Earlier in the elementary and junior high school, we were kind of forced to go to Japanese school and things just to learn. In high school, I really didn’t do that anymore. But still, my parents would speak a lot of Japanese to us. So I would be able to kind of understand that. And also, I guess when I was in junior high school and elementary school, my grandparents, my father’s parents, were living with us for a while. They definitely did not speak any English at all. So in order to communicate with them, it had to be in some kind of Japanese, broken English form. All of that was part of, I guess, my language understanding or education as far as Japanese.
I never, unfortunately, really embraced trying to learn it more, which I really regret right now because of the things we’re doing now and also just my relationship with things that’s in Japan. Although, fortunately, when I do travel in Japan, things kind of come back after a while.
Date: January 26, 2005
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Art Hansen, Sojin Kim
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
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