<Begin Segment 10>

AL: Where did you attend school?

RT: In Cayucos. A two-room schoolhouse, first through eighth grades. And I think there were five people in my class who graduated from eighth grade, so it was a very small community, a small school.

AL: And Maxine was in that?

RT: Maxine was also in my class from the first grade on, and into high school.

AL: Were you involved in extracurricular activities in school or clubs or anything like that?

RT: Oh, everybody was in some kind of thing or not. We were all in. We were busy. When I got up to high school... well, in grade school, we were in grades one through four in the younger years, and then four through eight. We were all together, so it was more like community learning. You helped the younger children and the older ones helped the younger ones, and it was quite a busy school situation. And so I don't remember that we had any special activities outside of just studying.

AL: How were you treated by other students? You said you were the only Japanese American?

RT: Well, we were treated very... you know, there was no discrimination as such. My friends were all Italian, Portuguese, there was one Jewish boy. We were totally integrated and we all were equally accepted. My friends mostly were Catholic because they came from Italian and Swiss backgrounds. But they never tried to convert me to that religion, and it was all very integrated. And it was not until the war came on that we got disintegrated.

AL: We definitely are going to talk about that. Your family, you were talking about you went to the Christian church. Did your parents, when they weren't working, were they involved in any sort of other social clubs or organizations?

RT: Well, my father worked with the, sort of a farm coop or something, they got together. There was an organization of... the farmers would get together and share information on how to improve their farming skills and that kind of thing.

AL: Who was in that coop? Was it local farmers, Japanese American farmers?

RT: Those were Japanese, mostly Japanese American, because the Japanese, I should say, because they all spoke the same language which was Japanese. My father also did communicate with some of the people in the, farmers in the community. He was quite sociable, and he made friends with the Italians, and we had wineries around there, they raised grapes, and once a year they'd get together and stomp on the grapes and have a nice party and drink last year's wine and make next year's wine. And so I felt like that was kind of a social outlet for him. And he would always, he would go once or twice a year to those wine making parties. My mother was busy at home with the kids. [Laughs]

AL: How would you characterize, before the war, what their marriage was like, what you observed of their marriage?

RT: Well, Japanese marriages are very different than what you assume from current American marriages. They got along fine. I mean, they were... how would you say it? They were fine, but it was just like this is the way life is, and they were very accepting. And I know that they had their moments of not getting along, my father liked to drink beer and get down, he could drive his truck down to Los Angeles and have a good time with his buddies down there, that kind of thing. So I think my mother felt a little left out of the loop on that point. But she was able to look well, she dressed well, and she had a sewing machine and she made clothing. And so as poor as we were financially, we did fine. And she did a lot of gardening and raising flowers in the garden. We had chickens, oh, that's right. Talk about living in the Depression era, we didn't have to spend a lot of money on food. We grew vegetables in the garden for all our vegetables. The boys went out and surf fished and brought back fish or abalone or clams. We had chickens and we had eggs. And so the only things we needed were like milk and butter and that kind of thing, and meat. And my father would go to the slaughterhouse which was up the way and he would get organ meats that people didn't want. So we lived a lot on liver and brain and tripe and all that, so I have a very wide arrangement of food that I will not turn my back on. We had to survive on whatever was available. And we did a lot of cooking at home, everything. We didn't eat out at all, much.

AL: Maybe that's how you got to be the smartest girl in your class, by eating brain.

RT: [Laughs] People say, "Brain?" Well, that's the good food to eat. You ought to try it sometime.

AL: Just one question about Katsuma. You said that when you came back, he needed to go to elementary school to learn English. That would be close to the time you were in elementary school? Were you in school together at all?

RT: I'm trying to think. I think I was... yeah, I was probably, but we didn't have much contact. He would go in and it was probably... he had all the skills of math and other things, but it was just the language part that he had to learn. So he advanced very quickly through elementary school and ended up, was in high school as soon as he got the language skills. So we didn't spend a lot of time in school together.

AL: So he didn't have to go through with an elementary class.

RT: No, no. It wasn't like we were first graders together. [Laughs]

AL: Well, you know that's one of the things in the propaganda back at that time, you see where they're talking about the dangers of having these older Japanese students, they're caricatured as these sort of older men sitting next to fourth graders.

RT: Oh, well, I don't recall that at all, so I didn't get in on that.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.