warren. And one day in the homeroom class, our homeroom teacher said, picks on Virginia and she says, "Virginia, unless you straighten up in algebra, I'm going to have to tell your dad on you." I thought, "Why did she say that?" And that afternoon when we, Milt and I were pedaling our bikes to go home, I asked Milt, I said, "Hey, why did Miss O'Neil pick on Virginia in homeroom?" He said, "Well, don't you know who (her dad) is?" I said, "No." "Well, he's Earl Warren." He was the, at that time he was Attorney General and running for governor. This was in '42. And, 'course, Earl Warren was not our best friend. But then later on, after the war, I ran into Virginia at Cal, Berkeley, and she was in the library. So I just went up and talked to her and she remembered who I was, and we just chit-chatted for a little bit. But that was kind of ironic that I was in the same homeroom class as she was.

There was an incident going back to when I was at Emerson, playing at a playground after school. And one day, our playground director loads us, whole bunch of us, he had a Chevy coupe that had a rumble seat in it, he loaded about twelve of us in there and told us to bring our swimming trunks. And we all piled in and went to the Forest Pool in the hills of Oakland. And this is, now, this is in the '30s, mid-'30s, 1930s. And we get there, Don comes out and says, "Hey, Bobby," he says, "sorry, you're too young to go in the pool. Bobby Hoffman also can't go in." So Bobby Hoffman and I played around outside the pool, they did their swimming and came back and went home. And thought nothing more about it other than the fact that anytime they went, if the activity was at Forest Pool, Hoffman and I couldn't go. And then it didn't dawn on me until I was, I think, in camp, that incident came up. And I asked my mom, I said, "Hey, Mom, you remember when I couldn't go to Forest Pool?" She said, "Yeah." "Is that because I was Japanese?" She says, "Yeah." And you know, being a young kid, had no reason to think that I couldn't go in because I was Japanese. I was the only Japanese in that whole group, grew up in that Caucasian community.

MA: Right, so there was discrimination back then.

BU: Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, then... well, then as I grew older, found out there was a couple other places we couldn't go either. And just everybody, everybody knew. The blacks knew where they couldn't go, the Asians knew where they couldn't go, it just didn't apply to Japanese, it was Chinese, too, or blacks at that time.