<Begin Segment 19>

TI: Now eventually the two of you ended up in the Seattle area. And this was after traveling to lots of different places, but you came here, actually, quite a while ago.

MF: Yeah, '73, from Berkeley, when I graduated from Berkeley.

TI: Yeah, so that's thirty, forty years ago.

MF: Forty-something years.

TI: So what was it around, about Seattle that attracted you? Because you're not from this area.

MF: No.

TI: Tsuchino's not from this area, but yet you decided on this area.

MF: Well, when I went to Berkeley, I went under a federal program called Air Transportation System Specialist, and they basically sent me there because of the work I had done in putting radars on the East Coast. And when you graduated, the Washington headquarters would give a two-year position with full funding to whatever region would take you. So you move in, you'd come in with your own position, you've got your own funding, and they would allow it. We would send out our resumes at the end of the thing, and they would bid on us.

TI: Free help, right?

MF: Yeah, free help, fully funded.

TI: Well-trained, valuable person.

MF: And so what happened is I sent mine out and we'd gotten an offer from Seattle, we got an offer from Hawaii, we got a couple offers from Washington, D.C. And I said I want to go to Hawaii. She says, "I don't want to live on another island." [Laughs] So some were in grade. At the time I went to Cal, I was a GS-13, and some were promotions. So we only looked at the promotions. The one in Hawaii would have been a promotion, the one up here was a promotion, one of the ones in D.C., had a couple in D.C., one was a promotion. One was not, it was an in grade. It was very intriguing because it was at the... the FAA has their own fleet of aircraft, and they're at Washington National Airport, and they basically have a hangar there called Hangar 11, and they had offered me a job there since I was a pilot. I said, "Gee, if I take that job, I'd get trained on all these different airplanes, go to flight school with the FAA flight school." And she said, "No, no, we want a promotion. [Laughs] So we decided to take the Seattle one. So we came up here in '73. And she kind of liked it, she says, "Well, this is where I think I want to stay." Had the advantage, it was halfway between my family and her family. And, of course, Seattle's a nice area. When we moved here it was not quite as developed as it is now.

TI: From your perspective, so Tsuchino left her homeland, came to a new country, and what do you think was the hardest adjustment for her?

MF: Wow. I know one thing she had was the food. I remember she said that she wanted to have some Japanese food an stuff, so we had to go out and get some soy sauce. And so we're in New York, and so we go around, and the only soy sauce they could find was Chunking, and we bought it and she says, "This is not soy sauce." [Laughs] But I think the food is, thinking back, I think the food was the thing. She just periodically would have a craving for Japanese food. But otherwise, I don't know, we've kind of worked as a team all the time, so it's kind of leaning on each other and things like that. Because living all over, we got to see different parts of the country, she got to see different parts of the country. It's surprising, when we were first married, the military called us in and we had this legal counseling. They said that because of miscegenation laws, I would not be stationed in certain states, kind of thing. And surprising, one was California. And therefore they couldn't send me there and stuff like that. And so we were a little bit concerned about that, but we never ran into any real prejudice any place we went. I remember that people, we would go out and I'd see people looking at her, but she was beautiful, you know. People look at beautiful women, right? We've lived all over.

TI: How about curiosity? Did people ask a lot in terms of how you met or how this happened?

MF: Yeah, they were always curious and stuff like that. People would say, "How you met?" I says, "Well, I was in the service in Japan," and that's all you need. And basically that's it, we were introduced by mutual friends is what happened. I know when we were in Pennsylvania -- and she's made friends, she made some friends in Pennsylvania that we got to know real well, and one of 'em's a doctor, so we basically were able to, they had a summer place up (at the lake), we were able to go ahead and associate with them. So she's quite a diplomat. [Laughs]

TI: Now, because I know both of you got involved in, one of the terms I was saw was like the Nikkei Interracial Marriage...

MF: Yeah, that's the International Marriage Association, actually War Brides Association, but they changed the name to International Marriage.

TI: What were some of the issues that the association looks at? Are there sometimes difficulties that war brides face, or what did you guys talk about?

MF: Well, the women, the men, basically, they talk a lot and stuff, like the guys just kind of hang around and just talk about, some people like baseball, some like this and stuff like that. Some of the women, I know from what I've heard, some of the women came back and had real hard times. I mean, a lot of men would get divorced and stuff like that. When the husbands got back, they decided they wanted to run around with American women rather than Japanese and stuff. So there are a lot of people -- but there was a lot of them, really successful. So it's just like any society. But the women liked to get together and talk about things, kind of like a mutual support group. So she's involved in that, and then there's a... oh, what else is she involved in? She seemed like she's involved in everything.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.