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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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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.

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VY: I want to talk more about why your father gave up that role, but we're not quite there yet. Is there anything else about your dad in his early days? Did he serve in the military when he was in Japan?

MM: Oh, yes. He graduated from Kumamoto University, which is like the MIT, in Japan, the MIT, it's the scientific engineering school of that time. And he went there, and then after that, he did his military, two years' military service in Borneo, and it was with headhunters, he has pictures of headhunters where he was assigned to do surveying, they were surveying for roads and dams, and that's how he spent his two-year military service doing surveying work.

VY: Did he ever talk about that with you?

MM: Well, he showed the pictures, and I said, "If they were headhunters, weren't you afraid?" He said, "No, they were just people, they were very nice." So he found, you know, his assignment in that he had to wear a military outfit, he saw his pictures in the military outfit with his transit and doing whatever he was doing. But that was his interest, and he was very friendly with the people from Borneo. So he was, even though they were called headhunters, it wasn't a confrontational situation.

VY: Oh, wow, that's interesting. What happened after that?

MM: Well, after that, my father, his mother wanted the best for him and she wanted him to go to go to a Lutheran missionary kindergarten. They didn't have kindergartens in Japan, so she thought that would be interesting for him. So the people, the missionaries, really loved my dad, five years old, and they kept track of him all the way through college and military. And after the military they said, "I think you should come to the University of Pennsylvania because they have a good engineering school and that would be helpful for your career. All right. Now, between five and twenty-five, that's twenty years I've kept track of him. So they made arrangements for him to go to the University of Pennsylvania, and then he was met in San Francisco by a Lutheran minister who gave him a tour, and then put him on the train to Philadelphia. Then when he gets to Philadelphia, he stays with the niece of John Wannamaker, which is the society point. John Wannamaker was a, I forget what governmental role he had, but it was a leadership. And he owned all these upscale department stores. So he was housed with the niece and introduced to all these well-established people. And they were always kind to him because they were, he was their guest. So my Aunt Edith Fayles, as we called her, was always concerned about him. She was a maiden lady who loved having him as her charge, and introducing him to a friend because he was such a nice, friendly person.

VY: So it was her family that he would...

MM: Well, she alone. She was a maiden lady, big maiden lady. [Laughs] But, you know, you have, if you're with a Lutheran congregation, he went up to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania and did surveying on some Lutheran property which they appreciated. So he endeared himself to the Lutherans that way. And that was, he was finishing off his thesis, and somehow a fire was caught and burned down, burned all his theses and he had to do it all over again.

VY: Oh, my gosh.

MM: Yeah. His stick-to-itiveness was one of his words, stick-to-itiveness, and have vision. And you can see when he writes, he says about memory and respect and dutiful, so that was always part of his well-being, but he was able to change.

VY: When did he learn English? Did he learn English in Japan?

MM: That is a very good question. I never asked him where he learned English, but he obviously knew enough English to come to the University of Pennsylvania.

VY: Yeah, and his writings were in English.

MM: Yes, but he had the help of my mother to help...

VY: Later.

MM: ...fix it up.

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VY: Okay. So I think we have a good sense of your dad, let's now talk about your mom and where she came from, her family, why she came to America.

MM: So my mother's family is all uneducated. She's the only one that has any college degrees. Her father did not believe in education, so she got her mother's permission to go to school, because her father wanted her to work on the farm. So she went and, because there were eleven children in her family, number one, took care of the new babies in the house, and number two was my mother. So she took care of all the younger children that could walk.

VY: And where was the family at this point in time?

MM: At this time it was in Pennsylvania.

VY: So your mom's parents and the whole family came to America?

MM: No. My mother's parents went to Wyoming, and then they went to... they came over on the boat and they docked in Baltimore, so they entered in Baltimore. And during that time on the boat, my mother and grandmother Schwenk took care of a lady who had TB, which ended up being in my mother and also my brother and I. And I would assume she died shortly after arriving, but they weren't like Ellis Island, they didn't check people for their health as well in Baltimore when people came over. Anyway, they went to Wyoming where they knew somebody and it was a disaster, so they moved back. But they were in farming at that time, and my mother loves children. She can't clean a house, but she can entertain children no matter what age they are and make life fun. And she was very good at that, so much so that she got a job in Perryopolis, which is a very tiny town in Pennsylvania. And in order to go to college, you had go to Connellsville. In California, there is a requirement that if a person wants to go to college, the school district has to provide them with college recommended courses. Each state runs its own educational system, educational rules, that's what it says in the Constitution. So each state is responsible for the education, so California, if I wanted to go to college, then the school district would have to provide it for me. In Pennsylvania, it didn't. So what they did in Pennsylvania, if your school didn't provide it for you, then they sent you to another town, and the town would have a special entrance where they would interview the people coming into the town, find a place for them to stay in the area of their interest. So my mother wanted to be a medical missionary, she went to Connellsville, so they assigned her to the doctor's house to give a basis for understanding where she... but the family that she went to was a woman who was a woman's advocate for the vote. So she was always having these events that my mother could see would be important for her in the future. So my mother was made middle-class by this lady instead of immigrant class. Because she taught her how to speak, required that she educate herself with vocabulary so my mother would know Greek and Latin words. And if she didn't know a word, even before she died, she's writing on these little slips of paper the words she didn't know, and the Greek and Latin roots. So she was a wonderful dictionary.

And the other thing the lady told her she had to have good manners, so Emily Post. And it was very important for my mother that her children had good manners. Because when we were young, having a Japanese father, short father and a tall Western mother, and these two children, we would look like a zoo coming in there and they'd always look at us. So having these perfect manners that my mother (had) inculcated it was perfect for our family moving around. And this lady was also very important because she gave the money to my mother when the banks died during the Depression. So our parents went to Japan in 1929.

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VY: Let's back up a little bit because I definitely want to talk about that. Let's talk about your parents when they met. How did they meet?

MM: Oh, I should go back further. Because my mother went to Oberlin College, so she was with Mary Jane Kerr, and then she goes off, and she goes to pick a college. She doesn't know how to pick a college, so she said, "This one seems like the kind I want. It's the first college in America to accept Blacks and women." "Oh, great." So there she went; she went to Oberlin College. And in her senior year, they had an assignment for sociology. The sociology course said, "Pick a topic for assignment, and it has to be researched." So she worked with two children of missionaries, because that's what she wanted to be, and they decided, well, let's see if the values of the founding fathers of Oberlin still exist. So one took the townspeople, one took the faculty, and Mother had the students. And when she was interviewing the students, she found the Black students could never go the Spring Dance because the Spring Dance was a formal dance and you had to dance with six different people and you had to have these six different names on your dance card. But there weren't six Black couples, so her group decided to integrate. So the two men on there, they danced with the Black gals, and Mother, and then found another woman, they danced with the Black men when they had to change partners. And the next thing she knew, she was called into the office of the dean to explain herself. So she did that, and the lady said... well, if you can imagine, 1925, you're on the dance floor, and all these Black and white people were dancing together. So, I mean, even in the '50s that would have been a shock. Can you imagine what it is in the 1920s? Well, anyway, she went to see the dean, the dean said, "I am, have to investigate what happened last night, and I want you to answer me yes or no. Do you understand? I don't want any other word other than yes or no. Is that agreed upon?" And my mother said, "Yes." She said, "This was an organized activity, wasn't it?" Mother said, "Yes, but..." "That's it, interview over, you're excused." So my mother thought it was all right because the dean led her to believe she's investigated, she found it was a group project, fine, all right. Then while she was doing missionary work in Montana, Christian missionary work, she gets this from the Christian Society in Boston saying, "They've taken away your scholarship to medical school for advanced, too advanced views on the race question." Because they wouldn't get other funders to give to them if they would fund people to do things like that.

VY: This is all because of the dance?

MM: Well, that was pretty dramatic in the 1920s.

VY: Sure.

MM: So she lost her scholarship for that. But this is the theme all in motherhood were -- as a dating person, she was following, speaking up for the Blacks in America. So that's why it's like a tradition. If you speak up for somebody, you might get shot down one way or another. And we were trained as children to speak up for others that were being mistreated. But we became middle class, unlike most people, because of this Mary Jane Kerr trying to make her visibility welcoming to other people and showing that her different ideas would work, and she was a kind, upper-class lady.

VY: That is so interesting because she was able to kind of move in, I guess, different circles or be a little more successful because of how this other woman taught her to just be, basically behave differently.

MM: Yes, exactly. Isn't that amazing?

VY: Yeah. So your mom did, she moved forward and --

MM: Oh yes, and she had one year of medical school, and then she got a master's and my aunt's laughing, they say she was on the stage, she didn't realize she was the only woman on the stage. You know, in the 1920s, how many women get their master's? And she did research for the Wistar Institute, which still exists, you know, it's now a cancer research place. And my daughter, since she's named after her, looked up and she found papers written by my mother in the 1920s while she was working at the Wister Institute.

VY: Did she make copies?

MM: She did and she showed the little animal called the Daphnia that was used, like white mice are today, Daphnia were used because it was a crustacean, it was a little, like, water flea that jumps around, and it has live births. And it's orange and you can see through it, and you can see all the little Daphnia babies, and you can see them being born. But if they are threatened and something's bad, they become male. And they can become male and female depending on the situation. But it's an interesting animal. By putting other things in the water to test, she was working on a project to see if they could use the Daphnia to test whether one was pregnant or not.

