<Begin Segment 26>

MR: I just have one more question.

HY: Okay.

MR: Earlier, you spoke about growing up in two cultures.

HY: In what?

MR: In two cultures.

HY: Oh, yeah.

MR: One fluent in the traditional samurai-type thinking and the other fluent in the individualistic American culture, both hard working, but very different.

HY: Oh, yes.

MR: Can you talk about that experience?

HY: Well, I'd have to modify that a little bit, Margaret, because I wasn't all that proactive. Min was and some of my other siblings were. I wasn't. I was one of these nice guys, quiet, not... Japanese have a saying, "The nail that sticks up gets pounded down." Well, I was like that, and I didn't want to get pounded down, so I was quiet and unobtrusive, generally speaking. But, and this is typical Japanese culture to maybe Southeast, maybe it's East Asian culture because I understand the Chinese were like that too. They don't want to draw attention, so I'll be filial, I'll be pious, obey the law, respect authority and so on. And that's the way I was in the Anglo culture too. I mean that's why most, for example, teachers thought, well, it was because, we were quiet and well behaved, did our lessons and all, but we were kind of Pollyannaish, but we didn't know any better. That's the way we were brought up. That's the way we were reared because that's the way our parents were reared, so respect your teachers, you know. They're giving you everything they can for your own good. It's not for their own, so respect them. And same thing with the government and the law and the President and the police chief and even the American Legion until I knew better. So the American culture is that for me, again, personal opinion, personal observation is that it went fine until the dating age. When I say dating age, sixteen, seventeen, because in my experience --and I speak only again for Hood River and for me -- that when it came to the dating age, social contact with the opposite sex stopped, and we did not go to, we did not date Caucasian girl. I didn't date any Caucasian girl, no Caucasian man ever dated a Hood River girl in my knowledge. We dated each other. We were Japanese to Japanese, Caucasian to Caucasian, so there was a tremendous dichotomy there, not a dichotomy, a great difference. I mean, that's when the culture really became evident to me. I've never known a single Nisei in Hood River that ever, ever went out with a white person, either way, either sex. It just stopped because it worked both ways from the Anglo community and from the Japanese community because the Japanese community were in their way provincial and insular to the nation as well. If they don't like it, you don't, you shouldn't be hanging out, and besides, we're proud people of the Yamato race. You know, we're great people, so we don't have to mix with these people who don't want us. And of course the Anglo says, "Well, these are just dirty Japs, you know. These are just FOB, fresh off the boat. They breed like rats and they smoke and they drink and they whore around, and they're no good people, so don't associate with, you're lowering yourself." So from around the dating age, that never happened. To my knowledge and to this day, I don't think, I still think it's true. I've never heard otherwise. It maybe peculiar to Hood River because remember that was a small agricultural community, and you know, everybody knew everybody, and it didn't do to go around with a "Jap kid." You know, it's okay if it is "Jap boy" and "Jap girl," I mean "Jap girl," "Jap boy" or Caucasian boy and a "Jap boy" or a "Jap girl" and a Caucasian girl, but it didn't do otherwise. So that was the way I look at it, and that's the way I remember it.

[Interruption]

HY: Well, I'm not sure this is not a fable, but for many, many years when Min was living in Denver, he'd come and visit, we'd notice on one finger, he had a very long fingernail. I mean really long, maybe, oh, half inch or inch long, and I never thought anything of it. He'd dig his ear with it, and he says, "That's real good for digging your ears." And sometimes he'd even clean out his pipe with it, because he was a pipe smoker, and he says, "It's very handy for that." But it turned out according to the legend -- and I think this is kind of a fable, it is a fable, but he says when he was first in the Multnomah County jail for a solid month, they would neither let him cut his hair nor his fingernails, so they both grew shaggy, unkempt, long, disheveled, and ugly. So in commemoration, in memory of that period a one month time when he was in solitary confinement, not allowed to shave, not allowed to cut his hair, not allowed to clip his fingernails, he kept that little pinky fingernail long to remember how that one month was in the Multnomah County jail, that fingernail. That's the story, an apocryphal story, I think, but that's it.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.