<Begin Segment 23>

MN: Now, did your relationship with Mr. Nomiyama get better after you got married?

PM: Well, I asked Dad's permission to marry his daughter, and there was resistance to that. But he finally agreed, 'cause Lisa wanted it, and I wanted it, so it was accepted, and certainly, it got much better. And I started to call him "Dad," and he reciprocated, you know, and treated me better and respectfully, so things improved as we went along. So it was a, it was a good thing.

MN: Now, how many years were you married before he divulged his past to you?

PM: We were married in August of '73, and I learned about this, I believe -- just judging from the actions that we took in 1980 -- I would have learned about this probably in early '79. Maybe late '78, early '79, something like that, around and through there, would be my best estimate as to when I learned about it.

MN: What was your reaction to him being in prison?

PM: Well, it was... it was the kind of situation where I felt I knew him then, I knew his character, so I knew something was up there. I mean, something bad happened for which he had to take a position on, that he made a judgment call. And I respected him enough to know that I didn't immediately thing badly about him because of that, certainly. We needed to know more about what the thinking was that went into it. So it was just a kind of, "Oh, really?" kind of a situation, you know. Then we learned more.

MN: And what did you think about the situation where he hadn't even told his daughter yet about his past, and he told you.

PM: Well, yeah, I suspected that his daughter and his family knew something about it, because like I had mentioned, they had been getting together with the DB Boys since they were kids and having picnics and so forth. But no one really questioned what was going on, which I thought was very unusual, that the family didn't dig into this a little bit more because it was such an event, a historical, something of social importance. But it didn't, and so they were learning along with me as to what happened.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.