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HH: All right. Growing up as you did here, there were very few Japanese Americans in Philadelphia.

AO: There were very, very few Japanese Americans and very few Japanese. I think at that time, in the Philadelphia area, the greater Philadelphia area, there must have been about sixty Japanese and Japanese Americans all together. And I can remember many of the family names, and they were scattered throughout the Philadelphia area. South Philadelphia, Philadelphia itself, Ridley Park, Germantown, and of course we were in Abington. It was called Willow Grove at that time because Abington was using the Willow Grove post office in our area.

HH: Did you feel that you knew all the Japanese who lived here?

AO: I felt that we knew all of the Japanese that were here.

HH: How much racial prejudice did you encounter during the times you were growing up here?

AO: It depends on where we're talking. In our immediate community, since we were the only Japanese around, everybody knew our name, practically, and everybody knew of our family, and we did not get too much harassment. However, if you went outside of the general area, the Abington Township area or the area that we lived, you could get some harassment just like any other ethnic group would.

HH: So you went to the public schools in the Willow Grove/Abington area?

AO: Yes.

HH: And after you finished those schools, what did you do?

AO: I went to, I enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in a town school. I went there for two years, and then I was out of school for about a year to get some more money and so forth. And then I transferred to Lehigh. I graduated from Lehigh University in a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.