Densho Digital Archive - Frank Miyamoto Interview I (denshovh-mfrank-01-0015)

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SF: Okay. So, would you say that the churches were the kind of main institution that sort of helped the new immigrants adapt to the country?

FM: Yes. I would say as far as other organizations, other than the family and the ken are concerned, the churches probably played as important a role as any. I guess I would have to, yeah, I'd say the churches were very important. And, and, well go ahead.

SF: I was just going to ask, now these Protestant churches were -- when they started to reach out to these new Japanese male immigrants to help them cope with their new context, how much interaction was there? So, in another words, was it just to help them set up the church and to kind of get these different things started, like the cooking? Learning how to cook American and how to deal with American society and it then once the church was sort of started, was the congregation all Japanese, or what, what, how was the interface between the whites...

FM: Yeah.

SF: And the Japanese?

FM: Well the initiation, especially at the very beginning was by Caucasian missionaries, missionary types. And they would help the immigrant bachelors in small groups of half a dozen people initially perhaps get their initial beginnings here in this country. But once these groups were brought together, that is, the immigrant groups were brought together, they, they in turn, they themselves organize in the typical Japanese fashion, they immediately sensed the need for organization and they would organize and they would take over so that the missionaries then immediately, increasingly take a secondary role and the group itself becomes the organizing entity. So as far as the Japanese Baptist Church was concerned for example, it very quickly brought in a Japanese minister, I think Reverend Okazaki was probably one of the first. They bring in a Japanese minister who in turn organizes all the Japanese members into this church and it comes to be well supported. And Christian churches didn't flourish in Japan, so the members of this new church were not so much people who came with a Christian background, but people who found that this Christian church, this Buddhist Church, Baptist Church for example offered advantages which they had not appreciated or had not required in Japan. It would offer cooking classes or sewing classes or language classes or, and they had Sunday schools for the kids. Now in the Sunday schools, often the missionaries would, because of their English language, come in and help teach. But the church itself tended to be taken over very quickly by the Japanese people themselves. And this was true in the Baptist Church, Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church and so on. Now in the case of the Methodist, one of the things I remember, was that as a three or four year old, I went to the kindergarten that was run by the Methodist Church, Seattle Japanese Methodist Church on Washington Street. And this kindergarten was famous at that time because it was the only, the main kindergarten to which Japanese kids went. And it had these white teachers, white Sunday school or kindergarten teachers teaching Japanese kids in the -- and this was thought to be desirable because very soon these kids then would go on to public schools where they would have to be exposed to white teachers and so they got a start. And there are pictures of myself with Michi's older sister in the same class and so on, a whole group of us sitting there in front of this Methodist Church with a white teacher present and so on.

SF: So, the basic thought there was that this would help you cope with things, the American things that were going to come later on.

FM: Exactly, yeah. And in a sense the Christian churches served that function. And what I was trying to point to was that the community then takes it over and then uses it for this kind of function. They needed a kindergarten, the church is the place where they would organize it.