<Begin Segment 5>

TI: It just strikes me in the last few minutes, in hearing about your growing up, your childhood, your school. So you were pretty much a straight "A" student, you were a very good athlete in terms of making the varsity team in baseball and basketball. I think you said you were the student body president in both your junior high school and high school.

DM: Uh-huh.

TI: I mean, it -- that sounds very impressive. I mean, it sounds amazing in some ways. I mean, how do you view those years? Was that a fun, fond time for you?

DM: Yeah, except, looking back, I was extremely driven. You know, I look back at that and I, where I mentioned, you know, I wonder why I did that. And I realize why I did it. Gardena promotes this culture of achievement, superior achievement. And it has a culture that could be really, really oppressive at times, and very dangerous to young people. Because the idea is -- it's a community. So parents talk, they talk to each other, oh, my son did this, my daughter did this. And so achievement in every aspect became really important rather than the happiness or the fulfillment of potential of children. You had to achieve along predetermined, pretty set scale, and that would be student government, grades, sports. There, it didn't reward you for being an artist, for example. And one year in Gardena, in, maybe about twelve years after I had left to go to law school, when, when drugs were rampant, especially reds, downers -- twelve, twelve kids in Gardena died, twelve Japanese American kids. Most of 'em from suicide; overdoses. And nobody's really talked about it. Nobody's studied that. But all of us from, who were a part of that generation or a little bit older, probably felt the same thing. That there was so much pressure as a young child to achieve, that it was overwhelming for some people who couldn't. And that was destructive.

TI: Now, for you personally, though, when you're in that environment, did you notice that? Or, the sense I get is you're such a competitor you probably just went at it and just tried to do the best you could and in some ways compete against others during that period. And are you now sort of looking backwards at that environment? I'm just trying to get a sense of, of, sort of who you are as person, especially in those sort of stressful or pressure situations.

DM: Well, in those days you didn't notice it because you were weren't self-aware, or I wasn't self-aware enough to understand what was happening to me. I did notice that I used to chew off the paint of all of my pencils. And I thought that was very strange. I'd have these solid wood pencils without the yellow thing on the outside, you know, little yellow paint. And I'd be gnawing at this during class and it became an anal-compulsive kinda habit I would have. And I never, never realized it until much later on. I thought, "God," you know, "why did I ever do that?" And I realized that there's probably some element of how the tension had to resolve itself in some ways by chewing paint off pencils, which is pretty sick. It's probably why -- I could've been a lot smarter if it wasn't the lead poisoning that's probably infiltrated my brain. But I handled it because I was able to.

And I was... but looking back, one of the reasons I left Gardena is, intuitively I felt that that was not conducive for you, for any person there to find themselves, to really find themselves, to be placed in a psychological box by people in that community and not allowed to experiment and try something else to see what could become of you. So that's why I left for Berkeley. Because I think for all the advantages of being, growing up in Gardena, and it was wonderful to grow up in Gardena for a lot of reasons. That type of narrow perspective, I think, was, was, inhibited somebody from realizing their true potential. So looking back now -- and I remember specifically when I started giving up being competitive, as competitive. I, people still think of me as competitive today, but I remember playing basketball, and in my law school I got recruited to play for this team because they knew I played basketball from L.A. And so we played on the team and we won the league. In fact we were undefeated, won the state championship in the Japanese American league. And if you win in those days you have to move up to the higher level. And I could just see myself going back to the old days of becoming as competitive and needing to win as I was before. And I just didn't think that was really healthy. And I realized -- and Berkeley was good for that. And there was a whole new sense of culture with the counterculture coming along, a sense of collaboration, of cooperation. There was another way. It wasn't just you have to win all the time. So while I'm still fairly competitive in most things, I think I, maybe it's age, maybe it's self-awareness, I think I have mellowed quite a bit compared to how I was then.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.