<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So I want to get to some of the support that you got as a child, which I think takes us to Petaluma. So let's go to Petaluma from... so Chicago, why did you go to Petaluma? I think we talked about earlier, because of your mother's family.

JM: We were in Chicago for a couple of years. My mother met her husband, second husband, who decided, he was working in a carbon factory, and he wanted to change his occupation, his work, and he thought us moving into the country and building our own house and living with our grandparents' acreage would be a positive move for us. So we left Chicago and moved to Petaluma and lived with my maternal grandparents for, I'd say, a couple months, and then we lived in a chicken house. And my mother said, "Don't ever talk about living in a chicken house, that is so disgraceful." So we had no refrigerator, we had running water but no plumbing, so the running water that we had went straight into the creek that was underneath the house. And we had an outhouse that we'd have to go to the bathroom in. So it was really truly antiquated living. And while we were working in the chicken house, my brother was born, and I was eight years old. And fortunately we had, this chicken house had a small room attached to it, that was cold enough where we could keep the milk cold. So we had no refrigeration, we had electricity, but we had no refrigerator. And while we were living there, my stepfather and my mother, with the help of a carpenter friend, built our own house. And that took, I'd say, a year and a half, two years.

TI: And how was it for you going from a city, Chicago, to rural life. What was that like for you?

JM: Oh, it was much better, I thought. The city was not friendly. I remember in Chicago we used to get strung up by black kids, white kids, and I remember one time they hung me up on a clothesline, it was in the middle of winter, and they were pulling me back and forth, "Kamikaze, kamikaze." [Laughs]

TI: So how would they string, I mean, they would actually just tie you up onto the...

JM: Yeah, they'd tie me up by my coat and just pull me on the clothesline, you know, those old fashioned clotheslines. And we lived with other Japanese American families, and this Issei gentleman who lived on our floor, who I shared the bathroom, we shared the bathroom with, came out and he used to chase them away. But yeah, so it wasn't great living in the city.

TI: So it was a pretty tough neighborhood, it sounds like.

JM: Yeah, it was real tough. They dragged one of my friends down the stairs, three flights of stairs, they dragged him down because he was Japanese and Japanese American.

TI: Do you recall the neighborhood in Chicago where you were?

JM: I recall it being a poor building. We share, again, we shared a bathroom, each floor shared a single bathroom, so you can imagine three or four families sharing a single bathroom, so we had to schedule a bathroom time. And my best memories was when I was able to take a bath with my mother, because then I felt really safe. And my father in Chicago was supposed to see me once, twice a week, and I remember always being disappointed because he never came. And when my mother and her second husband married, that's when the beatings began. He started spanking me. And when we moved to the farm, I had my maternal grandmother. She basically saved my life because he began to molest me. I was molested by, I would say, three or four adult males in my family, so it wasn't just him, three or four different males, adult males.

TI: These were, like, relatives?

JM: Relatives, cousins.

TI: That were living on the farm?

JM: Or that we had community with. And also my stepfather's friend, who would come and stay with us for two or three months, he was a chick sexer, do you know what a chick sexer is? Interesting job. Anyway -- he had his hands insured. [Laughs] But he chick sexed me, so what can I say? So there was a lot of abuse.

TI: While this was going on --

JM: And I would tell my mother, and she would not believe me. And it's not because she was a bad person, it was just because she didn't want to be lonely again. And I understood that many years later. But my grandmother understood, and I don't speak Nihongo, but she knew, and she would tell me in Japanese, just, "Ganbatte," you just have to endure and just get away from here. "Get away from here, you can do it with education." So, of course, being the Japanese super achiever, overachiever, that was my form of escape.

TI: To...

JM: To achieve in school and get the best grades I could, got straight A's, scholarships to two universities, UCLA, and I got accepted into the UC system, to both universities as well as Santa Barbara, but I chose UCLA because they chose then, in 1958, to move to Los Angeles.

TI: I'm sorry, who moved to Los Angeles?

JM: My mother and her husband decided to move to Los Angeles with my brother. And they said, "Well, since you got a scholarship to UCLA, you can go there," because they couldn't afford to send me. They saved all their money to send my brother to college.

[Interruption]

JM: So I think it was my grandmother's compassion when I ran to her and I said, "I've just been beaten up," or I went to her crying in her lap, she would comfort me and she would understand. I mean, I was... he would lock me in the cellar. We had those old fashioned storm cellars where my grandmother would pickle her tsukemono and stuff, and it was a dirt floor, and he would slam the door on me and lock me in the cellar. And it was pitch dark, and I was terrified.

TI: And how old were you at this point?

JM: I was eight, nine, ten. I was molested for almost fourteen years of my life. So I understand... and then, of course, when I was going to college, I was addicted to relationships that were brutal. So guys who beat me up, guys who'd treat me cruelly. I used to get beat up by this one boyfriend I had for just giving somebody else an address, giving another man an address. He would come up and slap me in front of the guy. And so I understand when a woman is being beaten up by her husband who has pimped her, she hasn't brought home enough money and he beats her up for not bring home enough money. I understand why she still is with him. And so that's why I feel so passionately about having programs of support for women. And when I tell them my story they're always shocked.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright (c) 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.