When I was a child, Japanese was bad. Boys played with you as a target of a machine gun, you were called Jap which was bad and cheap party favores were made in Japan. Now it is different. Still the more vulnerable of my children suffered from ethnic based hate champaigns. Stupid stuff like in Junior high school, an ever present "Jap, Jap, Jap." in the hallways Weakness is so formative at that age. Now that child is going to school with mostly Asians who are wedging their way into American society through mastery of science and math. He realizes that Asian is powerful.
Just like the current understanding of what children understand, we were dressed in clothes that came from the PJ drawer. My sister and I sang a simple Japanese folk song that then we did not understand. Spring is coming, Spring is coming. From the Mountains, from the Valleys. Spring is coming.
As a child, our Japanese associations were limited to our neighborhood, Park Valley and the Japanese Church were we took my Grandfather. The basement was musty, but they provided a Santa Claus at Christmas.
My grandfather at 75 was a guy who shuffled and could not speak English. I had no mercy. If I was teased for being Japanese, so much more should he be teased. I had him chasing me around a circular hall of our small house. He enticed me with lemon drops, but the smell of his room was too much and I wouldn't go.
To this day one of my best friends is a childhood friend from those days. She was 7 years younger so we were not friends in the narrow definition that children have, but her mother went to nursing school with my mother and her father had a crush on her mother's sister so in some stupid mixup, they ended up dating through my father's introduction. She dances, choreographs for Trapize and works as a shiatsu/organ massage healer in New York. Janet Aizawa.
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