<Begin Segment 11>

RP: And what was your... did you go to school with all kinds of other ethnic groups? How was... was Redondo High School sort of a mixed group of kids?

TM: Not too much. It was mostly Caucasian people. We had one black, black going to that school. But we had a lot of Japanese going to that school because they all, all the parents were farming over there by Prairie and 182nd and there used to be the red car, streetcar. They ride that streetcar and come to Redondo Beach, it used to come to Redondo Beach. And like even in our, I lived, we lived on Torrance and Hawthorne Boulevard. And on Torrance Boulevard there used to be a Greyhound bus, so we used to go to school on the Greyhound bus. The school would give us the, the...

RP: The money for it?

TM: Uh-huh, yeah.

RP: How long a trip was that?

TM: Not very, maybe half an hour.

RP: Did you ride the red car, too?

TM: No, no.

RP: That was the, the last sort of rapid transit in the city of Los Angeles. Well, now there's trains and sort of things but that was a great line.

TM: Yeah.

RP: So, did you have any, when you were growing up and attending high school, did you have any plans at all about what was gonna happen next as far as a...

TM: Not much, not much. [Laughs]

RP: Just a... take it one day at a time?

TM: Yeah, yeah. Nothing in, nothing special. Going to school, higher education... no, I didn't have that in mind, yeah.

KP: Can I ask a question? Did your, did your family have like the bath? The...

RP: Ofuro?

TM: Ofuro?

RP: Yeah.

TM: Oh, yeah.

KP: In every place you lived or...

TM: Well in Costa Mesa we had a real nice ofuro because we had a nice home. And my neighbors, they were Japanese. And they would have a, just a tub and they would have to... I think we even had propane. We had, what is it? Tank, gas tank to heat up. Yeah, so we did pretty good.

RP: Pretty good.

TM: Our neighbors, the Japanese, they, they had to use wood to heat up their bath and so forth, yeah.

RP: And you had the gas.

TM: Huh?

RP: And you had gas.

TM: Yeah. We had those, I don't know, those tanks.

RP: What was the... who, who went in the bath first? Was it the parents who would go in the bath first? Or, was there any kind of order?

TM: No. Whoever... yeah, we didn't have that. Yeah, in Japan they do that. The men, men goes in first. Then the ladies goes in last and... yeah, no, we didn't have that. We were...

RP: Informal.

TM: Yeah. Whoever's ready... you just...

RP: So you graduated from Redondo Beach High School?

TM: Uh-huh. Yeah, Redondo High, yeah.

RP: And you also had some letters, right? Some junior varsity letters?

TM: Oh, yeah. In basketball and football, yeah.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright (c) 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.