VY: Was that her project?

MM: That was one of her projects.

VY: Was it one that she came up with?

MM: No, no, everybody was looking for it all over the world, looking how do we tell if a woman is pregnant or not.

VY: I never heard that before.

MM: Yeah. So they take her urine and they would put it in there, and seeing if the Daphnia would be able to tell if the lady were pregnant or not, but that was one of her assignments. And while we were younger, the Wister Institute had a laboratory and I would walk to the laboratory, or my mother would drive me in the car and I'd stay over there. And there were these salamanders and all these microscopes and dead animals, pickled, in all these different forms. It just was a very interesting, unusual upbringing.

VY: Well, okay, so that's fascinating.

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VY: So let's see. Have your parents met yet? Not yet. Let's talk about when your parents meet.

MM: Well, my mother, after one year of medical school she decided she didn't know, after she took the scholarship from this Christian church in Philadelphia, what would they expect of her. So she wasn't sure, so she went into science. So after she went into science, she was ready to go to work and could have a social life, right? So she was very interested in the International House in Philadelphia, it's one of the first ones. We have one in Berkeley here, it was one of the first ones, and the one in New York, of course, it's Rockefeller money.

VY: Can you describe, just really quickly, what the International House is?

MM: Oh, the International House is a concept for international development where people from all different countries come together. They live in this building, in these small rooms, but it's set up so there are a lot of activities within the house, opportunities to eat together and study together. Because the rooms are so small they have to study together and have these common things. And I know in Berkeley, eighty percent are foreign born and twenty percent are American-born, I don't know what the percentage was in Philadelphia, but I know that a certain proportion had to be American-born. But the problem was, with the American-born, is the International House only allowed American whites. But they would allow Africans in, why wouldn't they allow American Blacks? So at that particular time, both my mother and my father were demonstrating for the house to enable American Blacks to be members of the International House. And at that time, some of the people had taken the International House social time off campus as a demonstration against this... no American Blacks. They said, "We'll come back when you allow American Blacks to come in." But when you rent a house or buy a house, there's a covenant at that particular time that says you cannot have this house used or sold by Blacks, Negroes, colored. So they had to figure out a way to enable the American Blacks to be able to come into there, and it took several years. And during those years off campus, that's when my mother met my father, fighting for the rights of African Americans.

So they were both social activists, and as a married couple, it worked out very well because they always had something to talk about in our house because there were so many people that didn't allow people of color anyplace. Like we had a, Herbert Tokutomi came to our house out of the camps. So he was working in the co-op stores, the produce, he couldn't get a place to live. So he lived with our family during the whole time he came to the co-op 'til he left.

VY: How long was that?

MM: I think that was about two years. And I remember, before he left, he wanted to go see the Statue of Liberty. And you know, he's from California, the farming community in California. So he said, "Would you like to go?" So he took me as a guest on the train to New Jersey, and you go to the Statue of Liberty, although it's in the... people think it belongs to New York City, it belongs to New Jersey. So you have to get a boat from New Jersey and go to the Statue of Liberty. And then you climb all these stairs up to the crown, and then there's another set of stairs that are even smaller into the hand. But we went all the way up to the torch she was holding up. And it was one of the highlights of my youth.

VY: Oh, I bet. I don't think you can go into the torch any more.

MM: Oh, really? The stairway gets so narrow because the hand gets narrow, so I don't know. But it was, I was exhausted. But what a gift for somebody to give to you.

VY: Yeah, really. Let's see. So your dad... well, I know you said your dad was involved in the JACL, but maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later even though it started early on. Because we were talking about your mom and dad, they'd met. How long did they know each other before they got married?

MM: Oh, my, I don't know. Maybe a year or two, I don't know.

VY: And then what happened once they got married?

MM: Oh, then my grandpa Mikuriya had a heart attack. So because it's required that the oldest son light the funeral pyre, they took a boat. They took thirty days to go back to Japan and lived in Japan until he had his final heart attack, and then they could come back to the United States.

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<Begin Segment 7>

VY: So do you know how long they were there in Japan?

MM: Yeah, they were there about three years.

VY: Three years. So your mom was in Japan. Did you talk about what that was like to be living in Japan?

MM: Oh, yes. She talked about, she laughed at herself a lot. She said one time, "I want to be a good Japanese wife." So sitting at the table, there were all men and the women waited on them. She was the only woman at the table, but her husband had to translate. So they're getting to know and she was getting to know them. And she said, "I want to know, what do I call my husband?" So he said, "Blah, blah, blah," in Japanese, and she said, "Now, what does that mean?" "It means, 'My lord master.'" She said, "I am not going to say that." [Laughs] Which, of course, surprised everybody because they hadn't seen Japanese women refuse to say that. And so she was, she tried to be a good Japanese wife, but there were certain things that she didn't understand, or couldn't fathom. She did a lot of teaching of English as a second language, or she gave English classes, worked with other missionaries that were there, and tried to learn Japanese. And she would laugh at herself, she said, "One time I got on the trolley, and I went up and I was so proud of myself to say, 'Let me off at the next stop.'" And she said it in her best Japanese, and the whole trolley laughed. So she turns to her friend and she said, "What did I say?" She said, "Kill me at the next stop." [Laughs] So she laughs at all these little incidents that come up in her life and in her learning, because she always liked to learn, she asked so many questions. And she used that learning about Japan when she came back here to give talks on life in Japan to women's groups. And she was so fascinated, she took all her kimonos and all her children's books and showed how they worked, famous children's stories. And we had them in our house until there was a fire in the house and burned up all these clothes and items that you used for her telling about life in Japan.

VY: So your mom had kimonos. Were they specially made for her?

MM: My mother was five-ten and a half, and the standard kimono gets bunched up to fit the person, but they don't have five-ten and a half tall people. So she had to have her own futon, her own zoris, geta, everything had to be made to measure. That meant the design had to be made specially on the flowers because they rolled up like wallpaper. And when you wanted to roll them, you sewed the stitches up this way. So they have to have a bigger design or a design that doesn't fit the standard. And what was interesting, when I went to Japan, I have to tell you, I was going around the world and Japan was the last stop. So I thought, oh, a western country, I'll be able to get some pantyhose there and I'll go see my relatives. So I go the pantyhose, and they were big enough around, but the crotch was way down between the mid-knee and thigh. But you know, I walked a little step and didn't look too awkward, but it was very funny. And maybe five years later I was in Japan again, they had girls that were taller than I am. I was five-feet eight and a half. Five-feet eight inches and a half, and I was bigger than most people, but now, the girls and the boys were getting taller. And some of my cousins were six-foot-three, every time I went by they got taller and taller. So you know, the Japanese Americans in this country, the Nisei are three inches taller than the Issei. And that's sort of like what happened in Japan.

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<Begin Segment 8>

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.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

VY: Okay. So your parents return, they take the boat ride, and how long was the boat ride?

MM: It was one month. And then they came to stay with her sister, her sister Mary. Her sister Mary had one child, and she worked and her husband worked. And so my father could stay home with the baby while Mother went out and worked. Because then after the baby was born, he would take care of his son and his in-laws, whose name was Walter, he was like a year and a half. And so now there was a new baby, so now he was the babysitter. That's when you see this samurai become kind of a ooey-gooey loving kind of a parent that was very, very kind. And that's why, because he was so kind, his brother-in-law felt he was stealing his son's affection, so they had to move out. And during that time, my mother found a book, she was always reading books. She found a book, a family of four can live on two acres. So now they had a dream. They had no money, but they had a dream. So my father was able to get a job with the American Bridge Company, and then a permanent job with at the American Bridge Company in Trenton. So then near Trenton they looked for a place that had two acres so they could fill this promise of a family of four can live on two acres. Because one time they had, only thing they had for dinner was green beans somebody gave them. And they said they had to have more stability, maybe if they had their own piece of land, they could do better, and so that's why it became their dream. And that's what they did.

VY: So when was this? At this point in time, your brother had been born, the first child had been born?

MM: Yes. My brother was born in 1933 and I was born in 1934. And I was a big baby. So growing up, people thought we were twins because girls grow faster, and I was a big baby and I was, we were going around, they treated us like twins, but we weren't. And our upbringing was a learning lesson of my parents learning how to live the American life together. Now, they were sure that they were becoming American parents, but our food, I thought our food was American, they thought our food was American, but when I went to college, I didn't know any of the foods they were giving out because we didn't have that kind of food. My mother was European type of food and Japanese food that she'd learned to cook in Japan.

VY: So what would be like a typical meal you guys would have?

MM: We'd have these hearty vegetable soups with meat, or we would have mackerel, rice and pickle, I mean, kind of thing. My mother was a good, we had an apple tree so she made apple pies. And she has the kind of attitude, you can't let these go to waste. So she'd take every pie dish out and she'd make apple pies, maybe ten, but they were in big dishes and small dishes, every kind of thing she could bake in. Then she'd go to the neighbors and say, "You know, I have just so many apples, could you help me? I made these pies, maybe you would be able to have it." Of course they looked forward to the pies because she was an excellent pie baker. And so we had... she developed good relationships with the neighbors by barter and giving them things. And at Christmastime she used to make Stollen, which is a very German Christmas dish, and give those to the neighbors. So that's how they would talk to my mother more because she was, interacted with them.

