Overall, my life has been mostly free of racial assaults and attacks, thankfully nothing physical. Of those that did happen, only a few were direct confrontations. Most of them were sideswipes.

There was nothing of any kind when we first returned from camp, which was in early spring 1945. I learned later that the principal and all the teachers of Mitchell Elementary School had agreed to protect the three of us Japanese kids in school. I think too, it was a different time and children were held to respect their elders and were fearful of getting into trouble if they didn’t. Respect of elders was important in the upbringing of children then, maybe more-so than today, so when all the adults set out to protect us their word was law.

Anyway, I was a six-year-old sensitive to being Japanese and being different because of race, especially because of the war. I started that spring in Miss Peck’s first grade class with half the school year gone, and before the wars in Europe and the Pacific were over. I then progressed into the 2^nd grade in the fall of that year. By that time the war with Japan had just ended. I remember all the kids as friendly, with a handful as close friends. By the time I graduated from the eighth grade in 1952 we were seven years out from the war, and race had faded mostly into the background, and I felt more secure. Even still, race was a shadow in the back of my mind, always ready to leap out at any moment. I was calm with friends among all the kids, but wary of any unforeseen insult or comment. I feared it could happen. It never did.

Since there were eventually five of us Japanese kids in school, and the only girls were my sister Janet and my cousin Peggy, I didn’t date in elementary school. Except I did have one date with this girl, Virginial C., when we were in the eighth grade. She initiated it by inviting me to a birthday party given by her best friend. I was young, very young and naïve, totally ignorant of what girls were like, other than I was with a girl and things that I didn’t know about were happening.

The details of the birthday party are sketchy, but I vaguely have memory traces of playing spin-the-bottle and post office. I had my first kiss at the party, and it is vague in my mind exactly what happened. In spin-the-bottle I think I ended up kissing most of the other girls in addition to Virginia and have no memories of any reluctance on their part in kissing a Japanese boy. I think there were four girls and four of us boys at the party, and I was clealy Virginia’s date.

Where race was likely involved in the experience was in her asking me to meet her at the party instead of me picking her up from home. Actually, Daddy would have driven me to pick her up, and later return her home. At the time I was totally relieved that it was that simple, but in later years it occurred to me that there was likely another reason for this arrangement. She wouldn’t have to introduce me to her parents. Her dad was an officer in the U.S. Air Force stationed at the Strategic Air Command base north of town. It was 1952 and not that long after the war. I suspect she didn’t let her parents know that she was taking a Japanese boy to the party. Afterwards, that very weekend, her dad had been reassigned to an air base in Berlin, Germany, and the family moved immediately to his new assignment, and I didn’t see Virginia ever after the party.

There was one incident that did leave an indelible mark in my memories: Cousin Robert and I were playing beside the road in front of our place when a car drove by, slowed down, and the diver yelled out the window, “Ching, Chong, Chinaman, sitting on a fence…” and drove off. The rest of that sing-song jingle went like this: “…trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents!” – A racist slur and a ding. It was 1946 and Robert was 9 and I was 8. That was the only incident of someone making a slur directly to my face, even though from a passing car. The incident hurt, but at the time Robert and I joked that he was so dumb he didn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese. A common mistake.

In high school, as in grammar school, there were no incidents of racism or racial attacks. This was eight years after the war, and all the Japanese kids in school had grown up after the war with the townspeople and their kids, and for the most part fit into the community. There were some twenty families in the greater community surrounding Livingston, whereas there were only two families in Atwater. I think the greater numbers helped in the assimilation, and the increasing years out from the war helped. For me, I went out for football and track/field and excelled in both, and that meant something in my being accepted by my peers.

When I started at the University of California at Berkeley in 1957, most of my life centered around classes and the Methodist student center, Wesley Foundation, situated on the edge of campus. It was there I met a blond-haired student named Nancy B., and one day I called her intending to ask her out. Her mother answered the phone and asked who I was. I gave her my name, that I was a friend from Wesley Foundation. She said her daughter wasn’t there, but she’d pass along a message that I called. That very next Sunday after church, her father approached me and in clear words said there was no relationship in the future with his daughter, and I should not call again. I didn’t see her at Wesley Foundation after that. Other than this, there were no other overt incidents of racism while I was at Cal.