<Begin Segment 8>

SG: Did you speak English or Japanese with your brother and sisters?

BO: Well brother and sister, we spoke mostly English, but the folks were all Japanese. They think different.

SG: Your parents never spoke English?

BO: Huh?

SG: Your parents didn't speak English?

BO: No, mostly English, I mean Japanese, but outside was, they speak English. I made it all mixed up now. They speak Japanese at home, but sometime, they speak English in, business and stuff like that, market or store. That's old days.

SG: So your first language was Japanese growing up?

BO: Japanese, yeah, Japanese. So I go, when I was five and a half years old, little bit too old, too young, so they told me to stay home. When I was six, I went back and started speaking a little bit of English. But that's when the girls start to tease me, so I probably kicked one. So they tell you to stand in the corner, so they let me stand, made me stand in the corner, but I had no way of telling the teacher that I got to go, so I wet my pants. And the teacher said, "You better go home." So two and a quarter, two and a half miles to home, country road, so they told my sister, told her that she's excused to take me home.

SG: So then kindergarten, you couldn't speak any English?

BO: No, none, all Japanese.

SG: How did you survive that first year?

BO: I don't know. Little after you enter, you just play around, then you pick it up because your brothers are speaking English at home. Then finally, you catch on and start playing. It's rough.

SG: Were there other Japanese kids in your school other than your family?

BO: Yeah. There was one, two, two of them I guess, scattered around the country, but very few.

SG: Was it hard to make friends with the Americans for you?

BO: Make friends, they were kind of scared like, but they liked to tease us. The boys weren't too bad, but the boys were kind of like to, like saying the ice cross to the creek, you know. Oh yeah, we walk across that, come on, and they make you, ask you to walk across just so you step on the ice, you break through, all wet and cold, or make us chew the tar that's on the concrete pavement across the road. You take a tar out and start chewing. They said, "Good for your teeth." Or they'll take all the tree seed, you know. They said, "This is the Indian tobacco," and then roll it up like a Bull Durham, and start oh man, say oh, that's good for you. That's how they, like chewing tobacco or smoking, they say, "Come on, have one." And the older kids, hakujin kids, they used to play all kinds of tricks.

SG: So did you have any hakujin friends?

BO: That time? Oh, yeah. I had friends. We'd play or we'd go to school together or come home together. We had friends.

SG: What kind of things did you do together?

BO: If we were outside, we play [inaudible] or marbles or we used make beanie or try to hit a target, stuff like that which is illegal. We start playing game. Game was a lot of fun, softball. We used to really play hard.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.