Densho Digital Archive - Joyce Okazaki Interview II (denshovh-ojoyce-02-0016)

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KL: That's what public school was like in Chicago?

JO: Uh-huh, yeah. It wasn't very good in those days. Anyway, that's what I heard. Because we had lots of that stuff even in our -- kids would run through the halls of our tenement building and throw food, tomatoes and things, so there was stuff all over the walls. Even when it was newly painted the kids would do that.

KL: Were they kids from within the tenement building?

JO: No, it was from the neighborhood. So that's what we did, and we walked to school. And close by was a juvenile detention center, and it was split into two buildings with a walkway in between, and we would walk right through that as a shortcut or as a longcut, however, we felt walking through the detention center with all those kids, the naughty kids.

KL: Did you interact with each other or were they closed off?

JO: They would yell things at us, and we'd just yell back. But I don't know, I was not... I was always a good kid, so I never did any of that. I would just walk quietly. But we would always walk in a group, either because of other people that went to school, we all, all the kids went to the same school. We didn't go to the public school, we went to the parochial school.

KL: Was it predominately Japanese American?

JO: Uh-huh, in the building, Japanese.

KL: It was in your apartment building?

JO: Yeah, but the school was all Catholics, Caucasians, Catholics. We were the, mostly non-Catholic. But we kind of went along with the, whatever we were supposed to do. Like when they required everybody to attend mass, we would go.

KL: But the school was physically located in your apartment building?

JO: No, no, no.

KL: Oh, I see.

JO: We had to walk to school. It was about ten blocks away.

KL: And you said the school was mostly Caucasian and then you guys. How did that go?

JO: Oh, it went fine. I never encountered any prejudice in Chicago. Not from the students, they didn't know what I was, or who I was, or how I happened to get there, because all of a sudden I appeared in sixth grade. But they didn't treat me any differently, they were very friendly. I didn't get invited to sleepovers or anything like that, though, but I don't know if they had that kind of thing in those days.

KL: Was sixth grade the highest level in that school?

JO: No, it went to eighth grade. Elementary school was K through 8, and high school was nine through twelve, so that's what I did. But I did come back in 1946.

KL: Did you live anywhere else in Chicago?

JO: Later on.

KL: Oh, I'm sorry, you said 1946 you came back?

JO: Yeah.

KL: Okay.

JO: 1946 we came back to Los Angeles to see, visit my... my mother wanted to see her family, actually. But we stayed at my grandparents' house, because it was a large, lovely house, and they had a TV, they had all these nice things that we didn't... I don't know if they had TV in '46. They certainly had it in 1950, we came back in '50 again. But in '46 we stayed for like four months. So I went to Mt. Vernon junior high school, and I was in seventh grade there.

KL: Did your folks consider just staying, do you think?

JO: My mother came with... my father was in Chicago. My father, my mother came with the two of us, and we went to school. She was in second grade and I was seventh grade.