<Begin Segment 13>

AC: When you came to school, were you like the only Japanese students in school?

JS: Well, generally. At Carver we had, we took eight grades at Carver school. In the recent addition of the Clackamas County Historical Society, they had a book on it, on the old A's. And in that book there's two pictures, and my friend from Milwaukie sent me this copy, there's two pictures of Carver Grade School in there, two classes, and I'm in both those pictures. [Laughs] Four years apart, one was when I was a first grader and one was as a fifth grader. The fifth grade, I was in the big room, they called it. We had two classrooms of four, four classes in each room, then we had a dividing, a sliding, folding door between the two rooms. Then it became an auditorium, when we wanted to have a Christmas program, things like that. Now, I got along with this one problem that I had a habit of mouthin' off. I got, I was the smartest kid in the class all the time, through the eight grades. I think I was. [Laughs] But I never was, some teachers, I never their pet because I used to mouth off and God, I had a, my last teacher, she was a good teacher, but she used to swat me with a ruler sometime, across my hands or slap me across my ears. But she taught me something, that there's a limit to how much you oughta open your mouth. And so I learned, that's kind of the way I grew up in life, I think. I'd have to, I'd even argue in my family and everything, and they put up with me, but I guess, that's, I guess it's not an uncommon thing because maybe your kids inherit a certain amount of that. We have three kids and they're all different. Some of 'em, you could slap 'em all day and you'd do nothing, but the other ones, why, they fight you back and... and fortunately we end up with three kids that love us. They call us every week, now everybody calls us once a week at least, to see if we made it through another week alright. But we have, our family, my family -- and I'm just talking about my own family now -- there's lots of love in the family, and we just are fortunate that way.

But as the only Japanese family in a community, it... and these people are kind of backwards, you know. We only lived fifteen miles from Portland, but there was old-growth timber out there. There were logging trucks, they were logging right around us. I can remember going to bed at night and looking out the window, seeing a big forest fire across the road from us. And we had little logging trucks, Fords and Chevys and stuff like that, haul one log at a time to Milwaukie. And they used to slide 'em down, have, they'd build wooden slides off the hills and slide the logs down to the loading ramp, and everything was loaded by PVs, tools, bars. But it was quite an interesting area that we lived in, on the road to [inaudible]. It was a narrow two-lane road, but it was a good road, and the life was good out there and the people were, the neighbors were just as good as, I think just as good as they could be, being as close as they could get to us, because socially, why, we didn't have any social life with them. But we can get, I mean, we can go there, to some neighbor lady. We'd go to play there with kids, and she'd make us some, she just got some bread out of the oven, make us hot jelly and peanut butter sandwiches and stuff like that, and a glass of milk. We used to just have good times with the kids. But then, the problem in those days was once the kids got out of high school there was no more of this social life together, because then the parents were worried about -- kids fool around socially at that age, right? That was a no-no, even amongst our own people, I think. And then amongst our own people, why, it was kind of a situation where it was kind of rough in a lot of those communities 'cause if you asked a girl for more than one date her parents gonna want to know what you're doing round there. And this is in the Portland area. You go to different parts of Portland, you'll find different situations. But, like the Gresham, Troutdale area, it was one of 'em that was a tough area too. But when we lived out here, gee, if you wanted a date round here I might have to go forty miles to pick up a date, 'cause we didn't, we didn't... interracially. That was, that's why all the, a lot of, my generation of people are not very social, I think, on account of that. They're just amongst their own people. So we have, I got veterans of the 442nd live around here, who don't associate with their Caucasian friends. They live right there and you see 'em in business and maybe some of the women will join the women's clubs or vegetable, garden clubs, things like that, or they'll see their kids, other kids in 4-H projects and something like that. But other than that, they just don't associate. And that, a lot of that is because our people were generally told to keep quiet and listen, our generation was. This is one of the weaknesses of the Japanese people, that there are those of us who mouth off without any problem and those who will never say anything, and they can, they're not able to. They didn't learn how to talk. As opposed to, say, the LDS, man, they teach their kids to talk. And they, but some of 'em may not be as good as the others, but they can all talk. And this is, 'cause a lot of people, we're prejudiced just like any other group, and nobody can ever say that, that we're not prejudiced, because we are. But amongst our people, why, those are who accept things in society the way they are and those who don't accept it. But there you have it. You know, the way our people were pictured too, when war came along, they made all kinds of funny faces and cartoons and everything. I don't know hardly anybody mentions it now, but those days they were talking about Japanese being two-faced. Well, I never realized how true this was, and the manner in which it has to apply, until my wife and I went to Japan. Have you been to Japan?

AC: No, I haven't.

JS: Well, even some parts of Honolulu, where houses are just right close together, some of the housing districts in there that you can spit in each other's windows practically. And you go to Japan, it's all over in these smaller communities, even in substantial, larger communities, they're not very, they're not very, they're not industrial cities, but there're a lot of people living there. And my gosh, my house wall is here and the next house wall is right there, and when I say I can, you can spit in each other's windows, if you had a chaw of tobacco you could. But, and anyway, to live that close to each other and to get along with each other, and everybody keeps everything spic and span, you keep all the weeds cleaned up, no junk laying around in between the homes -- everybody doesn't work on the same level -- but to live that close and see each other 365 days a year, you got to have your, you got to be chewing on your tongue, to keep your, keep from having an argument about this or that. Now, in this country, all that means is trouble, but in Japan they get along easier that way. And when I told my wife, "My gosh, when they say people are two-faced here, I can see what they, it could apply real good," because you're gonna smile at your neighbor, but you're gonna hate what he's not doing or what he is doing. So that's part of life.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.