<Begin Segment 8>

SO: All right, so after camp you went to Sacramento and continued with school. What was the feeling in the community about the Japanese?

GM: Well, I think it seems that there might have had more bias after camp. Some of the kids were picked on, families were picked on, and stuff like that. I think being out in the country, you were probably protected from a lot of that. But when you went to school, well, there were older kids to pick on you and stuff. I guess maybe that's when I felt the bias, was after camp rather than before camp. Of course, I was older then.

SO: Did you graduate from high school in Sacramento?

GM: No, in 1950 my father started strawberry farming in San Jose, actually Mountain View, California. And so in my sophomore year we moved to Mountain View. We started a strawberry farm and it was actually on a sharecrop basis too. We put in the field of strawberries and cultivated and picked it, took it to market and stuff.

SO: Did you help out?

GM: Yeah, quite a bit. The whole family pitched in.

SO: What happened to Japanese school?

GM: [Laughs] No more Japanese school.

SO: So you graduated from high school.

GM: In Mountain View.

SO: Then what did you do?

GM: I started at San Jose State. This was right in the middle of the Korean War, and a lot of guys were getting drafted and even some out of school and stuff. We thought... some of our friends were getting drafted so I thought anyway that if I didn't want to be a soldier, I'd volunteer for the Air Force, so that's what I did.

SO: Had you decided on a major or were you just taking general studies?

GM: I was just in general studies.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.