<Begin Segment 2>

JC: I'd like to backtrack a little bit. We've gone through history pretty quickly there. I'd like to go back to when you were a small boy, and hear about what, who was in your family, where did you live, what were your early experiences in childhood?

SN: There's so much to tell that I, you know, I get sidetracked and start talking, but I move on. I went to Mount Tabor grammar school. My father moved away from, did not live in the Japanese ghetto as so-called which in southwest and northwest Portland. So he had very little, so therefore, we had very little contact with Japanese. My mother was a little bit unhappy about that; but of course, we had a car so my father took her to Japanese church once every Sunday and waited for her and then picked her up and brought her home, but he didn't go to church himself. When I went to grammar school, I was the first Asian or even non-white to enter that school. So therefore, I was a big curiosity to everybody, you know, everybody from the first grade down. My teacher was Miss Lavin, L-A-V-I-N, and she was really, really kind, I mean nice to me, because she knew because I had very limited amount of English because English was not spoken in the house. So I learned very quickly English, you know, very quickly and got to know what it is, and the teacher took special time to try to teach me, you know, get me up to grade on my speaking ability. So, and also my father didn't know when school was started, so I got started in almost like, I guess he find out, found out that I was supposed to be in school a little late. [Laughs] I think school had started in January and I got to school in February or something like that, February as I can remember, and school was walking distance from my house. And I made a lot of friends in school and lot of the boys liked to get to know me because I was, looked different than others and so on. I still have friends that, from grammar school. His name is John Beema who comes down, John Beema who comes down here from time to time to visit me from Tacoma. He lives in Tacoma. He's married to a Korean girl. And then I have other friends that, grammar school friends here but I don't get to see them too often. Your friends change as you grow older.

JC: So you were kind of a curiosity when you were young because you were Asian. Did you, do you feel you experienced prejudice at that age?

SN: No. I didn't feel any prejudice at that age. That's very, very interesting. I think... I think prejudice comes up, flares up when there are more than a small group. Let's say there are more, a lot more of the people around. The other very important thing is that... that people don't realize is that if you don't see another Asian face, all right, then you don't think that you are Asian because everybody's white, everybody's white. And so it doesn't come to your mind that you're Asian, all right, if you're the only Asian. That is very important, I think, in my whole life of growing up, you see, growing up not thinking that you're Asian. I think it reflects on my school, and it reflects on my life and the way I talk because, you know, if you're in the ghetto, you know you're Japanese or you're Korean or whatever. You're different than the others. You realize that because you see it. So when I got to Washington High School, I started feeling that, and then a certain amount of prejudice starts showing up. It's amazing that the neighborhood my father built the house had, no one objected to my father and mother moving in, in Fifty-eighth and Burnside. This is a blue collar area, it's a blue collar. There was a physician down the street on the same street, Dr. Rose. But anyway, but the neighbors were all very friendly, very acceptance. Next door was a Norwegian immigrant, Norwegian couple named Olsen. And next door to that was Marlow who was a fireman, and he was very friendly, and on the corner was Ward. I can remember these people. Mr. Ward who was a delivery man for the Journal newspaper and did all the delivery work, heavy truck work and so on, and everybody was very friendly. We did, we did have a little gang, gang wars, throwing pears or apples and so on at each other. That was probably the extent of gang war in those days.

JC: So you said that you didn't sort of experience your "Japaneseness" until high school at Washington High School. Then how did you experience that? What was it that made you recognize that you were different?

SN: Well, when I see other Japanese, then you realize you're Japanese too. And then there is where the break started, the prejudice starts to bring up. I was taking public speaking and some of this... we're play acting, all right, boy and girl play acting. I was the only Japanese boy in that class. Now, we had to, you know, play acting was like asking a girl to marry you or some kind of a thing, one of those things. So the teacher was in quandary of which girl that I should be doing that because she didn't want to have the mother and father saying that, "You have a little Jap boy doing this lovemaking to my daughter." But there was one girl who was rather friendly to me, constantly friendly from way back and he knows that, so he used that girl. That was the first time I felt there was prejudice in high school.

JC: And what year are we talking about right there?

SN: We're talking about 1940, '39, '40, '41. As you know, there was a certain amount of anti-Japanese feeling flaring up. And when you went to prom and so on, you're supposed to take a Japanese girl. I didn't. I was kind of shy about asking any of the Japanese girls because they were, they were shy themselves. I can't remember the details, but I did end up with a girl for prom which I was embarrassed about. [Laughs] But anyway, that's why. So I went to, from there went to University of Oregon, and there were quite a few Japanese Americans, Niseis, Niseis at that place, and we stayed. Of course, none of the frats would allow Japanese in there. So I stayed at the student dorm, and there were several, there were quite a few Japanese Americans, Niseis, going to University of Oregon at that time. Of course that was 1940.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.