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VY: You mentioned, during one of our earlier conversations, about how after the war people were struggling and your mom, you were sending things back. But you know what, before we get to that, let's leave Japan. So your mom and dad are able to leave because...

MM: Well, they left with great difficulty. I found an intact diary of my mother. They're getting ready to leave, they're saying goodbye to all the Mikuriyas, and then they have to go on this train to the next town, and then they have a hotel there. So before they left, the military picked my father up and had a three-hour or so interview. And he would not tell my mother what was said in the interview, we don't know. Then they go to the next town because they knew the itinerary was to get on that boat to go back to the United States. So they went to the next town, stayed there, and suddenly my father is called away again and the interview goes on for hours and hours. "What happened?" "Oh, they were just interviewing me." He wouldn't tell her what they were interviewing about, who knows? But he was a samurai with engineering training that anybody going to war would need. And he went to a very excellent school, so I'm sure they were asking him to stay. But, you know, he knows that you could never be a naturalized citizen. So he could, with Mother being pregnant, he could never stay in Japan even though they wanted him to because the family would be nothing. Because there is no welcome in Japan for people who were different. You could look at that right now, anybody, there are a lot of Koreans in there, and they've been in there for generations and they're treated very, very badly. And so we see that my cousin owns a, makes dishes like china, very fine china for the emperor. And all the workers there are from Korean families originally, and then the next generation is still Korean families. The same families have been working for Arita-ware all these years, and they are not treated like Japanese. In this country, you have, birth makes you a Japanese citizen, but they can't be. And until 1970, you couldn't even be naturalized, but now you can. Of course, it's very difficult. My mother would never make it as a naturalized citizen because you have to have fluency in Japanese which she didn't have. So even if the rule was, at that time, she wouldn't make it. But her family, Dad's family, was always welcoming of Mother. They liked her, they liked her spirit, she would teach them American ways. Like one time she made mashed potatoes, and they liked them so much that they hid the mashed potatoes and the other child found them and ate them all up. I mean, there were little stories about how she was there, and she would laugh with them. [Laughs] So she liked being in Japan and learning it all, but she knew she couldn't live there as a family.

VY: Yeah, I see. So they had to leave, they had some difficulty, the military wanted your dad to stay, but they were able to get on the boat. When was this?

MM: 1933.

VY: 1933, they get on a boat, and was your mom pregnant at the time?

MM: Yes, yes. And what's interesting, the doctor, they said Mother had TB, so they should abort the child, and Mother said no. But she knows where she got the TB. And when she was in Dr. Kerr's house, Mrs. Kerr, she knew she had TB, so they sent her away for a sanitarium for the summer. So they were very kind to her. And I know, I can take a lung exam for TB, it doesn't show, but if I have that pinprick thing, I always have positive TB.

VY: Oh, that's interesting. So it was kind of passed on to you?

MM: Yes. And that's why you see many people in Old England die of TB, because it's so easily passed on to somebody, or being in a same room, or having them cough with all those TB germs coming out. And my mother was very researchy in her mind on everything she did. So my father had a stomach that didn't do well with American food. So she started studying nutrition and so on, and so he had less, she figured out a way so he can have milk products and cheese by adding rennet to his diet. And she was an ovo-lacto vegetarian in the end of her life, but always fresh fruits and vegetables were key to his well-being.

VY: She was ahead of her time.

MM: She was. Oh, ahead of her time. We didn't have a bread man come to the house, so she had to make her own bread. So I was in a family that made their own bread, so she didn't want to just make white bread, she was always putting things in mashed potatoes, barley from the chicken feed or whatever. And now it's common, but back in the '40s, it wasn't.

VY: Yeah, so it's interesting. Because even though she had lived with the woman who kind of taught her to be more refined and that sort of thing, she did come from a farming family, or a family that farmed and that kind of stuff with her in a good way, she was very resourceful.

MM: Yes. But the thing is, it's really funny. When you wear an apron and you live on the farm, you're out in your clothes and somebody, guest comes, you put on a clean apron and you look as if you're clean, right? So you could meet your guests in a clean apron so you don't look... so for her, she'd like to work in the garden, and her hands weren't great. But when she went to the symphony and you have the long gloves, who could tell you had these gardener's fingers, hands? So we used to laugh about that when she was all dressed up to go to the symphony.

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