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RP: And what did... did you have a particular strength? Was it speaking or writing or...

KY: What was that?

RP: What part of, of Japanese school was your strength? Was it speaking the language or writing it?

KY: What's strange? Well...

RP: What was your strength?

KY: Well, they had different classes for whatever the subject was. But, there was no set rule on how it was taught. But, for instance, Japanese is taught with, you know, ink and a brush. And that's a way to write Japanese, with a brush and a, you know what I mean? And they, you'd have a little thing that had... in order to make the ink, the ink for the brushwork, you have to make it with this tray and you put water and you have the piece of this chalk you might call it, and you go over like this and it would make its own ink. And that's how you made the ink for the pen, I mean the brush. Well, that, so that was one form of Japanese is to learn how to write the characters. But normally it's from a book that you learn the different subjects. For instance, reading, and then there's this... but characters are drawn with this, with this ink and brush. And that's how you get to know how to put pressure on the brush to make the character. And that's what you did there. So, that was the only thing that was different from the rest of the language. Rest was you read, and you learn to read Japanese, and the characters you learn from the book. And, but...

RP: So you ground your own ink?

KY: Huh?

RP: You ground, you ground your own ink for the...

KY: Yeah.

RP: ... for the brush.

KY: For the brush.

RP: That was part of the process.

KY: That was part of the training.

RP: Oh. Did you learn about the country of Japan and the customs and the history of the country as well during your...

KY: During our studies?

RP: During your studies.

KY: No, not so much, no.

RP: And so mostly focused on the language.

KY: Yeah, from the book.

RP: And how, how far did you go in the books?

KY: Well, I think it was book twelve. You read from, you started from book one and you go to book twelve. And then it's like going to junior high school. You went to a junior high school. I went to the first year in junior high school. I never did go to senior high school. They, I don't think they had a class in senior high school. But if anybody had the most training, it was my sister. She was the smartest one in the school. She was so smart. Because when, whenever we have a graduation, say my class... we move from one class to another. We go from the first grade all the way up to the twelfth grade. And then we go into a junior high school like crowd. And that's what you call kotoka. In other words it's junior high school. And then, I don't know of anybody that had high school education in the school that we went. There was no high school. All it went was junior high school. And I was in the first or second year in junior high school. By then I'm going to high school in the public school. But, I remember though that after I, we went past twelfth grade or twelfth book, the teacher asked me and several other students -- there was only myself, this other girl, and another guy and... no more than four of us -- to go on a test, go to this place and have a test of your knowledge. And I did real well in that test because I happened to be studying a certain part of that, or these twelve books, I was, luckily for me I was studying a certain chapter and when the test came that we went to, a lot of the subject was on that particular subject that I was studying. So it was easy for me and I passed, passed that part of the test like it was nothing. And I did real well in that. Because I happened to be testing, studying that part of the books. So it was easy for me. But when it came to writing... you had to, you had to write a story about your family. I didn't do so well because I didn't, I didn't know all the characters that I needed to know to write a composition. That's what I had to do. I had to write a composition. And I wasn't, didn't do so well there but I did okay on my written part. The girl that I went with, she was number one. You know why? She was, she was formally, from kindergarten on, she was in Japan with her parents. And so she was, she had most of her education in Japan, unlike us. So she was a whiz at Japanese because she had the advantage. So she joined our class, but hell, she was an outstanding student because she had all this training in Japan. It was kind of unfair. But I don't know how far she went in public school. I don't think she... she was probably just past the grade school compared to us. We were already, already in high school and when she joined us in Japanese school she was much, she was the, she was the best student because she had this advantage of going to Japanese school in Japan. So it wasn't really fair but that's how it was.

RP: Did your parents speak any English at all?

KY: Oh they spoke some, especially my mother. She was, she was doing housekeeping while we were living in Santa Monica prior to the war. And so she could speak better English than my father did. All he did was do gardening and you don't have to, have to learn to speak English that well. He got along okay but I think my mother was smarter than him in that way.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.