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JG: So you're growing up in Crenshaw at a time that, of this kind of burgeoning African American consciousness, this kind of... you had mentioned the rise of kind of the Black Panthers and here we have the Watts riots, and I'm just wondering how this informed your own understanding of the African American community, and the relationship that existed between Japanese Americans and other groups that were living in Crenshaw at the time. I'm just curious how that, what kind of influence that had upon you.

MN: It had a very profound influence, and as you might suspect, it formed my outlook, not just on the local L.A. area, the Crenshaw area, but it formed my outlook on race relations early in life, but it also informed my outlook on the larger world because it gave me an opportunity to see life through, not just the lens of the Japanese American experience, but of the African American experience, which really is the experience of people who are marginalized and disenfranchised. Now, I need to balance that, though, by saying there were other Japanese American kids who grew up in Crenshaw, and a lot of them, I'd like to believe, have, or had similar attitudes as I did, but there were some that didn't. There were some who, for whatever reason, went through the same experiences as myself but, but grew up looking at the world a little bit differently. But I think, I can honestly say that, for the most part, I really was not a whole lot different, in some respects, than my contemporaries. We were all shaped by these same influences. In fact, even to this day, although most of the Sanseis have moved out of Crenshaw and are living in other parts of L.A. in the urban area or out in the suburbs, a lot of us still have parents, like myself, how are in that area and, I think, use that as an excuse to come down to the area. But I think even if we didn't have parents living there we would still find other reasons to come down there, simply because it's the area we grew up in, and the area in which we were shaped. I also have come to believe that for most, for many African Americans in Los Angeles who grew up during that era, whether they grew up in the immediate Crenshaw area or not, their encounters with Japanese Americans was very similar to what... the racial and ethnic dynamics that went on down in Crenshaw. And I think that just has to do with the whole postwar experience here in Los Angeles of people of color in general that happened during that time.

JG: What do you mean by the...

MN: Well, for African Americans, their communities, again, they were affected by the restrictive covenants that the real estate agents imposed on people, and in the city as a whole, for African Americans, the whole downtown area was transformed -- I believe right after, or, during or after the war -- with the area that was called "Bronzeville," that went through a transformation because of redevelopment. So in a lot of respects, African Americans went through their own time of resettlement, just within the city, and then when you take into consideration the African American experience during the war, I mean, black soldiers had their own segregated outfit known by some as the "Buffalo Brigade," and then the story of the Tuskegee Airmen on a larger level. In a lot of ways, African Americans went through... well, for them it was a continuation of the slavery experience, of segregation. And they went through their own experience, specifically related to the Depression and the war and the postwar period, in the same way that Japanese Americans went through our experience.

JG: So was there a common understanding among African Americans and Japanese Americans that they, that there was this shared history of discrimination or... did you ever see that manifest in any way?

MN: I believe there was. I can't say that it was a spoken understanding, but I, it's something that I feel. I can't prove it through any empirical evidence or anything, but again, if you look at any of the major... well, today, the major metropolitan areas where Japanese Americans historically grew up, whether it's the Crenshaw area or the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles, the Mission district in San Francisco, the International District, Beacon Hill district of Seattle, in Chicago, the area where Japanese Americans grew up around, I believe they call it the Rush district, or whatever they call it. But if you look at the patterns of where people of color in general have historically grown up in America, and particularly where Japanese Americans have grown up, there's no mistaking that we weren't the only people of color in those areas, that there were others, as well. And there were reasons for that, and we couldn't help but mix with people of other ethnicities and have a shared experience.

Where this really hit home to me was years ago, when I was fortunate to interview Mr. Seizo Oka, the historian from San Francisco, Japanese American historian from San Francisco. When I first got to know Mr. Oka and interviewed him, he made a comment to me one time that I've never forgotten, and his comment was that the Japanese Isseis and Niseis who grew up in rural areas, when it came time for the internment camps, he noticed a difference between the attitudes of Isseis and Niseis who grew up in the rural areas, central valley of California, Sacramento, Willamette Valley up in, in Washington, so on and so forth... between their attitudes of mixing with others and the Isseis and Niseis who came to camp from the urban areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, even other parts of the Northern California Bay Area, San Jose. And his thought was that people in rural areas, number one, they often lived far apart from each other on their farms or properties that their parents were sharecropping or whatever, maybe a mile or two apart, so really didn't see too much of other people. And so they could afford to live in their own little world, whereas the Japanese Americans, Isseis and Niseis who lived in the cities were already used to mixing with people of other ethnicities, whether they wanted to or not. And so if nothing else, we're forced to get along with people of other nationalities and ethnic groups. And Seizo Oka pointed that out, or remarked on that, always felt that that was one of the reasons why the camp experience, even though it was a negative experience overall for Japanese Americans, one positive outcome that it had was it forced the Japanese Americans from all backgrounds, whether rural or urban, to mix with each other and learn how to get along with people from other socio-economic backgrounds.

JG: So in terms of your own kind of associations, do you, I mean, do you recall having many African American friends, and do you have any recollections of, you know, did members of the Japanese American community date African Americans, for example? I mean, to what extent were those associations developed?

MN: First of all, to answer the first question, yes, we all, those of living in Crenshaw, all had African American friends and we would bring them home, we would associate with them. There was just no way getting around it, even if you wanted to, but we really felt comfortable with African American kids. We'd... in our world we thought, hey, this is how the rest of the world is. I joke to people. I didn't really, for the most part, I didn't really know any real live white kids until I got to high school, and that's because we ended up getting transferred, initially through forced bussing, out to a white high school. But up until that time, as I facetiously say, I always though white people only existed on TV, because we really didn't know a whole lot of 'em. And so for us, growing up with African Americans was the norm, and because of that you can figure out the next step. We acted like them, spoke like them, tried to dress like them, although we weren't successful at it, but it was just a great time growing up. And there was just no second thoughts about that. In terms of Sanseis going out, dating with African Americans, I don't recall any specific incidents of that happening, not among kids that I knew. I'm sure it happened. It happens a lot more nowadays, which is great, but at the very least we were all friends. Socially, we all got along. Yeah, we got in fights every, into fights every now and then, but it didn't have to do with race or ethnicity, it just had more to do with everyday, regular reasons why kids get in fights. You know, someone wanted my lunch money, or somebody liked the lunch, lunch box I brought and wanted it. So it had more to do with that kind of stuff than anything else.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.