Densho Digital Archive - Bob Fuchigami Interview (denshovh-fbob-01-0011)

<Begin Segment 11>

RP: Just to go back on to education a little bit, Bob, you... when you started kindergarten in Marysville, you started Japanese school roughly about the same time?

BF: Yeah.

RP: Now, did you, did you speak strictly Japanese before you started in kindergarten or did you have English?

BF: I don't remember. I don't... if I did, it was darn little. When you're the seventh kid in the family, you're... you don't really get to know the language of your parents. I imagine that's true of any immigrant family. The oldest ones, of course, learned the language. And then because they know English, too, having gone to school there, they're, they would, they'd basically do their communicating with us. And so you learn English. And then they, in a home where you have that many kids, you had mother and father sitting at the one end of the table and then you got a bunch of kids down the line there and the youngest of course are, are down here and the parents are up here. And then the, so, you don't learn a lot of Japanese or Russian or German or whatever. Some people were lucky, I think, because they didn't have as many kids. Others were... they had parents and grandparents. In our case, we didn't have other Fuchigamis in the U.S. So they'd, when they talked about grandfather or grandmother or cousins or uncles or aunts or second cousins or whatever, I didn't know what they were talkin' about. If you don't have 'em, you don't, you don't know. [Laughs] And it was only later I figured it out. But when they first started talking about things like that, then... there's Dick and Jane and they're going to see Grandmother and Grandpa, Grandpa and Grandma. I thought, "Who's Grandpa and Grandma?"

RP: How long did you attend Japanese language school?

BF: Well, in Marysville, it was standard, all the kids did this. We always go to regular school and then you'd walk across town and you'd go to the Japanese language school. And I did what everyone else did. You, you start off going to this school. I was a kindergartener in the, in the regular school and I was a kindergartener in Japanese language school. When you're a kid, if everyone does that then you think that's normal. Then in, when we moved to Yuba City, the only time you could go to Japanese language school was on Saturdays. And you soon begin to resent that because you figure, well, you've been going to school all week and Saturday and Sunday is sort of your, it's almost like a vacation, I guess. That's the day when, when you're sort of out of school and, and I guess your choice is working or going to, to language school, and, or playing. My choice was always playing but, but we'd, you'd have to go, go to language school 'cause you sort of resent it. And so when you resent things, you don't learn. So I, I wasn't a very good student. That's putting it mildly, I guess. My other brothers, my brothers, I guess they were, I guess there were higher expectations from my, my father and mother. So they, they learned the language and, and it helped them later on. I know I, I look back on it now and I think I was, I short-changed myself. If I had learned the language I'd have been much better off. I always regret that.