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VY: You know, that's interesting. When you're around other Japanese Americans, are other groups of people... I'm just wondering how, do you feel like, sort of a kinship with people, or do you feel like your different, do you feel kind of like an outsider? Like if you interact with other people who maybe had the experience of going to a camp, or had experience of growing up in a Japanese American community.

MM: I don't have things in common with them. I am an outsider. And I'm an outsider on many levels because I have a white mother. And I remember when the person, census person came, and he asked me, what was I? Was I Japanese or was I white? And I said I was both. He says, "You have to pick one." Why would I have to pick one? I ran away and I cried. It was very (upset)! I remember he was trying to push me to pick one identity when I couldn't.

VY: When was that? How old were you?

MM: I think I was... 1940, I was about ten or something like that, I was in elementary school. But it was shocking to me, and I cried, because it hurt my feeling that I was not willing to even try to do it for him. And he asked me, what was a...

VY: Was that something you talked to your parents about at all?

MM: Well, they didn't have... on the forums, they didn't have mixed race then. Now they do, but then they didn't. My mother and father were very good listeners, you felt listened to. But they wouldn't make judgments. Our dinner table was all conversation about the injustices in the world and what would you do avoid it or what could be done to avoid it. So there was a lot of conversation like that.

VY: Yeah, it's interesting to me. You had a father from Japan, and a white European woman for a mom, and they had this really strong sense of injustice and social justice, and it was more towards other people, like how would other people experience and trying to help with that. But I don't get the sense that they internalize that themselves, even though they were a mixed couple, right? And internalized that themselves or talked to your kids about it. I don't know, I mean, do you ever have...

MM: No, we were just people. Just people. And you know, there were so many people that were in and out of our houses. Mother was a Baha'i, so the Baha'is, so the original Caucasus come from Iran, and they're not seen as white because of their funny name, and they speak another language and have a different alphabet. I mean, they were seen as, like they were Black or something. Some of them were dark, some of them were light, but they were, these were all educated people, but they were different.

VY: Yeah, so it's interesting to me. It's like your parents didn't seem to, really, just think about it that much, or at least not express...

MM: No, they didn't think about it.

VY: Yeah. It was just, they were two people who loved each other.

MM: Yeah.

VY: And they had two children that they loved.

MM: And they had to, I asked my mother, "Why did you raise Tod and me so differently from our sister?" She had twenty-four years of private school education. And she said, "Oh, Mary Jane, I'm sorry, but we wanted to raise you like Beverly but we didn't have the money. We were just coming out of the depression, and we were doing the best we could." And I thought, well, that was pretty good. I had fun. Life was an adventure, and it was up to you to make the best of what you could do. And they gave me a lot of skills, because they had us working with them all the time. So it wasn't a negative thing. But there were no rules, like for ethnics, ethnicity. So they didn't put any ethnic group together, like there was one lady who came and lived with us. She was white, but her father was molesting her, so my mother had her come and live with us so she could get a job away from her father. I mean, we learned about how bad things could go on, but if we saw how Mother helped whatever she could do, offering a space and conversation, how to maybe do this and that, and get settled and so on. So they were very interested.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.