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TI: Okay, so I always start with what's called a slate, by saying that today is Tuesday, June 7, 2016, we're in the Densho office. I'm doing the interview, I'm the primary interviewer, Tom Ikeda. We're interviewing Michael Forrester, and I'll be calling you Mike during the interview. Co-interviewing with me is Naoko Magasis, and on camera is Dana Hoshide. So before I start the interview, Mike, we had the benefit that you wrote a memoir called Tsuchino: My Japanese War Bride. And so I had the benefit of reading this before, and it pretty much goes through a lot of your life with Tsuchino, so I'll be referring to this book. But before I start the interview, why did you write this book?

MF: It was kind of complicated. One of the things we found out is that I guess an interest developed in Japan of what happened to all the women who left Japan after the war. And from what I understand, it was triggered originally by the empress asking the question. So we started getting all these professors coming over and interviewing us and stuff like that and things, and so I kind of thought that the story would be interesting, and of course it would make it a lot easier because when somebody comes, I could give them a copy of the book. That way I would forget anything or stuff like that. And I don't think people realized that the impact the Japanese war brides -- and I use the term "war bride" deliberately -- is, the Japanese war brides had in this country. These women came into this country after the war, they married GIs, and Japan wasn't the only place, this happened in Europe, you know, a lot of German women married GIs and stuff like that. And of course the primary reason for that is during the war, a lot of young men died, so there was an imbalance, more women than men. And when the U.S. military went in, they would hire local people to work. But there wasn't any men to hire, so they hired women. So the women worked on the base and they got to know things, they got to learn English and stuff like that.

TI: So just naturally.

MF: Naturally, yeah.

TI: This social intermingling.

MF: And the same thing happened in Germany.

TI: And roughly, I know there are, from what I've read, the range of the number of these interracial marriages between American GIs and Japanese women, what number do you use?

MF: We've heard numbers anywhere from the mid maybe fifty thousand to a hundred thousand. I think most of the professors have settled about seventy thousand, seventy-five thousand somewhere.

TI: So significant.

MF: Significant number.

TI: It's a large number. And you mentioned the Japanese empress was interested. So was she interested in the personal stories, was that kind of what she was...

MF: I don't know. From what I understand, and you get this, of course, second, third, fourth, fifth-hand, and gathered from some of the professors, I guess she was interested in what happened to these women. Were they successful? What was their life like leaving and stuff like that?

TI: Maybe she was concerned that they weren't treated well in America and was just interested. Okay.

MF: So what happened... I'm losing my train of thought on that thing, too.

TI: Well, let me start the interview. That was the question I asked, I just wanted to know why, and it seemed like you felt this need to tell the story that wasn't really well-known, even though there were all these women, maybe seventy-five thousand o them, the personal stories, I mean, I searched the literature, there really isn't that much out there.

MF: Yeah. Well, because I think they tend to be very private. But, oh, reminded me what I was thinking, is the impact these women had. They went to places where they had never seen a Japanese, and they raised families and they raised kids. And people saw this, and they said, "Hey, these people are all right." So they actually changed the perception.

TI: And when you say "all around," because the Japanese American community was predominately on the West Coast, and army bases are located across the country, and oftentimes places away from the West Coast. But it's really those places that...

MF: Yeah, and the people that got out of the service went home, they went to farmlands and small villages, some of these GIs came from villages of maybe a couple thousand people, ten thousand people and stuff, and here they bring a Japanese war bride in.

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