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BN: I want to go back a little. You're pursuing kind of a nontraditional kind of occupation and life in a certain way, from a Japanese American woman at that time. Was your family in support of that, or did you have to fight them at all?

AM: No, I think that for that...

BN: You had your older siblings kind of paving the way for you in some ways, too. I mean, you had your older siblings as well, they were sort of paving the way in some ways.

AM: Right.

BN: And then did you meet your husband in, like, in graduate school?

AM: I met my husband in the MSW program.

BN: Was that, his not being Japanese an issue?

AM: My family disowned me and his family disowned him. And the first time that we contacted the minister about getting married, said, "Well, yes, I'll marry you, but, of course, you're not going to have children." So I said, "Why not?" and he said, "Well, they'll have such a hard time." And I said, "Well, I'm Japanese American. Whoever I marry, my children will have a hard time." But I guess it bothered me, because one of the research projects I did on one of my sabbaticals at UCLA, I compared the psychosocial academic adjustment of monoracial Japanese Americans and white Japanese couples. And I did it at UCLA or my people in my study were all there. I got really good toward the end when I really needed, like, two or three more people to interview, research people. And I'd be in the student union and I'd say, "I think that person might be..." and I'd go over and say, "Excuse me, but I'm doing a research project and I just wondered if..." and I found some people that way.

BN: Did your family eventually come around?

AM: Well, my mother never did, because she died earlier, but after about seventeen years, a really good friend of ours died. And he'd been like an older brother and older sisters to us, and I thought to myself, you know, I don't really want to have my brother die and not make up with him, so I went to see him and we made up. But we saw each other at weddings and funerals before, and we never came back to doing all of our family dinners and holiday dinners together, but it was like, we made up.

BN: Were you involved with JACL or other kinds of Japanese American organizations?

AM: I was not with JACL so much, but when I was starting in social work and seeing some Japanese clients, it was a time of the Big Sisters program and the people of your generation were reaching out to kids that were having a hard time. And they would bring them, too, for therapy because these are not kids who would just go on their own. So I got working with Little Tokyo Service center, and working with kids who were on drugs and having a hard time with adjustment problems and such. So I was a member of JACL, but...

BN: I didn't mean JACL in particular, but other organizations as well. Did you deal with, because in L.A. at the time in the early '70s was this kind of drug problem among a lot of the Sansei kids. Was that something that...

AM: I saw some of them, yes. Some of them came to see me. I think it's just really amazing that that organization has lasted for so long in the Crenshaw area serving all races.

BN: You're talking about AADAP? You're talking about AADAP?

AM: Yeah.

BN: Yeah, Asian American Drug Abuse Program. Did you talk to your children about camp?

AM: I did.

BN: The rare Nisei who did?

AM: Well, I think I took them to some of the meetings, not at the commission hearings, but preparing for the commission hearings and talking about the best way to try to get redress and such. My daughter became an ACLU lawyer, she just changed jobs, but she did it for fifteen years. When my son who, they grew up in the same schools, so everybody knew their racial background, but when my son went away to San Luis Obispo, he bought a lot of t-shirts that would indicate that he's Asian.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.