VY: So your neighbors interacted with your mom, did they interact with your dad as well?

MM: No. Well, these were German neighbors, so she spoke German to them.

VY: They spoke German?

MM: And they were treated very badly during the First World War. Mother was treated very badly during the First World War, and so she could talk to them and commiserate how this war is different, and their children don't listen to them, and I'm sorry my kids, children beat up your kids, but they don't pay any attention to me because they hear all the propaganda. So it's all very interesting. And my mother is, in a town of five hundred people, she was like the best medical resource they had in town. They wouldn't talk to her, but if there was an emergency, they'd come and get her. [Laughs]

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

VY: Okay. So now you're been born. Tell me a little bit about your childhood before the war growing up in your house. What's one of your earliest memories?

MM: Working. What family life means to me is cooperation. Whatever the event, the parents and the two, my brother and I would do it together. For instance, at the beginning of the war, they had rationing. So my father decided to go into chicken raising because they didn't need all this bureaucratic stickers or points to have meat, what do you call them? Anyway, so we could sell chickens. So he and mother -- oh, you have to know that the post office is a place where it had a great big book about this high, three inches high, made out of newspaper, and had all the things you can order from the government printing office. So if you wanted to learn how to raise chickens, you'd order the pamphlet on learning how to raise chickens. If you're chickens got coccidiosis, you got a pamphlet for what to do for coccidiosis. If you wanted to raise corn, they'll tell you why you couldn't raise corn in a line, you had to raise it in a square and this, that and the other thing. So they had a pamphlet for everything. If you wanted to learn plumbing and electrical, they had a pamphlet for that. So it's like the internet is today.

VY: I was just thinking that.

MM: But it was in the 1940s in this blue pamphlet, and I think my parents were the only college-educated people in the town, so I think they were the only ones that really used it, these pamphlets that you got, you ordered through the post office. And I don't think most of the people know what a wonderful service the post office did at that particular time.

VY: Yeah, I didn't know that you could do that. So you go in and you find one on the list, and you order it and they...

MM: They give you a little profile of what it's about, and then you order it and then you get it and it's maybe about five pages long and four pages folded over, these little tiny booklets. And that's how they learned how to do plumbing in the house. Because remember I told you, they had this desire to buy two acres, but they had no money? How are they going to buy two acres? So they found a house on two acres that had been on sale for ten years, hadn't been sold. So it had no running water, it had a pump with a red handle, it had an upscale outhouse, two holes, two holes. Outhouses can be pretty shoddily built if they're one hole, but for two holes, they put a little more effort in. And then they had electricity. There was no heat in the house, so my mother and father, they dug out the cellar to make (room for) a furnace, and to make another room for the coke. But to have cooking facilities and heating facilities, my mother went to Sears and Roebucks. At that time, it was during depression, 1938, and she said, "We will buy the furnace from you if you lend us a wood burning stove with an oven in it," and they did. And by the time they finished digging out and ready to put in a furnace downstairs, and a place for the coke to come in, because that was more efficient than coal, they were on their way to developing their family farm unit with heat. And then they had plumbing to put in there, you know, to get rid of the outhouse. So we had these potties, and then because it was too cold to go out at night, so we had these potties on the stair. And my mother said, "Aren't we so lucky? We're just like the pioneers; we have this challenge." So we were always, every weekend we did something to fix up the house, to participate in the building of the new place, to have a toilet, indoor toilet. So the indoor plumbing for a sink, instead of going out and pumping it. So we have a hot water heater instead of heating it up on the stove, I mean, so many wonderful... that was, "Aren't we lucky? We're like the pioneers, every little thing." So growing up was, "Oh isn't this fun? I wonder what project we're going to do for the next weekend."

So we raised, they learned how to raise chickens, the chickens, day old chickens would come. Did you know that the people that determined whether they were boy or girl chickens were the Japanese chick sexers? So, of course, I was able to see how chickens were sexed when I was a little kid. My father took me to the chick sexers as part of my education. But they were so fast, I couldn't understand how they could do it so fast. And so we raised goats, chickens, and we lived in this place which was just outside the city. So everybody would get a cute little puppy, and when it became a juvenile, "Oh, we don't want this, it's too energetic." So they'd take it in the country and throw it out and it could take care of itself. So my mother was always finding these youthful dogs needing a home, not knowing what to do herself, so she'd bring it home. And she would find out what the character of the dog was, and then she'd look for a house, a home for it. She'd first advertise it in the newspaper, and she'd give it away. And a year later she called, oh, they don't have the dog anymore. So she started charging two dollars. If they paid two dollars, a year later, they still had the dog. So she was learning all these lessons about how life went on, and she would tell us about how things were working. The barter system is very, very common with communities that have farming or nothing, so a lot of bartering for work or things. So we could, during the Second World War, we had butter because the neighbors had cows and they gave us the cream, we exchanged them for chickens. So we didn't have it too bad during the Second World War for food, because we lived in the country.

VY: What were the neighbors' living circumstances? Were they also, like were their other farms around?

MM: Oh, they were bigger farms. At the end of the war, there were no agricultural farm workers. No... what do you call them? They used to be braceros or migrant workers, they didn't have any migrant farmworkers because they were taken into the military. So children from the public schools were taken out, so I had to get up at five-thirty in the morning to go cut asparagus, and then I'd go to school. And in the summertime, we all picked tomatoes for Campbell's soup. And then when the, all these people came back, there were enough workers. But there weren't any migrant farmworkers, but there were enough workers around so that we didn't have to... I was only eleven years old. The minimum age for a child worker is fourteen, so the laws were forgotten when you needed the food. So it was very interesting to be part of this complex of changing rules.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

VY: Yeah, and now we're talking about the war. So why don't we talk about what happened to your family the day -- I don't know if you remember -- but the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor?

MM: Anybody that's Japanese American remembers the day, December 7, 1941. I mean, it changed your whole life, it changed how we were treated, it changed how the government treated us, how the schools treated us, the hostilities that you didn't know existed came out. It was just quite shocking. And when you look at that video of my brother, says, "Well, do you remember December 7th?" And both of us said -- and we hadn't talked about it before -- said it changed our life. And if you talked to anybody that was alive at that time, no matter how old they were, it changed their lives. Disbelief.

VY: Yeah. So what happened afterwards?

MM: So my father was working for the American Bridge Company, and he's continuing to work for the American Bridge Company all through the war. I don't know how they did it, but they had some arrangement that he was allowed to continue working for them. And they worked in military things, but he still worked for them. So they must have trusted him, or I don't know what it is, because he certainly wasn't a citizen. And there was an accent, he looked like it, and one day he was picked up by the FBI because he looked like a suspicious character. He's been going over across that bridge for the last fifteen years, so suddenly he becomes a suspicious character because of the war. And they pick him up, and Mother doesn't know where he is that particular time, this is a child's memory, they have these spools with four spikes peeking up. And you take this, and your assignment as a child, eye-hand coordination, and you put this around and you weave it over and it comes out like a knitted string, and then you make a potholder out of it or something, you sew it together. But that's your assignment, homework. Well, Tod came home with a big ball like this, and this little spool. It�s like a spool of thread only the wooden part with four nails. Well, when I got up the next morning, the red ball was gone, and I know how long it takes. She was so worried, she did this, she had to have to do something because she didn't know where Dad was, they wouldn't allow him to call her. So they come home, come to the house at midnight, and they say they're the FBI and they've been holding him. And, of course, (the FBI did not) let him call home, "I wouldn't worry so much." And they came in, and they wanted to see everything in the house, they looked at everything in the house, they looked at the sleeping children. And then I looked at the library, oh my goodness, all these books in Japanese. Well, they made, he made him open every single book, make sure, and tell them what's inside of each book. They were all engineering books. But they wouldn't just let him open one, two, three, and then presume the rest, they had to go over every single book and it took a long, long time. Then they took away the shortwave radio, they took away our camera, and they told him he couldn't go more than seven miles from the house or something like that. His family could go, but he, being Japanese enemy alien now, he didn't just have to register as an alien, he had to now register as an enemy alien. It was, it was shocking. So most people have pictures of people's childhood, these pictures are for special occasions. Somebody, for Boy Scouts, or your class picture, but you don't have any family pictures because of the taking away of the photography.

VY: So they took away your photo albums?

MM: No, they took away the camera. You could keep your photo albums but you had to give up your camera and the shortwave radio and you could only have AM.

VY: So you couldn't take any more pictures?

MM: Yeah, so we have no pictures of when we were kids and our friends.

VY: And your dad was still allowed, they brought him back home and made him go through all of the library books. But he was allowed to go to work, because it was within the radius, the seven or ten mile radius, but he couldn't go anywhere else.

MM: No, he couldn't.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

VY: So when you would go on, like, a family outing or something...

