<Begin Segment 5>

RP: You touched on religion a little bit. Did your parents stress religion as part of your upbringing?

YW: Not really. The way they got into religion was, lot of times the Buddhist religion requires that you go to this, go back to the temple and have special services for the dead, so, and there are certain years, fifth year, tenth year, whatever, they have certain calendars when, which you ought to go back and have a service for them. So that was one way I was exposed to the Buddhist religion and accompanied the parents to these services, but not knowing what was going on. It's kind of hard to understand. In camp, in Rohwer, it was, a young lady in our community who invited me to church, 'cause she herself was very active in the local church, and that was, I think it was Baptist, and she said, "Come on Sunday and listen in." How can you say no, right? So I had a mixture of religious experiences when I was a kid. I had both Buddhist and Christian upbringing. I wouldn't call it upbringing 'cause I wasn't a very steady attendee, but of course what made more sense to me was what I could understand. That was English, right? So the Buddhist was a little hard to comprehend, so I drifted toward the English speaking religions, if you will. And when I left camp, in Long Beach there was a Presbyterian church, Japanese Presbyterian church, so I'd attend that, off and on, not a very steady person to attend, but I did that. And, and then when we got, when I met her [points to wife] it was at a Congregational Presbyterian church? [To wife] Is that what that was? In Los Angeles, so that was English speaking. In fact, the person who married us, his name was Dr. Paul Waterhouse, very famous preacher among the Japanese, and he originally started out preachin' to the Japanese in Hawaii, so he was bilingual. So when (got married), we were at the dinner party after the wedding, he shocked my mother by speaking Japanese very well. And my mother's response was, "He speaks it so well he embarrasses me." That's how good his language was. He was a great man.

RP: I know your parents were spending a lot of time working on the farm and raising you.

YW: Yes.

RP: Did you have any type of a social life? Did you recall growing up at picnics, get togethers with...

YW: Typically the language school that I went to would have yearly picnics and lot of times that was part of it, get together. Also, they also had friends that they had that they would go visit each other on weekends periodically. In fact, my mother, on one of her trips to and from Japan, met a young lady on the ship back who was coming over for the first time, and they stayed in touch after they got back, and her husband and her family raised strawberries in Torrance. And we were in Hawthorne, so that was not too far away, so we'd come and visit each other. So that was part of the social life, if you will. Organized things my dad shied away from. He wasn't much for organized anything. Guess maybe he was shy.

RP: You never took any extended trips or vacations out of the, out of the area?

YW: When I was with the, my parents? Hard to do because the kind of work that he was involved required every day hands on. You know, when you're workin' on the farm or the ranch the plants will die if you disappeared, and if you don't trust your help to maintain the plants correctly, there goes your crop for the year, right? So they pretty much stayed close to the farm.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.