<Begin Segment 13>

TI: So tell me, what was the first day of school like?

RT: First day of school was December the 8th, Monday. Japan is sixteen or seventeen hours ahead of us, so it was the, in the United States the war started on a Sunday, in Hawaii, well in Japan it was Monday and it was my first day of school. And Tsushima City, the town that we settled in, there was a school right in back of the house that we rented and it was a grammar school, and my Japanese, I was enrolled into the fifth grade, third semester, 'cause Japanese school year starts in April, so I was in the last semester of fifth grade, according to my age. But my Japanese was, I just finished the third grade reader in Salinas, so I, and then in Tsushima the, they had a very heavy dialect and I really didn't understand that much Japanese. Something about the war starting, I could get that, but I didn't really grab the extent or the seriousness of that first day of school and went on, went home, my parents told me what, the war had started.

TI: But as they're making these announcements, as you looked around the class, what was the mood of the, of your classmates and the teacher as this was going on?

RT: I don't remember.

TI: And so were you, you heard war, did you know enough to know it was war against the United States?

RT: Yes, I think I knew that it was a war against the United States, but I didn't know the details. I didn't know that there was an air attack in Hawaii.

TI: Now, did your classmates and teachers at this, on this first day, did they know where you had just come from?

RT: Oh, yes.

TI: And so was there --

RT: And I think I was introduced as such.

TI: And so were there any comments about that? After they announced the war, was there any reaction towards you because of your American upbringing?

RT: No, no. In Japan in those days, after the age of seven you were never in the same classroom with boys, or with the other sex, so I was in a classroom of all girls and we had a lady teacher.

TI: Did, what was Roy's experience? So he was, what, two years younger than you?

RT: Yes.

TI: Did he have any stories or experiences then?

RT: No. All I know is that this house that we rented had an upstairs and we would sometimes look down at the kids passing by, and we were so dark -- living on a farm in Salinas, we were just dark -- and the Japanese, especially the girls, they were very, always had, they were sheltered because being fair-skinned was a better thing than being dark. And so we were so dark, my brother and I, and we would be looking down and they would, the kids would say, "Oh, they're from Amerika," and then another one would say, "No, no, no, not Amerika. Afurika." [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] And was that done in a, was it kind of a teasing thing that they would do, or --

RT: Huh?

TI: Did they know that you could hear this when they were --

RT: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I'm sure. They said we were from Afurika. [Laughs]

SF: When you heard about the, the war, understood what it meant, what was your, did you have a reaction to that?

RT: Gee, I really don't know. All I know is my father and mother and my grandfather, they were, I'm sure very depressed or, that the war had started, and of course the, since we had just settled down in that town a week before the war started, Japanese police were almost every day checking up on my parents, the radio that we had, make sure we weren't listening to shortwave.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.