MM: The family outing had to be within the short (difference). I got very bad poison ivy, and so I would get blisters that were maybe a half-inch, and they would be on my arms. And my mother said, "Time to go to the beach," so if you went to the New Jersey shore, all the sand was in the little waves that came over and you didn't feel them baking, and you were sitting out in the sun, and you hadn't felt anything. By the time you went home, all your blisters had gone away. Because the salt had shriveled them up and healed them, and it was now you were healthy. It was the best medicine for whenever I got a bad case. It was time to go to the shore, and with a Western mother, they didn't see any need to ask questions about the kids.

VY: I was going to ask that. If people, when you were alone with your mom as opposed to when you're alone with your dad, if people interacted with you differently?

MM: Absolutely, absolutely. Most of the time they were very fearful to talk to us at all because of my dad, he was the enemy, they'd walk across the street. They just didn't have any experience with any Asians, there were so few on the East Coast. And with Mother, when she delivered, I remember one time she would get on a bus, she'd clean the chickens. In other words, in that evening, my father developed a way how to kill the chickens (in) a humane way (...). So they hang the chickens upside down, all the blood would drop down, and my father made a knife that was curved. And you open the chicken's mouth, which was very easy to do, and just put it in and cut the spinal cord. So it couldn't feel anything, and all the blood would drip out. So that's like kosher killing of a chicken. And then my mother, that night, that evening, would sit with Dad and the children and we'd all together pull the feathers off the chicken. So you have to put (chickens) in boiling hot water that loosens up the feathers and then you pull them off. Then you give them to Mother and she takes these naked chickens away and she divides them up. And so she takes out all the insides and makes them, just breasts or just legs or the whole chicken if they want to have a roasted chicken or whatever it was. And then she would put them, wrap them up and put them in a suitcase, and we'd get on the bus, two children, and then we'd go to these different places, she'd deliver these chickens and these eggs. And when a woman said, "I don't have the cash, can I write a check?" my mother said, "Sure." "Who shall I write the check to?" So my mother said, "Anna Mikuriya." "What kind of name is that?" "Japanese." "Get out of my house." She was so enraged, she turned purple. She says, "I have nephews someplace," and blah, blah, blah. But she scared us. She was like this nice lady who was buying chicken before, and then she became a rageful woman that we didn't even recognize. And these incidents would come out, you just couldn't believe. It was, my mother was amazing how she took each knock down, she always said, "Are we not lucky we're pioneers, or we can do this or that, and we have enough food?" She gave us an attitude of appreciation, thankfulness. And was always encouraging us to be kind to others. The most important thing is kindness to others, and thoughtfulness, and so that went well.

VY: So do you remember her talking to you about, like, for instance, an incident like that where... I mean, how would she explain that to you, or would she? Or would she just kind of brush it off, or would she talk to you about how to deal with it?

MM: [Laughs] They say there's a Japanese saying, but nobody knows it. "If you fight with a flea, you know better than one." So whenever I was beat up, she would say, "You fight with a flea, you're no better than one." And then when this incident happened, "If you fight with a flea, you're no better than one." I don't know what it means, but it's supposed to make you feel better. But does it? I guess so. Your mind is not being on the hurt, it's being on, what does this mean? But it's a kind of thing for a pacifist parent to look at as a symbol of "forget it," or, "you can't do anything about it." But you have to be kind, can't hurt their feelings. And the Quakers were the only ones that were kind to us. Their children played with us, and so my brother, sister and I all went to this Quaker school nearby, for social action, and we were able to have that as a lifelong activity, is always volunteering.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

VY: What was the Quaker school like, and how old were you when you were going there?

MM: It only has ninth through twelfth grade, and there's only five hundred students in the school. And during that time, they were bringing students from Europe who were displaced persons, and bringing them to school. And some of the teachers, like the German teacher, I'm sure she was a Jew from someplace in Europe, but she taught us German. Nicest lady, Frau Blaschke. And we had a lot of Quaker activists in the school, and we were really, they were appreciative of having somebody in the school that had these parents from different cultures, because that was important, especially after the Second World War, to the Quakers and all the work they did, and they did work camps in Europe, and they did work camps in Philadelphia. So we were involved in working with people who were needy in one way or another. Not educationally necessarily, sometimes, but all these people that were needy. And my mother was always helping people because one time I remember sitting at the table and I said, "Look at that lady. She's walking down the street with a great big DP on the back of her." (Mother) jumps out, dashes to see this woman. Who is she? She's a displaced person that the military has brought back. She was from Latvia, and she was taken out of a German concentration camp and brought over because the Americans had gone in and freed them, and so they brought them over. So, being German-speaking, she was able to talk to this lady in German. And the lady needed hearing aids, she got her hearing aids. Her husband was a machinist. She figured, well, he doesn't need so much direction. If he's shown how to do it, he can do it because he's a machinist, he's a practiced machinist. And her son was five years old, so she was able to get him into school. So she would help this lady and, you know, in twenty years they were property owners, college graduates. Because she was always helping somebody.

And in our house, we had all these people living there couldn't find someplace. Or even if they did find someplace, they still would find my parents to help out. Like there was this Japanese student at Princeton, he was going to fail. And Princeton knew that he was failing because his English wasn't good enough. So, guess what? He came and lived with our family for maybe six months while my mother gave him lessons every day. He took leave from Princeton and went back to Japan. And my parents would go see how he's doing, they were so proud of him, and he died, oh, maybe within five years of going back to Japan. Just a young man, after he got his doctorate at Princeton.

VY: So sad.

MM: Yeah, but, you know, my parents would keep in touch. Like Herbert Tokutomi, when he came out of the camps, took me there, my parents went to see him and his family in Newcastle, California, where while he was in camp, while they were in camp, the highway came in right through their property and right through their orchards. Now, the Americans who were back at home, they made a tunnel under the freeway so they could get their tractors from side... but since they were in camp, they didn't get a tunnel to go between their orchards and their land. And so they had to sell their land because there's no way to get to the orchards to maintain them. So that's just an example of the kind of thing, if you're not home, you're not there. But anyway, they loved meeting my parents because they had taken their son in and given him a home while he was in the East Coast. So they were very happy, and they had a very Japanese house with a soaking tub and everything. But they couldn't be farm owners anymore because of the way the road had come and divided up their land. So they had no access, they had to go way around in order to get to it instead of just going on to the freeway.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

VY: Do you happen to know if someone was taking care of their property during that time?

MM: That's a very good question, I don't know. But I did meet Herbert Tokutomi's son, who didn't even know he had been assigned to Trenton Co-op (store) during his internment, he didn't know it at all. And he's still living; I happened to go up, my friend and I, so we went to this persimmon orchard where they peel the persimmons and dry them like dried Japanese persimmons for the shrines and so on. So we went there and I said, "Oh, you know this Newcastle place? Do you know the Tokutomis?" "Oh, yes. And you know, their son is right down the road here, let me give him a call." I said, "I don't know him." They said, "Oh, he would like to know you if you knew his dad," and so he eventually came and visited me. And it was, he's an insurance salesman or something like that. And it was very sad that he never knew about his father's struggles when he came to the East Coast, because he didn't even know he came.

And it was, it's a racist society in the 1940s. There was a man from Kenya named Kimani Waiyaki, he was blue-black, he was purple-black, and nobody would rent him a room. So while he went to college, he stayed in our house. And I was always fascinated because his skin was so purple-black. And I went to a Baha'i camp, and (Marie�s) aunt and uncle were so prejudiced against him. They called me the "Jap girl," so there was some indication there. And they said, "I don't want you to sit" -- they didn't want their niece to sit next to him. So they decided to drive us up so I could sit in the back with Kimani Waiyaki and they two can sit in the front with their niece, so she wouldn't have to sit with him. So that's the kind of society I was living in. And when, later on, after the war, there were these divisions of houses, like Levitown, pre-fab houses. People would go in there, all white, but they had all come out of the war, but they were Polish and Italian and Jewish and all these different groups that were around and you heard a lot of these not-so-nice jokes about them. And suddenly it's the biggest integration project in the United States and all these new houses that are building up for the white soldiers that came back. And, of course, the Black soldiers could only rent, they couldn't buy a house with their GI Bill. So that was a big difference.

VY: Do you remember if there were any other families of color in your area? Was it just you?

MM: Well, yes, there was a colored family, the father was a big real estate agent in Philadelphia, and they had a swimming pool. So my brother and I would sometimes go over there and go swimming in their swimming pool. And I remember they had a four-year-old who was walking around the swimming pool and fell in, and the other boys had gone in already because it was a big rambling house. So I took her in, she was crying, and I said, "You know, she fell in the swimming pool. And good thing I was there to pluck her out, but I think you need to be careful when she goes out near the pool." Well, when my brother died, she came to his funeral. Of course, I didn't know who she was because he died at seventy-six and probably she was like fifty-five or something, how would I know her? But I knew Melvin, who was his good friend, he came to his funeral. And she said, "You were the one who saved me." And so it may have gone into the story that, you know, you have to be careful of the swimming pool, and I was saved by her.

VY: Wow.

