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VY: Back during the war, is there any more... are there any other things that happened during the war that you would like to talk about when you were a kid working on the farm?

MM: Well, I'd like to tell you the story of raising pigeons. I mean, that was a situation that has haunted me all my life. We raised chickens and we raised pigeons which were called squabs, and they were for an upscale restaurant in Trenton, New Jersey, because they had all dark meat. And a squab is a baby pigeon before it has flown, but just about ready to fly, so it has, its muscles hadn't been developed yet and so it's very succulent. So one time, we came home. And it's about as big as this room, and the pigeons have nests in there and then there's chicken wire so they can see out, and air goes through. And we came home and found all the pigeons dead or had their wings broken, flopping around on the floor. And then the eggs, they took the eggs and broke them all. And then some of the eggs, the birds were just about ready to hatch, so they were in perfect condition.

[Interruption]

VY: So Mary, why don't you talk about the story you started about the pigeons?

MM: One of the experiences during my time as a child that was burnt in my memory was finding our pigeons -- they are very gentle animals -- we raised pigeons for meat, and we sold the pigeons that were just about ready to fly. And they are big breasted, and there may be two hundred or so types of pigeons, and each has their own characteristics, some of them fly along way, but some are big breasted like this particular brand of pigeon. And I like feeding them because they were always cooing and friendly. And one day we came home, and all the pigeons were killed. Or not killed was even worse, having their wings broken, flapping around, rolling around, and then seeing all these egg yolks and some of the eggs had a perfect baby bird inside that was ready to be hatched. And it was sitting there and it was in a broken shell, so it died. And it was so horrifying to me that I had nightmares for a long time afterwards. But there was a note there that claimed that, "We are saving America from your homing pigeons." I don't know homing pigeons get to Japan or wherever, but it just absolutely shocked us and so we stopped raising pigeons, of course, but knew that these were very uninformed people who, what we found out during the war, people can make up stories without facts and present them as facts and neighbors, and pretty soon all the neighbors believed it. But that's what propaganda does.

And in schools, the kinds of things that happened to us in schools, like one time a teacher came to the house and she said, "I'm very sorry, I think I ran over your bicycles." Somebody had put the bicycles under her car and when she backed up, she ran over the bicycles and ruined them, but she didn't know it. And she came to the house to apologize, we couldn't find the bicycles, we didn't know what happened. But they did that to us to get at us. When we went, when my brother and I went to go ice skating on the pond nearby, they would come and they'd bring their sleds and they'd throw them across the ice so they would hit us while we were skating, not so well, learning how to skate. And it would knock us over and hurt our ankles and so on. They were just mean kinds of things that people did. And the worst kind of thing was they played prisoners getting shot at the wall. And so one of the students, one of the children received a BB gun. So he got all his friends to show off his BB gun. "Let's get the Mikuriyas." "Okay, let's get the Jap kids." All right. They got us, and so we were going with them to see what they were going to do. We didn't realize we were going to become the targets, so we were stood up against the wall, like in the movies, in front of a firing squad. And he takes out these BB bullets and shoots it at us. And my brother got hit in the neck, and he screamed and cried and so on. And the boy with the BB gun and all the other people didn't know that it would hurt. Because in the movies, people just fall over dead and they don't cry or make sounds when they're shot or anything, it's quiet. So this really scared everybody. And there were just incidents that are very uncomfortable that happened again and again that, if you're alone with them, the people would be nice to you, as soon as they saw another townsperson, their whole personality would change. So my brother and I had trust issues all our lives. And I guess we're more aware of people's motivation. And it's... you have fewer very good friends, because you can, it's hard to trust people.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.