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MR: After high school, what direction did you take?

YD: Well, when I was sixteen in looking back, before I was sixteen, when I was fifteen, I remember my father took me to the hop fields that summer, and he was sort of a broker because of his education and because of his background that he was able to, I guess you'd call it a broker. He was able to get people to work for him in the hop fields, and he would hire the Japanese single men and the Filipinos, and he would never have any of us girls go to those camps because it was not the thing to do. But when I was fifteen, he took me to the camp and... I get kind of weepy. I think he knew then that he wanted to send me to Japan, and I had a wonderful time with my father. And it's also interesting to know that I met Mr. Koida when he had just come back from Japan, and he worked there with us, and I had a picture of him which I gave him later on, and he was happy about that. But in looking back, I think that he wanted me to enjoy being with him before he sent me to Japan. And then when I was sixteen, he wanted me to go to Japan to study for two years, and it was Matsushima's grandfather, Masaburo Matsushima, took me to Japan to study, and I went to a place called Gifu which is next to Nagoya, and I stayed there with my uncle and aunt for the next few years to study.

MR: And did you graduate from high school, then, in Japan?

YD: I graduated from high school in Japan. But since I was older than the other students, my life in Japan was the turning point of my life. I arrived in Japan on April the 1st. And to me, I remember I was, when I arrived in Yokohama, my aunt and a cousin came after me, and I thought to myself, "This is April Fool's Day. What's going to happen for the rest of my life?" And of course, my aunt was in Japanese clothes, and here, I was in American clothes. I thought, oh, what's going to happen with me, and that's when my whole life changed. And because of my age, I was not able to go into a regular high school, and so I was very privileged. My uncle and aunt were quite well-to-do and very well-known in their town. So the first education process that I went through was every morning I would get up and go to the elementary school there, and I was taught Japanese by the principal, which when you think back on, it was very privileged thing for me to do. And the first thing that I remember is when I was, my aunt took me there for the first day. And when you enter into the school grounds, there is a huge gate that's opened during the school hours, and in front of the school, there's a huge Emperor's emblem in gold. And when you walk into the gate, the first thing you do is you bow and show respect to the school and to the Emperor's emblem. Well, being American, I thought, "What in the dickens am I doing bowing to somebody or something that I didn't even know anything about?" But my aunt kept on saying, "This is something you have to do because in Japan you show honor and respect to the Emperor." And so the first day when she took me, I had on my hat and I had on my gloves like the proper Japanese American girl would do, and she said, "Take your hat off, take your gloves off." And I said, "What is going on?" But I was very obedient. So every day that I would go to school which I did go every day for five days a week in the morning, first thing, I would go into the school and I would bow, and I would be so embarrassed, thinking who's watching me. But of course, by the time I went to school, all the children had gone into the classes, and no one was there. And I would go into the principal's office and wait for him to come, and he would teach me until noon. And during the interval, if he had things he had to do, then of course, he would leave. But it was very hard for me because the only, actually Japanese that I knew in my formative years in Portland was like itadakimasu or gochisosama, the little formalities that every Japanese child knew. But because I was the fourth child and my sisters were all going to high school, all we did was talk in English at home, and so my Japanese were very, very limited when I went to Japan.

But going to school for my first Japanese classes, it was at the elementary school. And when I began to learn more and was able to speak better, then they had me go in to a retired elementary school teacher, and there I would go every morning after I finished going to the principal's office. I would go there, and she would teach me all the niceties of Japanese language, and I went to social studies, history, and I was there for, actually for three years every morning. But I had a very rigid learning experience because in the mornings, I would go to Mrs. Tanaka's home to learn my studies, and I would come home and have lunch. Then in the afternoons, I had to go to a temple and learn how to sew Japanese kimonos, and that was from probably one to five o'clock. And then I would come home and take a bath, and then I had to go to another class and learn the flower arranging. And so my whole life was just one class after another, and I think that's what really gave me the incentive of beginning to know myself more than I ever knew myself in America because there was no feeling of competitiveness that I had when I was growing up. And so I was very interested in learning, but I did have a hard time because, of course, it was, you had to learn thousands of the kanji, the Chinese characters, before you could even read or write. And I'm going forward, but I remember that when they, I was looking at the Japanese newspaper and I saw these characters, aoi toshi, which means literally green years. And so I told my aunt, I said, Obasama, I said, "I could read this." I said, "This is green years." And she said, "No, it's not aoi toshi. It's called seinen." And I said, "Seinen, what does that mean?" And she says, "It's the same thing, but it means young years." And that's when I began to think, wow, there's two ways of reading the Japanese characters. It means the same thing, but it has different, it has the same meaning, but it has different sounds. And I remember so well that that's when I really thought, wow, in Japan, there's meaning to all the different characters and not just sounds. But I thought "green years" is really youth. And so that's when I really began to study Japanese with vim and vigor, and those are the kinds of things I remember very well.

MR: You mentioned that you felt different in your western clothes when you got there. What happened to your western clothes?

YD: Well, you have to remember that was seventy years ago. And where I lived, this was the first time that any Japanese American had gone there, gone back to Japan to study, and so I was a great novelty, and I was written up in the papers quite frequently. Somewhere in the house, I have copies of those papers. But during that time, whenever I walked through the streets to go to school, the children of the village would follow me. And you see these in a lot of the documents, documentaries of an American going into a foreign country and seeing all the children following them. That's the way it was. And so my aunt and uncle said, "No, you can't do this because you draw too much attention." And so they made me wear Japanese clothes. And life was very strict, but I remember my aunt said, "You can choose your own zori," the footwear. And she took me to this shop, and I chose a pair of black zori, and she laughed, and she said, "Those are for older people. You have to wear something red." And I thought, wow, she tells me I can choose something, but I really can't choose things. I have to be very rigid, and I have to conform. And so in order not to draw attention... I had curly hair at that time. It was natural, and she would comb my hair in the morning to make it straight. And being sixteen, seventeen in America, I started polishing my nails, and she said, "You can't polish your nails." I had sterling silver bracelets that were given to me when I left, and she said, "That makes noise, you can't use those." You can't wear lipstick, and everything was conformity, conformity which to me, I think was a very good thing for me because it was something that I think I enjoyed doing because it was the thing to do.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.