MM: But they were the only family that we knew. The migrant workers were basically Black, because it was in Pennsylvania and they came up from Florida, whereas here, it's Hispanic, but there it was Black. And our public schools were township schools. So when the migrant worker children were there, they would put them in the public schools. Well, I remember, in second grade, Dorothy and her sister were very, very tall, and I was a young kid, so they must have been ten or something. And they were in the second grade class because they couldn't read or do the work, they could only do the work of second grade class. So usually about twenty people in the class, and then when the migrant workers come in, there would be about forty in the class. So I remember the principal came in and told Dorothy and her sister to stand up and come in front of the class, which they did. Then he said, "Take off your stockings." And I thought, "Well, that's not very nice, what is he doing?" So they take off their stockings and they had big holes in their heels, and I felt so sorry as the money was dropping out of their socks. They'd been stealing the milk money that was in where you keep your clothing. They were stealing the milk money and they finally figured out who it was. So they had them take off their socks and the money fell out and embarrassed them. And it embarrassed me for the way he hurt their feelings. Even though they stole, I think I, in my childish (self), knew it was so unkind that it was worse than the stealing in my mind.

VY: Do you remember where they stayed, where they lived when they were...

MM: They had, on the farms they had these little huts for (them). I'm sure they didn't have running water, I'm sure they had outhouses and it wasn't anything. I worked for the U.S. government, and in the U.S. government, they had to look out for the welfare of children of migrant workers, because there was almost nothing for them. And that wasn't just, Falls (Township) in Pennsylvania, it was all over the United States because they were treated so badly.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

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.

<Begin Segment 16>

VY: It's interesting that you understandably had these very deep trust issues, yet both of you went on to do things that are very giving and a lot of social activism and like your parents, really trying to make things better and welcoming people into your home and all the different kinds of things that you're involved in, so it's kind of interesting.

MM: Well, my parents always kind of implied that "they know not what they do." They're not fully aware, just like I was saying, we were shot at, they didn't really understand that it would be hurting or all that. I don't think they meant to hurt us that much. But the scream was so loud and the crying and the so on was so great, that everybody ran the opposite way. People don't really think about what they do often, and that's what you just have to be aware of. But we knew that if you're on a one-on-one, they would be nice to you. As soon as the second person came in, it was a pattern. They would turn to this very judgmental leader of the opposition kind of a thing, we learned that early.

VY: Yeah. And I mean, I think it's a good, probably, philosophy to sort of understand that people don't know what they're doing or maybe not understanding it, they don't get that it's going to hurt somebody. I think that's a good way to kind of get through these things. But that doesn't mean it's not affecting you, right?

MM: Oh, absolutely. I couldn't talk. I was working in desegregation, and we had this man come who wrote a book about races, Daniels and Kitano. Harry Kitano, Japanese American, was one of the consultants that came to work with us. And he talked about the Second World War, and I couldn't talk to him without crying the first three years because I had held it all in. And this attitude of being so hurt, you have put away, you don't really know about it. And then, although I'm talking about it now, I could not have done it in the 1970s. So Harry Kitano was one of my advisors when he knew I was going to Washington as a Fellow. He and this other lady, she was a Native American, came and took me out to lunch and told me that if I went to Washington, I would be ruined for life. Because, "The mentality of Washington is going to color your life and your future if you continue to stay there." And it was so right. They said you shouldn't stay there more than three years because you're going to become like one of the people. My value (would be): do I get a parking spot or do I get a windowed office? And when I went, I was there as part of HEW Fellows, Health Education and Welfare Fellows, Vernon Jordan wanted to integrate the big bureaucracy because it was too white and too unsympathetic to people of poverty and people who are of color. And people who were women. We didn't have women there.

So I was one of the first women administrator types. And you had to know when you worked for the government, you're a GS, government service worker. You get started at one, and by the time you get to three, level three, you may get fifteen dollars. But if you have a more administrative experience, you get into eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, those are the top levels. And because of my work in filling out all these detailed forms, I was a GS-14. And when you get to work for the government, my brother and I would laugh. We'd say, "You know, we're used to going around in the East Coast, and people would say, "What school did you go to?" And that would make a difference. But, when you get into the government, they say, "What's your GS rating?" So we would laugh about it because he was also a GS-14 when he worked for the National Institute of Health. And there are just certain roles that you get into when you work with people at that level. The first person that I worked with was a man who said, "I'm sorry, but I can't have you as a Fellow in my work. I can't talk in front of a woman, so you'll have to find another supervisor." But that's the whole reason why we were there.

So we would meet once a month as a group, there were ten of us, and we worked in, most of them worked in the Department of Education, but it was quite an education for me because I got to go out on a trip with two cars of people, and we would visit the Indian reservation. Well, unless you visited, you don't know what the Indians are going through. And one of the things that we found was that the Indians have reservations, but they talked to the educators, they run the schools. Then the Aviation Administration, they run the... if you can have an airfield on your property, then you can take off and then you could go to different, other airfields. You can have medicine on your property but it's not coordinated. HUD has, give you a free house -- well, actually, you have to pay one dollar, but (it�s not) at a place where it would be convenient. So there was one on a mesa that looked down at the school, she and her two children stayed in this one bed, this double bed, and they could look down. And she made bread with all the townswomen, the men brought in the (twigs/firewood). Now she had a house given to her for a dollar, but it's off this mesa. How would you get a ride to town? Then it turns out that these Zia Pueblo, Pueblo Indians, Zia people, have a problem, an eardrum getting a hole in it. They can fix it up, but they had to go to a hospital because they can't do it on (their health care centers). Their airstrip was not in compliance, so their plane couldn't go to the assigned hospital that was over the mountain. But they could go to Albuquerque, which they could drive to. But the Health Education (and Welfare) decided it was over there. So you would see a lot of people who had balance problems that looked like drunk Indians. So we were able to see that one part of the government didn't talk to the other on the Indian reservations. And there is no interagency group that deals with it.

VY: So there's no coordination.

MM: None. And they think they had difficulties working with the group, and they think it's the group's fault that they're not complying. But they need to have...

VY: Right, they set up this imperfect system and there were people that the system's supposed to help, suffer even more.

MM: And I got to stay overnight at this Zia Pueblo. And her name was Rafaela, and she was so upset because this Indian reservation was very Catholic. So the priest comes, and she had to give her children, about ten and twelve, cigarettes. Of course, me, I'm thinking, "What is she giving them cigarettes for?" For gambling! Gambling with a priest. So this program for young boys is gambling, that the priest organized. But her big concern is there is a lot of problem with suicide on that Indian reservation, either alcoholism or young people committing suicide due to so much frustration. And so a recent suicide was with this young... and he couldn't be buried in the cemetery because it was a Catholic cemetery. And he had committed suicide, whereas the man had just committed suicide by drinking himself to death, but he could be buried there. So the mother was so upset for her friend whose son couldn't be buried in the (Catholic) cemetery. So it's the parents that paid the price. So you learned a lot of things on these kinds of government, and then you had nobody to tell.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

VY: How long did you do that kind of work?

MM: I worked with the government for three years. Oh, I had a wonderful time because it was, you know, when a law's passed, like the Great Society, 1964, it takes a long time for that to become the law, to be translated into practice, because it has to go into the Federal Register and people have to have time to review it. Then it has to be made into (law regulations), what measures are going to be looked at to make sure the money is spent properly. Because that's oversight. (When) I worked with Title I, (we) went out and they saw it's supposed to be supplementary. So we would always look at the supplement or supplant the local money. So that was one of the major jobs. But (the Department of Education) asked me to stay on, I was on loan to the government because government workers are like widgets, they're interchangeable. So if you were going to have a GS-14, the GS-14 in the Department of Education doesn't have to know a thing about education or whatever department they're in, because they're interchangeable parts. So the law was changed too, and they needed somebody who had practical experience. So I went on these reviews to show them what they had to look for in the documents and how to look for the documents and what kind of questions to ask. And it was really interesting how each state is different. And I think most people come from nations where they have a national education group. Now, Hawaii has like a national education group, but it's an island. If it were a country it would be like that, but it has a strong education department.

VY: So when was this when you did this?

MM: I did this in 1973 to '76, I saw our president Nixon resigned among other things. But I saw women's equity come in, and another thing that I did was I volunteered a lot, so they had a lot of proposals. And although I'm a proposal writer, but I'm also a proposal reader, so I would volunteer for this. So I got to see the (Education) Department from, the different departments from different points of view. Women's Equity or Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, Migrant (Education). Like in the 1970s, they put migrant workers, individual children's grades and abilities on the internet. They didn't have internet, it was some kind of electronic something or other. So they went to another school, they didn't know where to place them. They would have these there at the other school, so they could be placed quicker than sitting for months until any kind of records came by. It was just brilliant. And I was so thrilled to be able to see that they had been working on this for migrant workers for such a long time. And I was so pleased (that) San Francisco brought a lawsuit, says if a child does not speak, read or (write or) understand English, they can't just be plopped in the classroom. And the Supreme Court, while I was in Washington, said that's a local (school) requirement. That if a child does not speak, read, write or understand English, it's the local school district that's responsible for doing something special to making it happen. So all this money that was used from Title I, because it's supplementary, now had to be taken over and owned by the school district. So it was very interesting times.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

VY: Yeah, what did you do after that?

