<Begin Segment 12>

RP: Question about attending the high school. Were you involved and pretty active in school affairs, clubs, sports?

JN: Oh yeah. Well, I remember Coach Holly was, not only taught math and physics and everything else, but he was also our coach. And the school was so small, the town of Eden had 415 people population in the '40 census. We played what was known, called six-man football, we couldn't even field a team of eleven. And I remember he said, "Nishimura, you wanna suit up?" And I, my god, these great big behemoth guys, I said, "No." But I became the water boy. And I had a lot of fun being the water boy to answer your question about if I was in school participation, I went to all the dances. And I was not talented but because you see the people in camp making, doing things with crepe paper, decorating the mess halls and I would do that kind of thing. It was good for what little things we had in Eden, Idaho, to decorate. What else did we do? Well, anyway...

RP: And as far as being accepted by the students there? It sounds like a small school anyway.

JN: Oh, yeah. No problem. No problem. I mean, I went on a school date with this gal that was, like, 5'10" or something. I was like a little short...

RP: So there were no issues about that even, interracial dating?

JN: Well, if there was, I was oblivious to it. To answer your question, I don't think there was. I really don't think there was.

RP: You had an amazing experience.

JN: I think it was a great experience. It was, we were not bitter. My bitterness came later. Even, even after I, we relocated, I thought about evacuation a lot. And in Philadelphia, I don't know if you know Philadelphia, but I guess it's not too uncommon in eastern cities there's enclaves of ethnic communities. Like in Philadelphia there's an area called Fish Town. It was the poorest area of -- I think -- Philadelphia other than... well anyway, it was a poor area. And that's where the Polish American families lived. And they must have been there for three generations, or two generations at least. And there was an Italiantown in south Philadelphia which was mostly Italians, but there were well-kept homes in there and I got to know many. And there was Germantown where we lived (during) my married life for four years. And I used to think that evacuation was... oh, and then I went to Central High School, which was a city school for boys, it was a gifted school. I was very fortunate to be able to be accepted there. I went miles to the school, it took us an hour and ten minutes to get to the school, but anyway, I went there. It was 99 percent Jewish, the kids were mostly Jewish. I don't know why I'm bringing that up, but what I am trying to say is we had segregated communities within Philadelphia. And I know in Seattle there were segregated communities.

As a matter of fact, Father Kitagawa, Father Joe from my church who brought me out, who convinced my -- he was a great, he was a great theologian but he was as equally great a sociologist. And he convinced everybody that he was able to talk to, including my father, that we should all relocate eastward, away from the West Coast, away from the "ghettos," and away from whatever the heck was not to our benefit in our growth and the integration of -- he didn't use those words -- of the Japanese into the American mainstream. But more so he wanted us to come eastward to get educated out here and to assimilate out here. Well, I used to say that evacuation, you know, I'm always the optimist, and people, what few people knew about my evacuation, I would tell them, and then they'd say, "Oh, Jim, that's a horrible thing that happened to you guys." "Well," I say, "you know, there's good parts of it." It accelerated my, the Japanese community (...) becoming a part of the American mainstream by a whole generation by dispersing us into the whole country. Of course, that wasn't true because there are still huge population centers of Japanese. But they're not that bad off, I mean, they're not like the ghettos of Philadelphia that I remember. So from that point of view it was, it was a good thing.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.