<Begin Segment 6>

DF: I think you stopped, we stopped the conversation last with Dennis going to UH.

AT: U of H, uh-huh. He left and I went to school. I continued to go to school at Niramasu, graduated from Niramasu High School, spent another year there because I couldn't decide what I wanted to do with myself and, because in those days, the boys were sent to college but the girls were not. Well, after a year, my father decided perhaps he better send me to college because I was doing nothing. And I did work at, I did work as a typist at, in a very, oh goodness, I wish I could remember, but General Ridgeway was the commanding general at the time, and I worked there as a typist, and I was given the job of handling or documenting classified information. So I was to destroy, type, destroy some things and not destroy others and keep track of where they all went. Well, I destroyed everything. I had no idea what I was doing. They didn't tell me that this took some skill to know what was top secret, what was classified. I destroyed it all, but I don't think they cared. But I only worked there for about three months, and I decided I better go back to school, get a skill, get an education, and so I did. I spent another year in school so I could go on to college. When I finally decided to leave, I chose rather than, I went to Hawaii and spent a year there going to school there, decided I really didn't like it. It wasn't, in Hawaii at that time, Japanese people weren't treated as well as I had been accustomed to being treated. I was not a second-class citizen. The kids in our school accepted that. I wouldn't. We had a Caucasian instructor, and he kept telling us how crude and rude and ignorant we were, and I just couldn't, I just didn't think he needed to tell us that. That just was not so, and so I decided that after I told him off a couple of times that I didn't need to go to school there. It was a very small community college.

And after a year, I left that school and went to the University of Hawaii, no, Oregon State University. I decided I could do that trip by myself and flew to, in those days, the military gave you the transportation to go from, if you were going to school, they would fly you anywhere you wanted to go, and that was part of their way of educating their kids. As soon as everyone graduated from high school in Japan, they all left and went home to the mainland, to the United States to school, so I did the same. I left and chose Oregon State because that was the school that was close to the coast, and it was something that, oh, I know. I didn't have to pay out-of-state tuition because it was reciprocal to the students from Oregon State, Oregon, the State of Oregon to go to Hawaii without paying out of state. I could go to Oregon State without paying out of state, so I chose Oregon State. At the time that I was leaving, someone asked me where I was going and I said well I'm going to Oregon State. You know, it's a little city outside in Washington. I had no idea Oregon was a state of its own. That doesn't speak well for my education, but I learned, and it was the most wonderful experience to come to Oregon.

I got into, they flew me, it took forever because of course we came in a propeller plane. We had to stop. We flew from Japan, Tokyo to Guam, Guam to Midway, Midway to Hawaii, Hawaii to San Francisco, San Francisco to Oregon. It took forever. Once I finally reached, when I got to San Francisco, someone was to meet me. Well, they weren't there because they had gone to a different airport, so I sat there thinking, "Now what am I going to do?" I didn't know how to use the telephone because we didn't have telephones with the, what are they called, ABCs. We just didn't have that. I had no idea how to use it, so I just sat and waited. And while I waited, here were all these young kids around me. I'm sure they were fine, but to me, they didn't seem fine at all. I was very threatened all by myself sitting there. Finally, my friends came. It was the most, it was the biggest relief to have them there to take me home to their home, give me a shower because I was just a mess, and then I finally, they then the next morning got me to the airport again to send me on to Corvallis. But the most wonderful thing was I got to Eugene, Oregon, got off the plane, and took a bus to Corvallis, and it was the most wonderful sight I'd ever seen. There were apple trees and fruit trees everywhere. It was the most thrilling sight in the world to me because in Japan whenever we did that, we'd go, in Japan when you wanted to pick fruit, you went to a farmer's orchard, and every fruit you picked was covered with paper to protect it from the insects and the weather, and every fruit you picked, you paid for, dearly. And so here you were in Oregon, and it was everywhere. There were fruit trees and pears and apples everywhere. It was truly the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen. I finally felt at home there.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.