MM: Oh. I came back to the school district and you know when you have a certain amount of administrative skills, I worked with the budget department because they were doing a review and taking the city, that the school district and the city were mixed in as one general accounting. But you couldn't know how much money you had in your department, or any department, under their system. So that was removed, and I helped make a book that described each department, what they did, how many people they were in, how money they got, so you could get a profile of the school district that never existed before. It was fascinating. And I could see, by interviewing some of the administrators, they had no budget capability. They did not know how to fill in the form. So I said in an interview, "What is the purpose of your department?" They've never thought of putting it in a small form so you could end up with this binder about all the departments and all the money. They just worked, they got the job but nobody was overlooking what they should do or would do or whatever. It was quite an education, and I loved it.

VY: It's a good thing, you must be very detail oriented and very organized. It's interesting to hear you talking about these things, this is all pre-internet.

MM: Well, you know, these schools were given a gift. The government was trying to integrate throughout the United States. So we had a court order, (...) we had to integrate San Francisco. And because there was so much money there, and I could read what these government rules were, I could write a proposal for four million dollars and get it. So it was... can you imagine the fun of saying, all right, we have four million dollars we can ask for. Now, what is it that you think you could do to integrate your school better if you had all the money you wanted? Some schools had good ideas. Like there was a school, James Denman, had a wonderful theater that had gone to ruin. They had shops that didn't work anymore. They stopped having shops and sewing and everything, they got rid of that. So I went in and I wrote a grant so that they can have the curtains fixed, the sound system fixed. They could get their instruments up and running, we could hire a music teacher, and we could take those shops and make them dance floors, because they were all wooden floors, and put mirrors along the sides. And you know, now that's going to be a lot of money. But that would bring students who were interested in arts, would come to that school. Because you have invested in that, and then students of all different races would come together.

So after integration started, I was able to go out, so as (an administrator to) see (if) the first day of school was running smoothly. So I'd go in this junior high and I'll look at it, and I'd see all these groups. Before, there'd be a Black group, Asian group, and a white group. And all of a sudden I went, and I noticed an integrated group (and another) integrated group. I said, "How was it that you know each other?" "Oh, we went to the same elementary school." So it was what we were doing in the past, obviously, having segregated schools before they got to junior high. And that shows what you can do. Unfortunately, San Francisco Unified is resegregated. We used to have 92,000 students in their school, we now have 52,000. And we used to have fewer newcomers to this country. Now fifty-two percent of our students now have a home language other than English. So our complexion of the school district has changed. And we have newcomer schools for high school students that my Servas visitors who were teachers came and looked at, she said, "We couldn't do that in our country." Like in Germany, they had a lot of Turkish workers and they don't have one Turkish book in their library, that would not go here. And then we have, you know, bilingual classes that are for newcomers but of all different languages. So you're working with people who don't, can't even talk to each other. So we're much more ahead and the (visiting) teachers love to see that, to see what's possible. They've read about it but they didn't know how it would look in the school, and they just were fascinated.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

VY: You mentioned Servas. Do you want to talk about that?

MM: Oh, yes. You know, when I was married, I was married to a man from Stanford, and his aunt gave us ten thousand dollars to get, have a trip around the world. That was in 1958. No, 1961, sorry. And so we decided to go to Australia. So we sent in our application for a visa, and they said, "He can go, but you can't, because you're Asian. We don't allow any Asians to visit Australia in 1961." So we said, "All right, let's go to Europe." So I went to Europe, and we went on the train to Denmark. And in the train station, it says, "Meet the Danes." Anybody on the train could go meet the Danes? I mean, that's as opposite of Australia as you can get. So we said yes, and we signed up, and they come to your hotel, they pick you up and take you into their house, and it looks like you've gone to a Danish store, furniture store, they have all Danish furniture. But, of course, we don't think of, when we go to a store, people lived like that really. So when we have a talk, we learned that they pay over fifty percent for taxes. "Of course we do. We have to talk care of the children all the way to the, as in the aged. That's our social responsibility." And I said, "Oh, my goodness, can you believe that?" So that experience, having dinner with somebody, just one evening, changed my mind. I said, "I need to learn more about people."

So I traveled around the world, because my husband had a sabbatical and we went around the world for six months. And when we went, were in India, we said, "You have anything like the Meet the Danes program?" He said no, but, "I'm head of the transportation. Let me see if I can get the groom to invite you to the wedding." Did I know it was a cast of thousands, (so it) wouldn't make any difference if a stranger came in or not. But since we were the guests of the groom, we were treated very nicely. We went down and saw the poet read his poem, and they were all drinking Teacher's Scotch. And we thought that was very, very interesting. It was all men except me, because I thought, well, hey, what am I going to talk, I can't even talk to the women. So I was down there, and then I saw the (Indian) Secretary of Agriculture put Teacher's Scotch in his Coke bottle with a straw and go out in public. And I thought to myself, in order to get into India and drink any alcohol, we had to claim we were alcoholics, and yet this goes on. Like everybody there knew that alcohol was forbidden but they were doing it, downstairs and with this chit-chat and everything. So that was like, he introduced us to another version of Meet the Danes by going to this wedding see how weddings were handled. They had closed off a street. I saw that he rode on a white horse with an umbrella carried over him and all this kind of thing, so many people that he couldn't know all these people. So when we went to dinner, there were two types of dinner rooms. One for those who were wearing all this gold jewelry and gold (woven into) their saris and so on, and then there were the other people. So if they had chicken, they (threw the chicken bones) on top of these white tablecloths, (...) on the table. In the next room, these people would take (food), and then there would be special water for washing their hands, (those were the) ones with all the gold on it. And I saw there was a class distinction with all of these things going on. And I said, "Oh, this is so wonderful that I can learn that way."

And I was looking for a program where people could enable you to see what prejudice or misinformation you have. Well, I had a cousin coming with Servas, cousin from Austria. And she and her husband stayed with us, and then there were four other people in the car. They were all related in one way or another, friend or mother and son, husband and wife. Anyway, they'd go and stay two nights with Servas, two nights with this Servas couple, two nights with this Servas couple, they get back in their car, say what they learned, and they would say, "This is what America is about," by sharing these experiences. And I said, "Oh, I want (to join) that organization," and that's how I found Servas. And it was more than I ever expected because it's organized since 1949. Because after the war, there was all this "Hate the Germans," "Hate the Japanese," "Hate the Italians," "Hate the Jews," some group was doing some hating, and there was no public transportation, so everybody was hitchhiking. So the founder of (Servas) organization was Bob Luitweiler. He was a conscientious objector, and he just didn't fit in his family. His family were upscale New York banker society, and he had this ecological understanding of different people and so on. (As a conscientious objector, he) was put in the prison. The prison superintendent doesn't know what to do with conscientious objectors, people who refused to fight. Most of the people in there, for doing some bad stuff, fighting. He didn't know what to do, so he said to all the conscientious objectors, "Here. You have this room, three hours a morning, three hours in the afternoon, fight it out." So (Bob) had an opportunity to meet people who were conscientious objectors. But each conscientious objector doesn't come fully formed as believing in one thing or another, there were different reasons. So he found these Black nationalists who had never talked to a white person. And after a month, they said, "Are there more people like you?" because he's the kind of person who gets up close in your face, and wants to know everything. And he realized that by talking to people, you could change their hearts and minds because they hated white people, that's why they weren't going in the military. "Why should I fight for white people?" And they never talked to a white person before, especially like that. So (Bob) said, "Well, we can change the hearts and minds of people by just meeting them and talking."

(Bob) went up to Denmark and there he met a German girl that was hitchhiking up there. And he said, "Oh, what do you think of the Jews?" (...) �And she says, "Oh, everybody knows the Jews were this, that and the other thing." He said, "Well, you're just prejudiced." She says, "I'm not." She says, "How many Jews do you know?" "I don't know any. But you know, I know what we've heard about all of them." He said, "Would you be willing to stay with somebody?" And they said, "Yes." "All right, would you come back and tell me how it was?" So he arranged a (two-night) stay with these people, she comes back, "How was it?" "They were wonderful. But you could tell they weren't Jews." "Oh." So he arranges for another two nights, goes away, comes back, "How were they?" "They were living historians. They were just wonderful. They had all these things that the Jews use for candles and feasts and they explained it all to me. They were just wonderful." Goes off on a third one, comes back, and she says, "I get it, I get it, they're just people." And then he said, "If the conversation of two nights can make that much of a difference, let's have an organization that has this as its philosophy for people to meet during the day or two nights," and that's (how) he started with Servas.

Now, he started in Europe, but after the war, there's all these anti-war groups. What do you they do with their lists? So he gets a list from them that's how (Servas) was built. And then he'd go to England, get their lists, and expand it to Africa, on his trip to Africa and Japan and so on, so it's all over the world. And they're a hundred and fifteen countries, but (Servas countries get Servas) voting rights, you have ten functional Servas members with identifiable contracts, ability to respond a national (group), if there's going to be an international conference and so on. So I've been involved with this group, and I find it just amazing, and I have learned so much. From my parents' household opening up to all (different) people, I now open up to Servas. But I also (host when) the U.S. government brings over five thousand foreign people each year that work in or with consulates, (are) recommended by consulates. They were (first) sent out by Eisenhower, he felt that people in other countries didn't know America. So he (wanted to) give mid-management people a tour for three to four weeks in this country. Either with their own national group, or (with a group with) the same interests. Like 2000, (I hosted) all superintendents or heads of state, education department. What's education in the 2000s going to be like?

