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AI: Today is October 10, 2002. We're here in Seattle at the Densho office with Mitsuye Yamada. I'm Alice Ito with Densho and videographer is Dana Hoshide. And the last two days, Mitsuye, we were doing a group interview with you and your two brothers, Joe and Tosh Yasutake, and also yesterday we began individually interviewing with you, and at the point that we ended yesterday, it was 1950 and you had gotten married in Chicago. But I wanted to go back in time just a little bit before that, back to still 1945 or so, '44, '45, '46. In those years, your parents, your father and mother and Joe who was still in high school, were living in Cincinnati. And I wanted to ask you about that time, and some of your interaction with your father and his, some of his fears and concerns and remembering also that at this point you also are still a Japanese alien, not eligible for American citizenship.

MY: Yeah, my father had changed quite a bit. You know, he used to be quite a, I think we, in our family history, we talked about what a happy, he was just a happy person. Really such an optimist that my mother, it used to just drive her crazy because my mother was sort of, tended to be the opposite view. And he always never saw the bad side of anybody, he was very, very -- had this sunny disposition. So I think which is why he collected so many friends, you know. People just sort of clustered around him, a social lion, I think, most of his life. And so suddenly he could not get a job. He did get job offers to teach in University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania, I think those two universities, to teach English because he was a Issei, he spoke fluent English. But the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, would not permit him, give him a travel permit to go for a job, interviews to these places. So, and being a person who had become, was an ex-prisoner, he was not able to get any kind of a job except as a gardener. And so my mother, as a housekeeper, and my father was hired as a gardener and handyman. And, which is kind of laughable because he didn't know a single thing about gardening. So my mother had a double burden of doing his job as well as hers, because she used to garden all the time when we were in Seattle. Aside from that, he was -- I think he was in a state of depression, probably, because we didn't -- my mother told me that he would flare up with the smallest little things, you know, would have these temper, temper episodes, tantrums, you know, which was unusual for him. And I remember having a little thing with him, and my mom said, "Well, you know, it took him four and a half years to get this way, and so it might take four and a half years for him to get out of it," you know, was my mother's point, that we just have to -- in other words, you have to be very patient.

And so during this time, I think around 1945, I had struck a correspondence with the brother of my boss who was Ada Gory, the cafeteria manager, she was the manager of the... she was the head cashier at the University of Cincinnati cafeteria. And her brother was a prisoner in a conscientious objectors camp in Trenton, North Dakota, for being a draft resister. He refused to go because he was a pacifist. And so, and they were going to let him out for a couple weeks on what they call a furlough, like the soldiers. So I was talking to my parents, I had to get back because of, I'd been corresponding with this friend of mine and Ada had written to her brother and her brother started writing to me, so we had this really running correspondence before he came, and then we -- so my parents said, "Well, who's this friend of yours?" And I said, "Well, he's coming on furlough." So Dad said, "Oh, he's a soldier," you know, because furlough, soldier. And I said, "No, actually, he's a prisoner at this conscientious objectors camp." And I really didn't have to give them all this information but I was a little naive and I was telling him that this person is really very inspirational, you know, he's very wise and da-da-da. And my dad just blanched, and he said, "Do you mean that you are corresponding with..." you know, and, "You can't, you have to stay away from people like that." His memory of having spent most of the war years, up to that point was very fresh in his mind and also he remembers how he got there. Having associated with certain people and was being questioned, grilled almost, at every hearing about so-and-so who was anti-American. Well, and then he asked me, "Is he hakujin?" You know, "Nihonjin or hakujin?" I said, "No, he's hakujin." Of course, that kind of set them off so my mother was -- my dad thought being hakujin wasn't too bad, but my mom thought that was terrible. So I just was getting it from both sides.

And, but I continued my relationship with Adrian for a very long time after that, but I met him when he came to the dormitory and when I was in Cincinnati, and then when I was in New York City to -- well, I -- were going to on to New York City to NYU, all the GIs were coming back from overseas and taking advantage of the GI Bill to go to school, and they, having missed a few years being in the army, or being in the military. And I had missed a few years being in camp, so we were more contemporaries rather than the seventeen-, eighteen-year-old students, the freshmen in my classes and so forth. So I really hit it off with a group of GIs that, we used to eat in the cafeteria all the time. And they were trying to start a Marxist club and they were trying to get a charter, they were trying to get petitions to show that, you know, enough students on the campus wanted this club and so forth. So my dad came to visit me from Cincinnati, they were still in Cincinnati at that point, my mom and dad came on a sightseeing tour. And so one evening I was telling them that, you know, they were asking me what I was doing, and I told them what courses I'm taking, and I said, "I just met this great bunch of," you know, and I just thought that he would be very happy because these are GIs, they were, they served in the war unlike Adrian, and they're trying to start this Marxist club. [Laughs] And my dad just went through the roof. He said, "Marxist club? Karl Marx! Do you realize what this man stands for? They're Communists." And I'm going, "No, they're theoretical Marxists." I was kind of naive too, they were kind of -- they were philosophical Marxists, they don't have anything to do with the Communist Party, blah-blah-blah. I'm not sure that that was true, but I thought that would kind of assuage his anxieties. But he said, "You don't have your American citizenship. If you want your American citizenship" -- and at that time it was just sort of still in process, of people trying to make it possible for a Japanese to become American citizens -- "You just have to keep your nose clean. You cannot, the kind of people that you associate with, and then the one thing, don't sign your name to anything, no matter how innocent it looks like. Even if it looks like some kind of a petition for some innocent cause or whatever it is, it might, you can get fooled into signing something," because he had gone through all of that with the FBI for years, himself, of things that he had no idea that the FBI was tracking his activities and made a very sinister twist to the most innocent of associations that, friends that he had dinner with and things like that. So he was very conscious of that, so he kept warning me that -- so I think I wrote a poem called "Warning." And, but I didn't sign my name to anything, not even to CODs. [Laughs] I had to go, I just got into this thing where I shouldn't sign my -- write my signature, put my signature on any piece of paper that I didn't know exactly what it was for. So he kind of made me paranoid about that because I did want my American citizenship when it happened. And so I think that was, and I did get my American U.S. citizenship in 19... in nineteen fifty... soon after, well, my dad got his American citizenship soon after the Walter McCarran Act was passed, I think in 1952, and I didn't get my citizenship until several years later, after I got to New York City.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.