<Begin Segment 2>

SG: You talked about your parents' work and how did, and going to school. How did you get to school from your home?

AU: I walked to school. It wasn't that far. So it was probably about half a mile, and we walk to school every day. And then from the English school to the Japanese school after the regular school, we walked again.

SG: With all your friends?

AU: Yes. Because going to Japanese school, they weren't, usually, the Japanese, you know, children went to school. The Japanese school usually, when you get to about high school, because we didn't have a high school in our little town that we had to go to Hilo to go to Hilo High, so then you would be going by bus. And so they didn't, by the time they were done with school and came home on the bus, that it was too late for school. So usually when they started high school, they kind of dropped out of the Japanese school. And it was kind of a, you know, it's a pity because I think we could have continued it would have been fine. But I notice even with that and I thought I was pretty good in Japanese then. But when I went to Japan, when I was about twelve years old, that's when my family decided, well, my dad wanted to return back to Japan, so he decided he was going to take his whole family back and had put me in school there, in Japan. And this school in Japan suggested maybe that I would take some other, some classes in high school, but my father didn't want me to do that. He said, well, he wanted me to go to the sixth grade for one year. I didn't quite go one year because school had already started then, and he wanted me to take an entrance exam to high school in Japan. You have to take an entrance exam to be able to be accepted in the high school. So I went there and I thought my Japanese was pretty good, but the teacher kept on saying, "You have an English accent." [Laughs] But we had to study after the class usually when school was over. After dinner we'd go home, after dinner, and then he would get all these students in his class that were going to take the entrance exam to high school, come over to his home again, and then he would drill us again until about 11 o'clock at night, and then we used to go home. But I sit back now and think, in a way it was very, well, it was fun although it wasn't, you know, when you try to take an exam and especially me, when I, in Hawaii, you don't have a Japanese history and all those that you have to study in order to be able to take the exam. It was hard for me. And in the beginning, I used to cry because it was so difficult. And I can remember the first test that I had when I went to Japan was they had a test, the Japanese anthem, Kimigayo. And it said, write the whole anthem and explain what it says, what it really means, and that was very difficult for me. And then of course, when I went to high school, when I took the entrance exam to high school, my mother, I think, was more nervous than I was because she was there with me, and she was watching from the side. Besides the oral examination, then they also had, they also tested for your physical endurance and so forth, I guess, and they made you run on the balance beam. They made me cross the balance beam, and then they, I had to do the broad jump too. And I almost lost the balance on the balance beam, and I could hear my mother just gasping, but I made it.

I got into high school, and it was called the Shiritsuchigushi Toshikoto Gakuen which was a private school. But the last time when I went to Japan and my girlfriend, her husband was teaching at that high school for quite a while, and she was telling me this. She made me realize that that is the, now considered the best high school in Fukuoka. She said, "Don't you know, you went to the top school?" But after high school, you know, in those days, it was a girls' high school and boys, we did not have co-education then because it was during the war. And I knew when I was going to school that, yes, that was a good high school besides their education being good that I used to see some of these girls that came from a very good family, and they used to have their maids bring their lunches, so forth, come to school. They used to come in cars, you know, where we used to take the streetcar or the bus to school. So they were very, girls from prominent homes like Idemitsu. That's the, their daughter was there. I think they have a great oil company. And girls like Kaijima who was, who owns the great coal mine, you know, and those people, but it was nice. And then we had people from the States that during the war that the Niseis that came home was, and they were there, so we had all kinds of mixture of people which was very nice.

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