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

MM: So I had a dinner with these people, they were all men, of course. (...) was from Iraq, Congo... oh, let's see, there were five of them. And one from Italy... oh, one from Pakistan, and I don't remember where the other one was.

VY: When was this?

MM: This was in the year 2000. So they're going to look at education (in the year) 2000. What I found out from that (dinner meeting), it�s not only for their learning, you learn about your own country. Well, do you know that United States and Canada are the only ones with community colleges? (Others) only have education for elementary, (secondary schools), and college. There was no middle ground for you to explore, and gain your skills or change your skills. Do you know how many people are going back to community college now, because they hate the profession they're in, and they choose another one, right? So my niece was in geology, but she hated it. It was all paperwork. Because in New Jersey, where she's the geologist, she has to make sure that the underground water under the land that (people were) buying was appropriately New Jersey's. So she hated it, it was all paperwork. (...)

My sister was training emergency (medicine for) ambulances, workers. Her friend was starting (a school and) she was a teacher, so she went there. She thought that was much more interesting than geology, looking at this. So she went back to school. She went to junior college and got her physician assistant degree. I mean, she went back to junior college so she could have the prerequisite courses needed to get her physician assessment in Drexel University, four year university, and that's what it's good for. In this era where people have professions they don't know anything about, but the profession they're in is... and so it was clear to me, it was so surprising to me, that (junior colleges) didn't exist. And one of them said, "You know, we really need that," and the other one said, "I don't know how that was possible."

But the other thing that came up in that conversation was, he's from Iraq, he said, "I understand we have gay people. How do you become gay?" Well, I live in a city where we have a lot of gay people, but nobody ever asks a question like that. The man from Congo explained to him, "You're born (that way), you can be different." And it was all these men telling this other man, who was not allowed to talk, this was a forbidden subject. And they all told him about how it's natural, and you know what goes on, and no big deal. It was just wonderful.

So I have these wonderful dinners for people from other countries to have this, like, Servas experience of exploring what they believe. And that's what I do, and I've been doing that for thirty years. It's just so enriching.

VY: Yeah, I can tell. I mean, it just sounds so... just that concept you were talking about earlier, about having, sending people, even into your own community to learn about it, and then come back to you with that information. You can learn from what they learned, I mean, I feel like we could use a lot more of that today.

MM: Well, there was a Japanese man who was a Servas traveler, he and his wife came and stayed with me. And he said, "You know, we don't have volunteerism in Japan. Would you find a volunteer experience for me so I can understand it?" And I said, "All right." So it was Christmas time, and so I assigned him to a place that gave out free food. And it's a church about two blocks from my house. It's a Turkish Christian church, St. Gregory, and they give out free food. He was giving a big cabbage to a lady. (...). So these people have to come across the town on the bus, and they're all Chinese that go in for this free food. So they ask, "Why do you come here if you don't live in this area?" And she said, "I am an old lady. I live with my children and my grandchildren, and I'm showing my children that I'm contributing to the household by bringing this food." He thought that was such a wonderful experience. And then I assigned him to St. Anthony's Dining Room in San Francisco. And it was during Christmastime, so they would have to wrap gifts. And his wife said, "I didn't know you could wrap gifts that well." He said, "Don't forget, my father was a grocer in Japan. And when you're a grocer, you brought food for a nice gift, right, when people give gifts." And so she said after thirty years of marriage, look at this nice surprise. Well, they went back to Japan, and he set up a volunteer support food distribution program for seniors in his community on minimal retirement wages. And everybody loved it, and it was a success. But that's from having a Servas member visit and volunteer and go back.

VY: Well, that's amazing. I mean, it really fits into your whole life story, really, and your upbringing and how you have just really kind of continued to live the values of your parents.

MM: Yes, yes. It feels so comfortable to me, yes. And I love the work. I've been on the Board for the U.S. Servas. (I was) elected vice president in (Servas) International, and I've also been head of the Development Committee in (Servas International).

It's just meeting people from eighty different countries that are voting together, and democracy is not something that comes naturally. And it is a shock to try to explain this, but we use voting and we (make) changes in laws. (Minutes are) written in Spanish and English at the same time, they're posted, (projected on the wall), and people (who) can speak both languages, and say, oh, it's not the same. And so you have the minutes that come out of that meeting that were posted, that everybody agreed to, and it's all done when you leave the meeting. So, I mean, I've seen wonderful international management through this organization.

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<Begin Segment 21>

VY: Yeah. And you know, you've had so many different influences throughout your life that kind of, I think, have brought you along to this kind of work. And I'm wondering if there's some earlier influences that you would be interested in talking about? Like, for instances, you went to a Quaker high school. How did the Quakers influence your life?

MM: Oh. Well, when the community hates you, and you're invited to a Quaker camp and you're treated not as somebody, (not) as a target of being put on, it's a joy to be free. And then when I went to George school, it was wonderful for me. I was a math whiz, I was very easy with mechanical drawings, and I was the first girl to take mechanical drawing, I was the first girl to take wood shop. Because working at the house in Fallsington, you were always having to do, make do with this or that. So I did very well in wood shop, and then the next year I would be the teacher (aide) for the next one. And my niece continued on with wood shop when she went, but the idea that they opened it to females at George school, I hadn't realized, although I was the first, that doesn't mean anything to you when you're doing it. (From George School, Pembroke in Brown University) and that was interesting. I went there, and they don't usually take people with foreign-born families. So the first question the dean asked me was am I American? Well, I was born in Pittsburgh.

VY: The dean asked you that?

MM: Yeah. Because they don't have, they have all-American families go to Brown University. They don't have recent arrivals, at least they didn't have at that time. So in 1952, they didn't have that, so I was one of their early ones, so they asked me about that. And that was interesting. When I went to college, the people, guys would take me out. And when they learned about my background, they said, "Oh, I can't bring you home, my parents would never accept you." I got early that I was, my upbringing was, my genealogy or my background was unacceptable for American Ivy League schools.

VY: Were you surprised by that the first time, the first time you realized that people kind of had that attitude towards you?

MM: No, because people would be nice to you in Fallsington, and then as soon as another American came along, they would not. So I can understand these hidden motives or hidden prejudices as they existed. And you know, I know that I'm different in this than other Japanese Americans because they didn't have that kind of when-will-the-next-prejudice-fall? I was unaware that it could be anything else. I was just shocked when I was in Los Angeles, in looking at the Japanese American Museum down there. And the person that was leading it was about the same age as I was. And I said, "How was it for you during the Second World War? Were you beat up? He looked at me. He said, "No, why?" And then I realized he was an all-Japanese community.

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<Begin Segment 22>

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.

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<Begin Segment 23>

I mean, I remember Dad one time, when they had... their fiftieth wedding anniversary was at the Princeton Country Club in Princeton, New Jersey. And the man who had, was the butcher, they took our chickens. He said, "I'm going to make the dinner for you, for your fiftieth, I mean, the luncheon, dinner, for you, for your fiftieth anniversary." I thought, oh dear, I wonder why he did that for? Well, it turns out Dad had helped him and his wife develop Mrs. Banani's Frozen Food. If you look in Dad's resume, he has gone to the Wharton School of Business, so he was able to help advise and how to set up their business and it was successful. And I didn't know that until when I asked the question, why would Mr. and Mrs. Bananai do that for you? And then Mother said, "Don't forget, you did something for their nephew." I said, "What did you do for the nephew?" The nephew wanted to open a carwash indoors in Trenton in a building that had been not used for anything, and it was (now) a blight. So they wanted to put an indoor carwash, and New Jersey said no. So my father goes in and checks it out the structure. And as a structural engineer and so on, he writes up his report. It shows that it's a solid building and should be allowed to be a carwash. So it became a carwash. So they gave free carwashes to three people: the chief of police, the head of the fire department, and my dad. So two of them were roles, and one's a person. So he always had a free carwash.

But, you know, I forgot about all these relationships were there, and he was very active in the rotary bringing Japanese students to the United States and having American Rotarians send their children to Japan, so he had supported that. So he was a Japanese American, I think. Oh, the one things I wanted to tell you about his character is that impressed me. When I was little, he had to learn about sharing things, have to be exactly the same that they gave to a boy and girl, so it was pencil boxes that he bought from the office. Because they only used German type of pencils to do drawings at that time. And they came in these metal boxes, for a dozen pencils, and then they'd throw 'em away. So Dad would pick them up and bring them home and he gave them to my brother the first time. I screamed and yelled, "That's not fair," I was devastated. And my mother came out and I remember them having a conversation, and they agreed that everything would be exactly what he's what he's going to give to him, give to her, okay. So Dad realized that boys and girls, the men and women, were equal. All right. So that was clear. But then, he came up to my college, and for Father/Daughter day, I thought he cared more for my brother than he cared for me. But he came out for Father/Daughter weekend, and I thought, "Isn't that nice?" So I remember we were sitting in the room, and we were Freshman Father/Daughter, Sophomore Father/Daughter, and so there were four couples in there. And I remember all the American couples, fathers were kidding their daughters, kidding, putting their arms around them, giving them hugs. After that trip, whenever my father saw me, he would give me a hug. I mean, that was so surprising. And I told my sister about that. She said, "Really? He's always hugged me." Well, of course, she was only eleven years old at that time. So she didn't know there was a time that he never gave hugs. And so it was like an aha moment for her, and his ability to change.

