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RP: Where did you attend grammar school?

YW: My grammar school was in Hawthorne School District and it's 135th and Yukon is where it still is. The only difference is, I noticed when I went back there, is when I attended there used to be a C-shaped building like this, and kindergarten at this end, sixth grade at this end and all intermediate grades in between, and after the war, when I went back some time later they had demolished these buildings and put 'em on the north side and built some new buildings over there, so it doesn't look like the school I used to go to. But the school was there and farmers were farming within reach of the school, around the schools, so we were really a country, country school. The one thing I remembered at the time was about 1940, right across the street a Ma and Pa family grocery store opened, so I wondered if that was still there and I went back and looked at it and sure enough that store's still there, but next door to the school they had built another school for the higher grades, and they named it after the principal that used to be the principal when I was going there as a youngster. So that school, I guess, expanded in, in enrollment so much that they decided one side'll be for the younger kids and the other side'll be for older kids, so they split up the campus into two campuses. And as far as I know that's still there. Had I, were it not for the war and I continued there, I would've gone to Leusinger High School, which I think is on Rosecrants somewhere. Yeah.

RP: Share with us the makeup of the community, of the school, the sorts of ethnicities.

YW: There weren't too many Japanese kids there, just farmers' kids. And I remember I had a classmate and it's hard to believe, but he was the biggest kid in the class, Japanese descent. He was big. And later on, after the war, when we got back from, from camps, I had noticed that he was participating in Japanese league sports, and I can see it 'cause he was very athletic, and not only was he big, but he was athletic. And he was playing in, I guess his favorite sport must've been baseball or somethin'. He was a pitcher. But I thought, my gosh, I'm surprised, because at the time when we were playmates, classmates, you could tell he was different from the rest of us. He was capable. We, we were inept. [Laughs] You know, you know how some kids stand out like that. But he was the biggest kid in our class, and I'm not talkin' about just Japanese, among all the Caucasian kids, he was bigger than they were. In hindsight I think that was incredible, that, you don't usually find that. The Japanese kids are typically smaller and shorter, but not him. He was normal sized and bigger.

RP: Your, your asthma had a real impact on your early education. Can you share with that, with us?

YW: Yeah, my asthma was unfortunate. At, starting at about age five or six or so, it became a weekly thing, every third week I would be absent for a week. I went back and looked at my school records years ago and I had noticed that I missed about thirty percent of my class time. And this persisted for an awful long time, until about the sixth grade. When I left camp after finishing the sixth grade, came back to school and started the seventh grade, and seventh grade was no different. It was bad, and as a result my grades suffered tremendously 'cause I wasn't following up on the class very well. But all of a sudden it's like the Almighty decided I had enough and turned off the switch, and from the eighth grade on I was fine. And to this day I don't understand how that happened, because the only medicine that was available to me at the time was an atomizer that we would spray my throat with, with a spray, and that would give me maybe an hour's worth of relief, two hours' worth of relief and then I'd be back to wheezin' again. So that was the way I grew up through the seventh grade, from about the kindergarten through seventh grade. It's a disease that just came on and it just quit all of a sudden. About seven or eight years later it just stopped. Fortunately. I couldn't have gone to college if it, if it kept that up. Yeah.

RP: Did, before the war, do you remember any instances of discrimination or prejudice in your community, the area that you grew up in, or any, anything of that nature directed at you personally that you realized suddenly, you know, "I'm Japanese. I'm different"?

YW: At the school we were perfectly accepted. The kids were all great. And being isolated on the farms out there, you didn't see much of the world, outside world, so the only time I found something rather hideous is when I got back from camp. We... how did that work out? We traveled about three and a half days leaving Rohwer, ended up in Union Station in Los Angeles, disembarked from the train, and they said, "Lots of luck, you're on your own," right? We were told by a friend to catch the red car, come down to Long Beach and take it to the end, and today the end would be almost, at the time we got off it was Third and American Avenue. That's where the Long Beach Post Office is. So the man told us to get off at the Post Office and stay there and "I'll come and pick you up." And that's how it happened, so we get off, we got our luggage with us -- whatever we can carry we had -- and the first introduction I had to Long Beach was some grizzly lookin' old Caucasian man looked at me, says, "You dirty Jap." [Laughs] That was my introduction to Long Beach. That was the first and only time I was treated like that. Never heard those words before. I'm sittin' there, said, what's the matter with this guy? I don't even know him, right? But I was gonna be in the seventh grade, so I knew what he was saying. But once I started school the kids were very good. Never did it come up. Good people. Kids were nice. I had no problems.

RP: A lot of kids who, who grew up on a farm like you kind of had to make their own fun. What do you remember doing as a kid, for fun and playing?

YW: As a kid for fun, on the farm, it was marble, playing marbles and riding our bikes. That was about it. We didn't have any, there's only one or two of us, so, this big kid that I was talkin' about, his father was growing flowers on the other side of El Segundo Boulevard and the street that connected his house to my house today would be Van Ness Boulevard, basically, so he lived at one end of Van Ness and we lived at the other end, and since we were classmates we'd come and visit each other and play. But typically the play, at that time, had to do with just biking and talking and watching, lookin' at comic books and things. That was it. There wasn't much else to do. If there's only two of you, you can't do much. We had more fun at school, the language school. The kids would invent games and we'd play whatever games they invented at the time. But that was after school every day, so we got to see other kids, but once on the weekend it's just he and I would bike to each other's homes and do whatever we did. There wasn't much in the way of playing things, but I think in some ways we played better in camp. We had a lot of kids on the block that you played with and grew up with.

RP: So your father had this, made this killing on, on his flowers --

YW: Yeah, that one, couple of weeks it was good for him.

RP: Right, and he was continuing to prepare the ground and grow flowers, and then suddenly everything changes.

YW: Everything hit the fan.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.