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LH: Well, going more then to your academic life at the U, what did you decide to study once you got there?

FG: Oh, I had my life, I had my heart set on becoming a medical technologist. And then so that's what I started off in, and my mother kept asking me what are you doing, and I tried to explain to her. She said is that like a nurse and I thought, well, kind of. Is it working in the hospital? Yes. "You know, Fumiko, you've never been really very strong so therefore I don't think that that's a very good thing for you, besides you probably will be getting married, right?" Right. So anyway, I switched to home ec. But I didn't want to be a dietitian 'cause I was more interested in the art side, but still anyway I took all of these food courses. So now I call it food technology. I never did anything. Oh, I know what I was going to say. Then I thought what am I going to do with home ec? And then so I thought the only thing you can do with it because we couldn't do demonstration as a home economist, right. I didn't think I'd want to do anything like that anyway so I thought okay, teaching. Everybody was in, everybody was in education. Everybody was teaching. So I thought okay. And then I think the first, I guess, the first couple of courses I took a week we went to visit the schools, and I looked up at the students and they were all taller than I was. Everybody. And I thought, I cannot discipline these people. They're too big. [Laughs] I thought no, I can't do this so I don't know.

Then I started wondering about what I was going to do and then by that time I was a junior. And my dad thought I ought to visit, make a visit to Japan so I went to Japan. And then I really knew that's not what I wanted to do. [Laughs] But actually I had a... Oh, one of the things we did in the first couple of years in college was every time our grades started dropping, we would take Japanese [Laughs] and raise our grade point. But it just happened that one of my professors was Dr. Richard McKinnon and it just happened that when I was in Japan in 1955 Dr. McKinnon was there on a Fulbright scholarship. And so I talked to him about staying in Japan and going to school, and he says, "Well, first of all, don't do it half. Go back and then come back. Go back and finish your degree at the U and then come back and do further studies." So then that got me thinking that I really didn't want to go into home ec, I really didn't want to teach, I didn't know really what I wanted to do. But then I wanted to do something that had to do with Japan because I wanted to go back. And so I came back and I took, to finish off my courses I took more Japanese courses. And then I ended up with a kind of a major and a minor type of thing, and it was really a bachelor of arts, bachelor of science degree in food technology with a minor in Japanese. What do you do with something like that? So then right after that, after I graduated I went to work as a file clerk at the telephone company. Doesn't that sound fitting?

LH: That's an interesting, interesting sort of weird path that you took in terms of choosing your major. And one of the things that struck me there was what your mother had said was that, in high school that you were saying that they actually did want you to get a good education. But once you got to college that your mother actually said that's not really a good major for you, it wasn't a good career decision, that you were going to get married anyway. Do you think that that was sort of...

FG: Inconsistency? I don't know. It didn't bother me because what it is is that it depended on what I wanted to do, right? My life, the way I led my life from day-to-day, from morning 'til night, my mother could tell me, could give me advice and tell me how to do that, right? But when it came to the bigger things in life then it was my father, and my father always, he always encouraged me to go to school. It really puzzled me because I was a girl and why would he want a girl educated? That's what I used to wonder, but it didn't bother him at all.

LH: So your father always encouraged you to go get an education.

FG: Uh-huh. And then I told him, I told him when I was in Japan when I was a junior that I wanted to stay, and I wanted to go to school in Japan. And my father said good, sure, why don't you. But my mother didn't think I should and so I didn't.

<End Segment 38> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.