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VY: Today is Wednesday, April 6, 2022, and we are here in Emeryville, California, with Mary Jane Mikuriya. Dana Hoshide is our videographer, and my name is Virginia Yamada. So, first of all, Mary Jane, thank you for joining us today.

MM: Well, I'm very happy to be here, because I feel it's important to see an unusual story of the Japanese American experience. And most of your files are from the West Coast where the East Coast is so different.

VY: Yeah, we're so excited about being able to capture this story today. You have a lot of information that's a little bit different.

[Interruption]

VY: So let's start off by having you tell us when you were born and what name you were given at birth.

MM: I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a hospital, unlike my brother, who was born at home. And my mother was in the ward for the very impoverished in the hospital when I was born. And I was named Mary Jane Mikuriya. I was named after my mother's American mother. So my mother came from Austria-Hungary, and this lady said that she knew my mother wanted to be a medical missionary, and because she was not American-born, she had a lot to learn. But to be heard in America, her American mother, Mary Jane Kerr, said to her, "You're going to have to have proper unaccented English with a large vocabulary, and you must have good manners or you can't even get to first base talking to anybody in this country if you want to change their mind." So that's why I was named after Mary Jane Kerr, Mary Jane Mikuriya after Mary Jane Kerr. And it turns out that Mary Jane Kerr was the person who lent Mother the money to come back to the United States from Japan because all the banks had lost their money.

VY: Oh, okay, and that happened later, right?

MM: Yes.

VY: That's interesting, we'll talk about that. I want to talk about your parents pretty shortly, too. So what year was that when you were born?

MM: 1934.

VY: And do you have any siblings? When and where were they born?

MM: My brother was born in Brownsville, 1933. He was conceived in Japan but born in the United States. And then I have a younger sister that's eleven years younger than we are. She was born after the war in 1945.

VY: So you're in the middle?

MM: Yeah.

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