<Begin Segment 23>

RP: And I imagine Seattle had a Chinatown area.

VI: Right, right next to the Japantown.

RP: It was right next to the Japantown?

VI: And we were very close friends, you know, the Chinese and Japanese. We grew up together, so went to school together.

RP: There were no, no animosities based on what was going on across the ocean with the invasion of China by Japan?

VI: Not the younger generation. I don't think they even knew about it. I mean, they read about it, they might have heard about it, but it just didn't affect them. So yeah, maybe the older, the first generation might have had animosity, but they stuck very much to their own communities. And the younger kids, of course, went to school together, so they were not affected as much.

KP: What were the two relative sizes of the Japanese...

VI: Oh, the Japanese community was much larger than the Chinese community, and that was due to the immigration law that didn't affect the Japanese as much. So they were very, I mean, in relationship to the Japanese community, the Chinese community was small, very small.

RP: Right, because the door had been shut on them really early.

VI: Yeah, so they didn't get a chance to develop families and things like that.

RP: Were there other communities that bordered Japan --

VI: It was a Jewish community.

RP: A Jewish community?

VI: Right.

RP: Right near Japantown?

VI: Well, that was north of, I mean, east of Japantown. This is a -- so the, so...

RP: What was the interaction like between --

VI: Very good. In fact, lot of our friends that went to Garfield High School, that's the high school in the Jewish and the Japanese community, uptown from Japantown. Japantown went to Broadway, anybody from Fourteenth and up went to Garfield, and they had a lot of the Jewish community. So the Japanese community was very friendly with the Jewish community, they still are. It was, and we had some colored, or the African American families, and they were mostly in the Garfield area, so they went to Garfield. But there were only a few of them, too. I mean, the --

RP: But that changed after you were evacuated.

VI: Right, and after, what happened is when you had the war production, then you had a lot of people that came to find jobs that stayed and then, stayed in the more reasonable, cheaper areas to live in.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.