<Begin Segment 6>

TI: Earlier you mentioned that you'd sometimes even go to the Japanese Baptist Church?

MA: Uh-huh.

TI: So tell me why you would go to Japanese Baptist.

MA: I think I just went there because I wanted to be with my friends and they'd say, "Why don't you come down," and I would go. Like the Finnish friends at my other corner, I went to the Baptist church up on Broadway, which was a different kind of a Baptist church. But then I, and my parents, they were not what you would call Orthodox in the sense that I know some people that were up the hill that were Jewish would not want to have their kids go to the churches, and my parents never stopped me. They, my mother was just so super. Whenever she was ill, there's several stories I have about her, and whenever -- in elementary school there were, I think, three Jewish kids in the school. I was one, and two others, and one of 'em was sitting next to me and we were having Christmas carols sung during an assembly during Christmas time. And she plowed me like that [imitates elbowing someone], and I said, "What'd you hit me for, Jenny?" And she says, "You're not supposed to Christmas songs, and you're not supposed to say the name of Jesus," da da da, she went on and on. And I was really upset and I went home and I said, "Mama," I said, "You know what Jenny told me?" And I told her what transpired. She says, no, no. She says, "You sing the songs. They're pretty songs. You can say the name of Jesus. It's okay. It's alright." She always said it's okay, and always felt, and when she described Jesus, Jesus was a good man, Jesus was a good teacher, so why would you not say his name? We didn't embrace him as our God as Jews, but then that's the way she felt, and so there were many, many incidents, and eventually I said, "I know, I know your answer, Ma." So it was comfortable that way. And, now I, in the homes of the Japanese I never encountered anything that was oriented to Japanese religion, whether it would, would it be...

TI: Be Buddhist, probably.

MA: Buddha, maybe, or whichever, yeah. So I never encountered any conversations there.

TI: Now, were your Japanese aware that you were Jewish?

MA: Uh-huh.

TI: And how did that come up, just in conversation?

MA: I don't think it ever was even thought about. And, and Tom, what's so great about those days, even, unlike today, which it should be better -- and maybe it is in some ways, but in many ways it isn't -- that was what's so, was so great, is there was no differentiation made.

TI: People just accepted you.

MA: Accepted is just, that's the way it is. It's okay. That's our lives, that's the way they went, it went, our lives went. And so I cherish that memory because it, unfortunately, should be practiced totally like that today, and it still isn't, as we know. So that kind of disturbs me.

TI: For your religious services, did you go to the synagogue nearby?

MA: I didn't. My dad went on holidays, a couple times a year. My mother, we weren't really involved, or at least I certainly wasn't, and my mother to a degree with the Sisterhood. My dad would go as the holiday, on a holiday, but then other than that I don't remember it being something that we were really attached to.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.