<Begin Segment 20>

AI: So we're continuing our interview with Mitsuye Yamada and just before our break we were just on the point where your husband had been transferred to Pasadena and you had reluctantly agreed to leave New York, move to California and your mother was living with you in New York at the time and she was --

MY: She moved out to California with us and then my daughter, Hedi, my youngest daughter Hedi Yamada was born in Pasadena in 1961. And so, and my son, the following year my older son started kindergarten at -- and I put him in, we were members of the Episcopal Church, the local Episcopal Church that had a, elementary school, parochial school that was being run by the sisters of, the convent was next door of the Episcopal -- the Sisters of the Episcopal Church. And so I was quite active in the school board and tried to, I felt like I needed to do something with my education and I was trying to help with the curriculum change in the school. They were still using rather old books in the school and I just really felt like they needed some, I knew there were some new theories of linguistics and so forth that I had kind of picked up in the meantime, in New York and Columbia University when I was taking linguistics. So I said yeah, there were all kinds of changes going on, you know, you have to keep up with that. So that was fun to become involved in that. And --

AI: You know, excuse me, that's interesting to me because it seems like such a huge change in your home life circumstances from New York to Pasadena --

MY: Pasadena, right.

AI: I was going to ask you about that change and that kind of getting adjusted to being in California and your new home.

MY: Well, I didn't really like -- I didn't, California felt very foreign to me. For one thing the flora, you know, the plants looked different. I mean, everything about palm, you know, the palm trees and so on. I don't know, you just really get, you really -- unlike moving from one part of the eastern seacoast to another, or even Chicago, California feels very different from any other part of the country. Everything about it. And I didn't even, and I don't even know whether the people were different or... but it was just, yeah.

AI: What kind of neighborhood did you move into?

MY: We moved into an all-white neighborhood which was, I mean literally all-white. Except perhaps -- and one of the, one of the... Hedi's, my youngest daughter's classmates, I think by 1965 or so when she started pre-, when she was going to kindergarten at Ascension, one of her classmate's father was black. But I think he might have been the only black person in the whole area. In the whole town there. And so when, there was the issue of the Fair Housing bill that came out as a result of the Supreme Court decision on segregation, integration, in 19-, I believe it was 1963. And I had a couple of friends at the church. There were two women who were very active in the church who -- and the bishop, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, I think at that time had made a speech that all the churches in the Episcopal Church should get behind the Fair Housing bill because it, because it was kind of a controversy about whether or not the Fair Housing bill was a moral issue or a racial -- you know, was a political issue or a moral issue, okay, there (were) two different things. Some of the conservatives were saying oh, that's a political issue, churches should not get mixed up in politics, and therefore the church should stay out of it. But then the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who was the highest authority in the church said no, he believes that the Fair Housing bill is a moral issue and that all the churches should get involved in it and there should be discussion in the church about it and so forth. Which was kind of a liberating thing. So two of the women that I was very close to were very active in the church. In fact, decided that we would try to persuade the minister who was a single man, somewhat conservative and I don't think he's ever confronted anything like this before. But he was very amenable to listening to people's decisions. So he, then he became quite involved -- you know, and then when the, his boss, you know, the presiding bishop -- he was asked to give a, to permit a performance of a play that was written by a Unitarian minister's wife, I think, on interracial relationship and interracial marriage, something like that, in the church, and that just created a great problem. It's, almost, it almost broke the congregation in two. And so at that time we had petitions that the Fair Housing bill that we were going to -- I forgot what the source of those petitions were, but when a couple of my friends decided that we would try to get petitions from the neighbors and so forth to have the church and also the general community support this Fair Housing bill.

And my mother in the meantime was very lonely, because she didn't know anybody in California, but there was a Japanese community in Sierra Madre, a very small community, apparently they were there from before the war. And they were kind of clustered in one area, I remember, and so I used to take my mom up there to visit her friend and so one day I took her up there and I took the petitions and I thought well, I'm going door to door around my neighborhood, go door to door to see if people would sign the petition. And I was kind of astounded, dumbfounded actually, when many of the people were very polite but they said they couldn't sign it because they have tried very hard to blend into the community, they have been accepted by the community, they've been there for a long, long time. I'm kind of a "Johnny come lately," you know, a new person in the community, and they felt that they didn't want to make waves. They thought that it might create dissension, and maybe hostile feelings toward the Japanese. I, I think that I was a little bit taken aback because I was sort of naive about... I had never really lived in a Japanese, you know, this closed community, and I really didn't have any awareness, I guess, kind of intolerant in my attitude towards... I was a little bit shocked actually.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.