Transcript

The only thing that I remember was a couple of incidences. One of my neighbors up the street who was a good friend of mine had a birthday party, and she invited this other friend, but she says, “I can’t invite you because you’re Japanese.” And I thought, “Oh, that was awful.” And I was very disappointed. The other thing, I thought, “Well, I’m going to get into some of the activities for kids on the Island.” Well I wanted to join in the Girl Scouts.

I had been in the scouting program before the war. So I went up and asked if I could get back into scouting and they said, I forgot what she said. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry, we’ve got too many in the group,” or something to that effect. She made some kind of an excuse, and I thought, Okay, that’s too bad. So then I said… I asked the kids in the class and I said, I wonder if I could join the Rainbow Girls — that was a Masonic group that the girls used to do a variety of things and they used to have fun. — And so I said… so I asked one of my classmates and she said… she’d asked her mother. And her mother made some phone calls and her mother was told by headquarters that no, I could not join.

So that was three incidents there. Other than that I didn’t run into any discrimination really on the Island. I think, I guess there were a couple of things I guess I couldn’t go. I never got to go to any of the high school dances or things of this sort because of who I was. At least that’s what I thought my problem was, but I don’t know. So that’s …as far as discrimination, no, I really didn’t get into too much of that. And the Islanders on the whole were very, very nice to us.