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AI: So today is October 9th, 2002, and earlier today we had a group interview with Mitsuye May Yamada and her brothers Joe and Tosh Yasutake, but now we're continuing with an individual interview portion with Mitsuye. I'm Alice Ito from Densho and videographer is Dana Hoshide. And... all this morning we were referring to you as May --

MY: [Laughs]

AI: So maybe you'd like to say a little about your name.

MY: Why my name was -- well, actually my name isn't changed. My whole name was Mitsuye May Yamada -- Yasutake. My father, you know, I think my brothers, when they were little, called me Mi, you know, which was short of Mitsuye, Mitsuye. And my dad says, "Well, actually your middle name is Mei," which is the Chinese pronunciation of the first character of my name, Mitsuye. And so that my name was, my full name was Mitsuye, M-I-T-S-U-Y-E, Mei, M-E-I, Yasutake. And I remember when I first went to high school and wrote my full name down, the teachers looked at this name, this very, you know, the first name is very long and foreign-looking, the last name is very long and foreign-looking, and "Mei" looks very foreign-looking, too, when it's spelled M-E-I. And so I remember thinking at that time, well, I think what I'm going to do is drop Mitsuye. I can't do anything about Yasutake, and I would just change Mei to M-A-Y, which would be then very pronounceable to anybody and it didn't -- May Yasutake didn't seem as formidable, I thought. So, so I became "May" from there on. And then my family has always called me May. They called me Mi and then it was very simple to start calling me May. So, and to this day they all call me May. And they're practically the only people who call me May, I think, except perhaps some old friends from, some really old friends from Seattle still call me Mitsuye because I was Mitsuye as I was growing up. But, so it's kind of all the saga of stories of our names, name change. Actually, I didn't change it like some people -- or take on an English name to Eng-, in order to have an English name. I simply changed the spelling of it. [Laughs]

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.