<Begin Segment 11>

TI: I'm going to take you back now to when you finished Vassar, how did you decide to go to law school?

PN: Yeah. Can I give you an incident, another one?

TI: Please.

PN: When I was a senior in high school, we were really poor, so I was going after all these scholarships. And one of the local scholarships I got was from the... what was that organization called? And they were just... not the Moose Club...

TI: The Elks?

PN: The Elks Club. So they had a local scholarship that I got, and then I went to the regionals and maybe I got that, somewhere. I went on to compete for other scholarships. Now, the Elks Club at the time was racially segregated club. And then maybe it was at the regionals, the two finalists were myself and another Japanese American girl from Troutdale. And so we were the finalists, and they came, they were asking us questions. And at the time, at Oregon State, the black football players had walked off campus in protest. And so they asked the question of, "What do you think about the African American football players walking off campus?" And at that moment I knew, okay, I could lie and get the scholarship, or I could tell the truth and not get the scholarship. So what am I going to do? So I didn't get the scholarship, and it's sort of those moments of truth in which you decide, who are you going to be and how are you going to act? And for me, those lessons came at kind of a young age.

So, I mean, I knew that was going to happen, it did happen, and the reason... so then I'll fast forward, the reason I decided to go to law school was between my junior and senior year in college, I was a waitress at a resort in Lake Placid, New York, upstate New York. It was 1972. They still had segregated "colored people's" quarters. In other words, the African Americans ate in a separate dining hall than the other employees. We were all employees, but they had a segregated dining hall, they had a segregated living place, and most of them were cooks or they were cleaning. And the people who served in the dining hall were college girls from the eastern seaboard. All of them were white except for myself and a very, very light-skinned African American woman. And the way that you got paid as a waitress was how many people sat at your table. And the maitre d' decided how many people sat at your table. So I would have eleven people at my table and somebody else would have three, and we were gonna get paid disproportionately based on that. And I didn't think that was fair, so I met Lisa from the University of Pennsylvania, she was Jewish, and we started talking about, "Well, that's not fair, so we ought to complain." So she and I complained to the maitre d', and he said, "What are you complaining about? You two get plenty of people." I said, "But that's not the point. The point is that it's not fair, that you don't have an equitable distribution, and people need to get paid here." And so he wasn't gonna listen, and so we wanted to start a boycott of all the waitresses. And we talked to them, and we also talked to the maitre d' and he said, "You know, we could fire the whole lot of you and get new people in tomorrow. There's no union, there's nothing to protect you. And besides, our Board of Directors are eleven lawyers from New York City." So the other girls got scared and wouldn't do the boycott so it didn't work out. I left because I said, "I'm not going to be a party to this." I needed the money as much as anybody else, 'cause obviously I came from a poor family, but I just wasn't going to do it. And I said then that if lawyers are that powerful, I'm going to go to law school for social justice and social change. Now, I'd never met a lawyer, had no idea what lawyers did. I was pretty ignorant, I was from a farm in Boring, Oregon. But Vassar was that kind of place where, as I said, as a woman, you could do anything and twice as good as any man, just go out and do it.

We also had a lockdown there, protested against the administration. I went to the first March on Washington in April of 1973, you know, anti-war, the peaceful one. The next one, I think, a big march was very violent, but this one was very peaceful. So, and East Asian Studies, there just, it was a time of change and it was a time of action, and there was a belief that we are a generation that can make the difference. And I used to sit in the Vassar chapel and think, okay, there's a civil rights movement, people are laying down their lives. There's an anti-war movement -- I feel like crying -- people are laying down their lives, what is it that I'd be willing to lay down my life for? And just asking myself, what is that? What would I do? That people would have the courage to do that, and it was really significant.

So I guess a combination of factors had me go to law school. I applied to go to graduate school in East Asian Studies, and I got into the University of Michigan. But I also applied to teach English in Japan. And I must have had about twenty-five applications in Japan, twenty-four rejected me, and one, the Tokyo YMCA accepted me because, I think, the guy who was the head of that program was an American, white American, and I said I was interested in learning about Japanese culture and Japanese and that was an East Asian Studies major. So he hired me, and I, instead of going to the University of Michigan where I could have met one of my future sister-in-laws and other people, I went off to Japan.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.