<Begin Segment 8>

KL: So we're back in tape two of an interview with Ujinobu Niwa, he's gonna stick around for another, we promise to hold it to sixty minutes and just ask kind of bigger questions. And one that I wanted to hear about, or what you recall about Emerson junior high school and your first start at Uni High, what are your recollections of those schools?

UN: Well, Emerson junior high school, I would say the people there treated me very nicely. And it was, I would say, in my formative years, I made a lot of Caucasian friends, and I had a lot of Mexican American friends. And I liked the Mexican American friends because we both lived across the railroad in the poor section. [Laughs] And there were times when I felt that they would support me. Now, when I went to high school, when I first entered high school, I took mathematics, and my teacher tested me, and while she was giving math lesson, she would give me a scissors, and I went out to the horticultural department and I cut flowers for her. Because she says I know this stuff already. [Laughs]

KL: Did you?

UN: And so I would cut flowers and bring it back to her, and I was having a great time. But then the war came, which ended all that.

KL: Did life at school change after...

UN: Well, no, within the very short time, the government put us in relocation camps. They posted signs on the telephone poles saying you only have so many days and you're gonna be evacuated.

KL: How did you react to seeing those?

UN: Well, when you're young like that, you just go along with... we didn't make any big statement because of this or that. But one thing my mother said to us, she got us, my brother and I together and said that, "Don't worry, because God's going to be watching over us." I think that, well, that's why I think a lot of my mother.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.