<Begin Segment 6>

RP: And where did you attend school, elementary school?

MN: Elementary school? Here in the neighborhood, Los Feliz Elementary. 'Cause we lived right up here on Los Feliz, and the thing of it is, I wanted to go to Commonwealth School because -- not Commonwealth School, Franklin Avenue School -- it was so close, but because I was within half a block of the borderline, I had to go to Los Feliz Elementary, which is down here on Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont. And it was alright, though. On the way home, as I got older she, my mother used to let me walk home. And then, so there's the Woolworth's ten cent, dime store and everything, I'd stop in and look at things right there, walk home. And then there were, like, homes, apartment houses and things, but when I got up to Los Feliz there was, at first there were no signals up there, no signals. Then they had they those signals that used to the stop and go like this, but I wasn't allowed to cross the street, so I would have to stand in front of the shop, where the shop was across the street and wait until my mother came and picked me up.

RP: So you grew up in a predominantly Caucasian area.

MN: Yes, yes.

RP: Were there any other Japanese families around?

MN: Not a whole lot, and my friends were all south of Los Feliz, down in, more in like the, I should say, well, south, like Fountain Avenue, in the Virgil area. And that's where we went to language school. And so, and then being that there was so few, actually in, I was the only one in elementary school that was Japanese. They were all Caucasians. In fact, I went to school with, you know the Times' Chamberlain or something, there's Times, L.A. Times, they used to, I think they used to run it or own it or something. Anyway, the two, there was a young girl, a son and a daughter, immaculately, every day just, their clothes are just pressed to a T, they come in a chauffeur-driven car, and my goodness, and they're picked up. But they were the quiet, most quiet kids. I wonder what happened to them. I went to Los Feliz with them.

RP: So how were you treated in school, as the only Japanese American?

MN: I was, I was treated, I mean, there was, they didn't have anything. I was treated very good, except one, sometimes the driver, my mother's driver would be a little late in picking me up after school so I had to wait right there, school grounds, and there was this one boy -- he looked like, well, he had, like, bobbed hair, always wore short pants, little different than other children -- and he kept bothering me and bothering me after school. Told the teacher, but he still kept it, so one day I got so angry at him I hit him with my lunch pail. [Laughs] Well, I got called in, but it was his fault. He never bothered me again. I used to dread waiting there and the driver's not waiting for me.

RP: So he, was he impugning your ethnic identity?

MN: I don't know, you know? I have no idea. But I had no trouble in school. And what happened was, after my brother had, well, he was in an upper grade at the time, but then he left right after, shortly after I enrolled at Los Feliz, 'cause he went on to junior high school, but we used to have carnival, Halloween. And so my mother would come down and she would dress me, not in a Halloween, I mean, she'd dress me up in a Japanese kimono, and so I'd always get to win first prize. [Laughs] And the prize was, like, a lei or something. And I thought, "Gee, how come I always get the prize? The others all dressed up in different costumes and things." But I used to always get first prize.

RP: So you were pretty comfortable with your Japanese ancestry?

MN: I am.

RP: Were you as a child too?

MN: As a child, we didn't have any, no one really bothered us. No. And even, we had to, when the war broke out, when we, we went up to Marshall High School, which is very close here, and at that time there must've been only about five or six of us students 'cause they were all white American families, and then we thought, we didn't know how they were, we had friends there, but we didn't go to school because we weren't sure how we were gonna get treated when the war broke out.

RP: So was that a decision that you made, or did, your mother made?

MN: Well, we got together with the other parents and talked it over. Just in case, you know. But we didn't have really any trouble, and we talked to, the school understand. They were good about it, and so what they did was they let us finish, they said they'll give us credit for the year that we were there, and they let us bring books home and gave us assignments that way. So we didn't have to, you know.

RP: You didn't miss any, you didn't get behind.

MN: No.

RP: How long did you...

MN: So that was December, and then things got a little more shaky around here, but we were very careful. In fact, we never went into Glendale. Glendale was like, they didn't like Japanese. But there were Japanese people living in Glendale. I don't know what they did. To me, Glendale was just far, far away. We never went to Glendale. Burbank was alright. In fact, we used to go to Burbank for our family doctor, who was a German doctor.

RP: Were there, were there any public areas that you wanted to go but you were prohibited from because of being Japanese? Swimming pools, theaters?

MN: Well, we kind of hesitated, and we, amongst our, my friends, I think we used to, stayed away. But we had our own little group that we'd have our socials and things. In fact, we had small parties at the church, church places.

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