<Begin Segment 5>

JS: Now, did your family, in this prewar period of time in Salinas, did they experience any sort of prejudice or discrimination at that time?

MN: Oh, no, not at all.

JS: No, huh?

MN: I don't think so, although, although, although Salinas is a, is a... I don't know what you call it. "Bigot town"? [Laughs]

JS: None of that spilled over to your family, though?

MN: No, uh-uh, no.

JS: Okay. Do you have any reason why none, none of that happened?

MN: Well, one year we all went to the, the so-called other side of the railroad tracks, and we went to the swimming pool where the elite, where the kanemochis -- is that how you say it? When they...

JS: The rich, you mean?

MN: Yeah, uh-huh, where all the little children go to, that swimming pool. And there was about seven of us, and these ladies, they wouldn't let us in. They wouldn't let us in.

JS: Because you were...

MN: Japanese.

JS: Japanese?

MN: Uh-huh. And I was seven years old then.

JS: How did that make you feel?

MN: I didn't know, I didn't think anything of it. I just thought that we looked grungy and dirty, so that's why they didn't want us to go in.

JS: When did you find out it was because you were Japanese?

MN: After we went home, and then the kids, all the other kids were saying that, "Oh, they're not letting us in because we're Japanese."

JS: Okay, so that was probably the...

MN: That was one of my first encounter with discrimination.

JS: Encounters with that. How did that make you feel?

MN: It wasn't nothing. I mean, like I say, it wasn't, I didn't think anything of it, except the older kids that I was with, they didn't like it at all. They were very put out, and they went to their mother and father and they told 'em, but what can they do?

JS: So did you, I guess you must have stopped going there if they wouldn't let you in. [Laughs]

MN: Yeah, we never went there. No, we never went there after that.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2004 Densho and The Japanese American Museum of San Jose. All Rights Reserved.