Densho Digital Archive - George H. Morishita Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

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KL: So this is tape two, we're continuing on with an interview with George Morishita. And John had a question about how far Miyano was from Hiroshima.

GM: I thought I heard fifteen kilometers or something like that, or fifteen miles. But since the Japanese used kilos, that's what I heard.

KL: When we left off on the first tape, we were talking about your parents' sort of roles within the family. And I was wondering if you would talk, just say a sentence or two about each of the siblings that you grew up with, sort of what people's personalities were like.

GM: Well, the oldest one, Jean, she didn't live with us too long. She was two years old, so I wasn't born yet. And I understand that she was sent to Japan. I heard different stories, but there was the First Street Streetcar running in front of our place, and she used to be playing out on the tracks, and the conductor would bring her and sometimes even tell my mom. So I remember as a kid going out to... my mom had a little rail across the hallway from the bedroom to the front. So anyway, I don't know if that was the reason they sent her there, and then when we came back to the U.S. in '35, by '40 and '41, she moved to San Diego to live with her future husband. And so she didn't live with us that long, just from '45 to about '40... about five, six years. And then she's the one that was raised in Japan, she was sent there when she was about...

KL: Jean?

GM: Yeah, Jean. That's the oldest sister that was raised here.

KL: Oh, I guess I thought that she died early, in 1932?

GM: No.

[Interruption]

KL: Thanks, we're back, and you were going to set me straight on...

GM: Yeah, my oldest brother, I believe he died when I was about two years old, that's what I understand, so that'd be about '33, '34. And my oldest sister in Japan died when she was about thirty-two, but that was in the mid-'50s, I think.

KL: But Jean was sent to Japan?

GM: Jean was sent to Japan when she was about two years old, and then came back with us when my mom took, like I said, two of my older sisters and myself, and my mom was pregnant at that time with my youngest sister. She took us back to Japan in '34, and when we returned, I believe we came back in the latter part of '35, she brought my sister Jean back. But by 1940, Jean moved to San Diego to live with the Iwatas, that's her married name. So I didn't know her too well growing up, although she used to complain, like my oldest sister, that she used to have to babysit us. I remember some good stories with her, though. Like I remember one time in Hollenbeck Park, there's a Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights, and I forgot, on Third Street, there used to be a drugstore on this corner. And remember those ice cream sticks, on the end of the stick, something, a prize, you'd get another ice cream. And it was five of us, Jean, Tosh, Susie, me and Reiko, and we're at the park. And with five cents, we ended up with five ice creams. And the last time Jean went in there to get another ice cream, the proprietor, this old Jewish man, I guess, old Russian man, he got mad and he picked it. And that one was blank. [Laughs] So we all could have ate one apiece, but we had to, each bar we got, five of us shared it. But we ended up with five. I'll never forget that. It was funny. We used to talk about that when we got older. But like I said, she moved to San Diego. Then Tosh, she was about five years older than me. And the thing I remember he was that I think she had pretty deadly whooping cough back in the late '20s or something like that, because years later, I realized why she was a baby, so to speak, she didn't have to do house chores and all that. Because my sister Susie, the one right below her, used to have to do a lot of the housework and all that. And then I realized a lot of parents, when they have a child that almost died, they just... because I had a good friend that way, who was, when he was two years old, he almost died of poisoning. He grew up in Needles, California, by the Colorado River, and his mother was telling me that the doctor told the parents that there's no way that he could save the kid. And the father just drove him all the way to L.A. to see a doctor. So when I was growing up, his younger brother became my brother-in-law, who had to do everything. And I thought about, okay, my family, Susie had to do everything, and Tosh was kind of like a real social animal, having fun and all that. Yeah, Tosh was the one that in camp one day, she came home and started yelling at me and my father said, "Why are you getting so mad at..." they didn't call me George then. She said, "Papa, do you know that he thinks that the older guys like to talk to him? Do you know what they call him? Tosh's Mexican kid brother. He talks like a Mexican; he don't talk like Japanese." I was only eleven years old, and I was confused. Yeah, because when I was in the army in Korea one time, the new kid on the block, we were coming out of the mess hall. He looks like you, not like me, but he goes, "Hey, George, you've got an accent." I go, "Come on, look at me." He goes, "No. Spanish?" And when it comes to my other friends, said, "No, you don't sound like a Mexican."

KL: L.A. roots.

GM: But there is a certain, I picked it up, it's interesting, twice in my life. At L.A. City College I met this kid, he was my next door neighbor before the war. He was a little younger than me, and we spent about a half hour talking on the lawn at City College. I went home, and I had just taken a course in voice and diction, and we had to, teacher had us record two minutes and then he would critique us. And when he came to me, he would say, "Well, so-and-so's from Mexico, we got to work on this, so-and-so's from German." And he came to me and the whole class laughed. He said, "George is of Japanese extraction, we got to start from scratch." And then he explained why, and I go, "He's right." He said, the Japanese, it's vulgar to open up your mouth and all this and that, and they don't even hold hands in public. That was back then in the '50s. And then I remember him saying, "You could speak Japanese and understand each other without hardly opening up your mouth." And I said, "He's right." Then my thing was to open my mouth. And it took about I don't know how many weeks before I finally... and the whole class clapped and my jaws were hurting.

[Interruption]

Off camera: Yeah, George, I was wondering, you said that you seem to have picked up a lot of influence from your Mexican friends in L.A. how about your brothers and sisters? Were they also, like, friends with a lot of the Mexicans in the neighborhood, or did they pick up any Spanish? And why were you different?

GM: Well, maybe because boys would go out and play more. Back then, girls were, I don't know... I really don't know. Like I said, my sister, she got very upset with me, and so apparently I used to just play with them all the time, and she may have known some Mexicans. But back in those days, a lot of people stuck to their own ethnic groups and all that socially and all that. Because I don't recall when I was younger seeing any older Japanese guys or gals with other ethnic people. So I don't know if that had anything to do with it. Because I used to spend a lot of time at my friend's, it was funny that way. Like I said, I used to go for those walks in the morning, I remember my friend in Manzanar called me a liar. I still remember, I would try to get someone to go with me, and I did get one of my friends to go with me, but I recall I used to crawl through the front window and walk past their parents' bedroom and they would naturally open their eyes, and then I'd go to my friend's room and he was with his brother sleeping and I'd wake him up. And I don't know how many times he went with me, and he finally told me he didn't want to go with me anymore. And years later I thought, "We don't want to see Fi-chan coming through that window anymore." [Laughs]

KL: That was in L.A. or in Manzanar?

GM: This was in L.A. when we were little kids.