<Begin Segment 34>

EG: And during the time that you were living in Seattle and working at export/import, you were active in a number of civic kinds of activities, too. Did you take a part in the reparations issue or what was your feeling about the reparations issue?

TM: When the first... I don't know what it was, but when the first team from east, Washington, D.C. or New York or whoever they were, came around here, interviewing the first generation, because of language difficulty, I was asked to interpret for them, and I did. And also about that time -- I forgot exactly the time frame -- but the first generation was allowed to become U.S. citizens. And there was a school here, how to prepare for the examination. American history and whatnot, so I helped that, too.

EG: Because you were especially good at American history. [Laughs]

TM: Yeah I think so. I think so. [Laughs]

EG: I just had to be mean. [Laughs]

TM: So I was able to help 'em and I was happy to do that. Yeah, in addition to being with a trading company, there were other community activities. Like over here, Japanese Community Service, Japanese Language School, Japan-America Society -- which is mainly a gathering of Japanese and the American businessmen, professional people. But I was active in those places and also a little bit later on I became active in, with the Nisei veterans and our own MIS veterans and Lions Club and whatnot.

EG: You were...

TM: It wasn't my choice, but they invited me to take part, so I did.

EG: You were, and still are active with the Japanese Language School. I understand there was differences, strong feelings of difference in the Japanese community about the Japanese language school, around the central issue of the Japanese American community should work at integration into the dominant society and not seek to separate itself out, and that the Japanese language school was not a good idea -- some people felt -- because it would be kind of a separatist kind of thing from integration. The people coming out of camp having these kinds of mixed feelings. What can you tell me about the, that whole issue?

TM: Well, I guess there's always a group of people against everything. But the large majority of the second-generation parents who had growing children, large majority of them, I understood -- I wasn't here I was still in the service -- came here in this office and asked that the language school restart. This was, oh, I don't know, about sometime in 1940s. So that their children, the third generation, could attend the school here. And so they started. I don't know the enrollment, not like the prewar time, when they had, what more than 1,500 students here in this building, and not that many, but maybe must have been several hundreds of the third generation.

EG: So there was strong enough support to make sense that the school should be in operation again, even though there was divided opinion in the Nikkei group. And the people opposed to the school weren't that opposed to...

TM: Well, they didn't have to come.

EG: They would allow it to be, and if people wanted. And you were on the side of the school. Of course, you've been a language teacher all your life.

TM: [Laughs] Yes. Sort of.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.