<Begin Segment 4>

MR: When... where did you go to school as a youngster?

MY: I went to school in Los Angeles. We left South Pasadena when I was maybe one or two years old, so I grew up attending the Los Angeles schools. And we moved around several times, so I attended several elementary schools. But I was at Virgil Junior High School in the Hollywood area when the war broke out, and then we went to camp.

MR: When you were in school in Los Angeles, there were several so I guess just kind of the overall picture, were there other Japanese children in school with you?

MY: Oh, yes. There were always a lot of Japanese children. There were blacks and Latinos. It was always an integrated community.

MR: What sort of social life did you have in the lower grades?

MY: Very little because my parents were both working, and so my sister and I, we'd stay at school. In California because the weather is good, they always had an after school program, and the kids could stay at the playgrounds, and they would have supervisors there. And we'd stay there until it was getting dark or the time that we thought our parents would be coming home, and then we'd go home and because we were left on our own a good deal of the time. We didn't go to Japanese schools as a lot of other children did, but we stayed and played with our friends and then came home and studied and entertained ourselves.

MR: Was there a Japanese community that you identified with in that area?

MY: There was a Japanese community, but I think we closely identified with the Okinawans more. We lived for the weekends so to speak. We had a lot of friends in the area too, but they were busy with things like going to Japanese school after their regular schools ended, so we had some friends, but we didn't spend that much time with them. We did go to, I went to church, Sunday school, and made friends there, and then we formed a social club later on, but we didn't have the programmed activities like they do nowadays.

MR: Where did you, where did your family other than the produce that your parents could have gotten for cooking did you find Japanese food? Was there a store specializing in that?

MY: There were several stores. There weren't too many nearby, but in Los Angeles, in the Los Angeles area, you could buy fish from the fish man. He'd come by several times a week with his truck full of fish and tofu and several special Japanese items, and the housewives would wait for him to come by. And it was always exciting to have Mr. Fujimoto come by with his truck, and he would give us little chips of ice to suck on. And then for the big Japanese marketing, we'd go into town. But since my mother and father had this produce stand which was a part of a regular grocery store, we were able to get our staple items and most of our groceries right there.

MR: When summertime came, how did you spend your days?

MY: Well again, we were on our own, but we had a lot of friends, and we played the games like jump rope and hopscotch, and we made mud pies. In those days too, we felt fairly safe, you know, walking, just children walking around the neighborhood. And I can remember my friends and I taking doll buggies and our dolls for a ride, and we'd go for several blocks, and it seems that we used to wander much farther than I would have preferred to have my children go. I would have disallowed that for my own kids, but we got by all right.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.