<Begin Segment 2>

VY: And what about your parents? What are their names?

MM: My father's name is Tadafumi Mikuriya, it's always been that. And my mother's name was Anna Schwenk before she married him. And she came over to this country as a child because the country she came from saw the First World War going on and they would assign all the non-Catholics to the military. So they wanted to get away before they were taken in, and there were already two children in the family, so my mother and her sister came over in the boat.

VY: And where did they come from?

MM: Austria-Hungary. Now, Austria-Hungary is a region that I kept saying to my mother, "What country did you come from?" There is no way to say what country she came from because she didn't know. Because if you look on the map when she died, I looked on the map... when she died, I looked on the map to see where that was, and it depended on what year I would look on the map. And from one year it might be Polish, the next year it might be German, then it was Czechoslovakia, and now it's Czech. So what country was she born in? So she always says Austria-Hungary.

VY: Okay, and what year was that?

MM: 1902. And my father was born in 1899 and registered on January 3, 1899. Because in Japan, you're one year old on the day you're registered. But he was less than ten days old at that time.

VY: And how many siblings did he have?

MM: There were six children in his family, he was the oldest. But one was given away to his aunt because he adopted, they had no children. So Judge Tanaka and my grandmother's sister lived door-to-door, so they just had the boy go and live in his house and his name was Tanaka and he was raised as an only child by the judge and his aunt, but he became their son. And he had six children with the name Tanaka whereas all the other children are Mikuriya or whatever they married into. And so there were six of those, and the second person was a girl, third one was boy, boy, boy, girl. So they were fairly close as a family because my father was the oldest child and the mother was pretty strict. And my grandfather Mikuriya was too nice a banker, so he's a banker, made his wife upset, he was too kind to his clients. But everybody loved him. So when he died, everybody was, sang all his kindnesses to them.

VY: Did you ever... no, you never met him.

MM: No. But I think my father has the personality of my grandfather.

VY: Interesting.

MM: Very kind to everybody.

VY: Yeah, tell me more about your dad. Tell me about his early life in Japan and what brought him to America?

MM: My father was born in a samurai family as the oldest son, and (they) made certain that he would be trained to do his duty and take care of the old arms and all the other artifacts from history. And he was involved in a very active samurai family. His aunt -- no, his grandmother, would tell him about how half a year or whatever length it was, half the family would have to go to the shogun, and then they'd have to stay there. And then they could come back, and then the other half of the family. So they would always be having some family with a shogun and they wouldn't rise up against him because their family was there. So I went to see his house that he lived in as a child, and I'm looking at it with 1968 eyes, and he lived in a thatched-roof house. Like when you go to England, you see Shakespeare's wife's house, Ann Hathaway's thatched roof house, it was just like that. It was very interesting. So his growing up, because he was born out in the country, he lived with an uncle who was a general of something. And so his education was partly militaristic, and duty and so on. But he was very involved with history. And he always belonged to the historical society in Trenton, New Jersey, and where he was. So after he leaves Japan, he's still involved in the historical society. And I was a teacher in California and I sent one of my colleagues to them when they went to Japan, and then come back to the United States, go stay with my parents, they did. And he was a history teacher and he said it was the most unusual thing about my father taking him to Washington's Crossing where George Washington crossed the Delaware. And he's saying to Roger, "Oh, this is, our forefathers did this," in a Japanese accent, he's heavily accented.

VY: This is your father?

MM: This is my father taking Roger and his wife and son around. And Roger, the history teacher, was saying, "Only in America can we have this American point of view, this accent point of view." And it made him so humble and look at America quite differently after this. So that's... he was very in touch with his family. So when I've taken trips to Japan, they open up these albums, and there are pictures of us from birth to the most recent times. So they are all involved with knowing his activities and family, and of course, they welcomed us whenever we go there. And what's interesting about this is my father left in 1924. He goes back to Japan, he has the language and the mind of thinking in 1924 Japan. And so my cousins will say to me, "You know, he wants to have all these relatives for the parties," because it was his seventy-seventh birthday, because you have special events on fifty-five, sixty-six, seventy-seven, eighty-eight and so on, but we don't do that anymore. He did it because my father expected it, but it's something how, expectations of how things are done in Japan changed. In another way, my father loved to keep in touch with the relatives. And he was, for a while, responsible, even though he gave up his role with the family, the Buddhist temple, you have to give money to and you have to...

VY: When you say he gave up his role with the family, what does that mean?

MM: The oldest son of a samurai family has certain duties. So when you go to the temple, the Buddhist temple, the Shinto is for the people that are alive, and the Buddhist are for the people that are dead. And for the people that are dead, there are these big tombstones, but they're not really tombstones, they're family stones that are like a pyramid. And then the Mikuriya name is on there, you pay your respects, you go and you put flowers on and clean off, clean it off and so on, and then you have a ceremony with the Buddhist priest and give some money and so on. So you have to do this on a regular basis to keep up your family plot or whatever it is. So after the Second World War when they went to the temple, there was a Mikuriya family that wasn't paying their dues and keeping up their pillar (with) their family name pillar, but they had the same coat of arms. So my father said yes, why don't you allow them to put their plot, their monument, which was smaller, it was about only three or four feet high, and ours was like eight feet high, on our plot. So they'll be our guests and we will pay for the priest and so on each year. So that's what he arranged, and that was his duty. But because his brother didn't really, wasn't a businessman, they looked alike but their personality was so completely different. He was not a good businessman or a manager, so that's how my father said, "Well, let's pick somebody else who did that," and he sent up a trust fund for the care and maintenance of this monument to the Mikuriya family.

VY: Oh, so that's interesting. So your father was very responsible even though he gave up his duties as the older son, when he saw that these things weren't happening that should be happening, he kind of stepped in and made sure that they happened.

MM: Yes. And the only thing that was left, you know how those Japanese samurai outfits are these big and so on, and they have these metal masks, that's the only thing that was left, because they burned up in the fire. He could have put them out in the country with some of the relatives. Everything was burned up and the only thing that was left was the half face of the metal mask.

VY: And what was the fire?

MM: Well, the bombing in Japan.

VY: Okay, so that happened during World War II.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.