And I think that he was able to grow when he saw things that were different, like when he went back to Japan. He saw that the samurai, his relatives, were talking to the (locals) in Japanese, and he saw it all over Japan. So when he came back to this country, whenever we went to a restaurant, Japanese women would struggle, and he wouldn't help them. And my mother would always say, "Well, could you say a few words or something?" No, no, no. And then he came back and he talked, my brother and I said, looked at each other and said, "What happened?" He said, "Well, they do it in Japan." We said, "Oh, maybe you should go back more often." But he was able to grow with the times (although) he was stuck in 1924 when he came over here. So when he went to Japan, we could see and hear about the differences over time. But I think that was (his) good nature.

In the end, he had dementia like his sister, and they came and lived with me. My mother was blind and my father had dementia. So I had two little kids, and so a house of six with four needy people (that) was kind of a challenge. But when I took him to a special place for brain damaged people, they always called him "the gentlemen," because he was always polite and he was always kind to others. So if he wanted to walk out the door, then they had this thing attached to his clothing, it beeps like if you're stealing clothes, it was that kind. So (someone would) run over and say, "Oh, gentleman, we were just to have coffee, and wondering if you could join us." "Oh my, thank you. I would love to join you." And so he turns about, and he's not going out the door anymore, and he comes back in, and he's so appreciative to everybody, everybody liked him. So it was, we saw his basic character being very kind when he got dementia. Some people get angry, he got kinder, and that was very interesting. And my brother, being a psychiatrist, one day took the children out to Levi Plaza Park, they had a stream there. And my father was sitting on the bench humming Handel's Messiah with a big smile on his face. I tell my brother he was so thrilled, and, "Oh, that's so exciting." Why is that so exciting?" Because the people with dementia can only track on one thing at a time. So he made tapes of Handel's Messiah, and similar music he knew my dad would like. He said at some point Dad's going to get upset. And so you put on this music, since he can only track on one thing at a time, he'll be okay. And it worked. He was sure that the boats were going to bump into the bridge and he had to call the mayor. And I said, "Dad, just a minute, I'll call the mayor when I get back, and let me go to the bathroom." I put on the music, and when I came back, he was just listening to it. And I have been able to help other (caretakers of people) that have dementia find out what your person with dementia loves, and you will be able to help them overcome these bumpy spots where they get anxious.

VY: You know, you had said at one point that your dad was a lifelong learner, and it seems like he was in many ways, and it seems like you are, too.

MM: Oh, yes. My mother and my brother, we all are, that's our family. Because when you have nothing, and you have to start making something, you have always accommodate for the situation. So how can it be? And that was, yes. And my mother's yearbook called her "Questions," so she was always asking questions, yes. And she loved learning. You know, if you've ever gone to an engineering meeting, an engineers meeting, engineers are deadly dull. I don't know why, some people are talkers, but engineers aren't. but my mother would go to this meeting and she would end up talking to this man or having this man talk. I said, "Mom, how do you do that?" And she said, "You know, you have to find out what they like, and just get them started talking and they will, and they will have a great time. Usually they don't have an opportunity to talk like that and tell you their passions." [Laughs] So she had it figured out, she was a big people person.

VY: That's very clear, yeah.

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<Begin Segment 24>

VY: You know, you had talked about, you brought up your brother a couple of times, and I wonder if you want to talk about him a little bit.

MM: I would love to talk about him because he, can you believe this boy was on probation when he was nine years old?

VY: Why?

MM: Well, you know, he's an advocate for rights of animals, he loved animals. And our neighbor next door said, "If your cat pushes over our garbage any more, I'm going to poison the cats." My brother was so stressed, he wrote a note and he said, "If you poison the cats, we're going to pepper your behind with buckshot. Cat lovers." Well, of course he knew who wrote that, the "cat lovers," in childish handwriting. So we had to go before the Justice of the Peace, and he had to be on his best behavior. But you know, he would speak up when he was four, the lady next door came in, she was red-faced, purple. She was screaming at my mother, and I remember holding on to my mother's skirt and looking at this woman with a red face yelling at my mother. Then I found out what happened. Our cats were urinating on her plants. And then when she was complaining, my brother, four years old, says, "They have to urinate someplace." So what does the lady say to this little kid? So she walks away. So he's always been speaking up for other people or other animals.

When he was in the military, he didn't like the fact that they had to buy, (at the) store, (a specific) shaving cream. So he wrote to the senator from the state and he said, "Why do they have a PX and I am only allowed to buy this shaving cream? What? Is somebody getting a kickback or whatever it is?" Well, it (became) a senate investigation, senator investigated this, something. And they said, "Oh, we're going to have an investigation." And the head of (soldiers) said, "Okay, Mikuriya, I know it's you or this other person, but when I find out, your life is going to be miserable." So at that time, my brother goes to the personnel and said, "Do they have a need for a psychiatrist or anything?" Oh, they have a desperate need in a medical center where they have the mentally sick. Tod was out the next day, and he was sent there. And while he was in Brook Medical Center, he saw them using all these drugs on patients, taking advantage of all the LSD and other kinds of drugs. So (the inmates) said, "Oh, I don't like this drug, it makes me tired." So on the weekend, he would take the drug to see how it made him feel, and (thus) he got interested in this drug therapy. And so he went and he said, "Oh, I want to go to medical school." So that's what they did, they let him out early. And he spoke some German, because he had German in high school. So he spoke German to the prisoners of war, and he could calm them down. Whereas the other Americans there couldn't speak German, couldn't empathize with them because they are prisoners of war and that's a big difference, they were just human.

And he got interested in marijuana in medical school because he was studying pharmacology, and in the book it said, "This drug has been available for millions of years, for thousands of years, for different countries." But it's illegal. "How can that be?" he says. So that made him interested in trying marijuana out. So he did it during his summer vacation, and then he studied in North Africa, Kief, and (marijuana) in Europe, India, and Nepal. And then he wrote a book about (marijuana medical papers).

VY: Well, I've seen him referred to as the Father of, the Japanese American Father of Medical Marijuana Movement.

MM: Well, it was like a passion in him. If something that worked for all these years, and suddenly it stopped, how could that be? How could you have (...) all the large pharmacies having the active ingredient, cannabis? It was a political decision, he couldn't believe that. So he wanted to put (cannabis) back on the formulary so that people could use it (again). And what he was finding in his patients, he was a therapist, and they would take (prescribed) drugs, but they would get bad side effects. And they found out that if they self-medicated with marijuana, they would find out they could control this or that problem that they have. So he started collecting data on that. And when they opened marijuana (dispensaries), he (found) five hundred uses for it. Because he was a researcher, every time they opened a new clinic, though it was illegal, he would go and he said, "Can I talk to your patients? I want to know why are they using (cannabis) and what is their medical condition that they're using it for?" So he started making this list of conditions, and then he had this sheet with a checklist. And so he could collate it with what the patients were taking for what problems.

And there was two propositions in California, Proposition 19 that didn't pass, and Proposition 215 which did. And he was so proud of himself because they were negotiating what could medical marijuana be used for? Could be used for cancer patients, for glaucoma. And Tod said, "But I have all these other reasons they could use for. So why don't we add, "or for any other medical condition that it's effective for?'" And he got that in the language of 215, and he said that's his, probably, best moment. And it's interesting that he worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as a director, and he supported marijuana. And when they found he supported marijuana after a year, they asked him to leave. Because they didn't want to be associated, because the government says it's illegal. So how can a member of their medical board, medical administration, saying that he supported it? So that's how he came out here from Washington to California, Berkeley.

VY: Oh, that's how he ended up on the West Coast?

MM: Yeah.

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<Begin Segment 25>

VY: You had told me earlier about a trial where, that you would go to. And I was interested to hear how you talked about how the Quakers supported him doing silent witnessing?

MM: Yes. We have attorney general of California, who at that time, 215, really was very angry that (215) was passed. "How dare the marijuana be legal?" So Dan Lungren said to all his sheriffs, all this police, "Let's get Mikuriya and Schoenfeld." All right, that means that everybody is going to find some ("dirt" on Tod). So he's taken to court because they picked some people that were they were (Tod�s patients) to have marijuana and they were sure that they were dealing it. So (police) picked (patients out and) listed them as the drug dealers. (Selected patients) said, "Well, I want to talk about my condition in front of the judge." Because you don't know if you're (not) a medical marijuana doctor and a psychiatrist, what the conditions are of these people. They look perfectly normal. So they arranged for them, the people, to be called Patient A, Patient B, Patient C and so on. So the first patient was a lady who took birth control drugs and smoked. You can't smoke tobacco and have birth control drugs. But she did, and she got a stroke. And so they did an operation on her at Stanford, so when they called Stanford, they say she is alive and she wants to testify on this case. "What's your feeling about it?" They were so surprised she was still alive, and they said, "Go for it," and they supported that. So she was one of the first persons to speak out. She was wheelchair-bound, and only with marijuana could she speak in a way that she could be understood, but she spoke like [mimics voice]. And so she had very halting speech. Now, do you think she's going to be a drug dealer if she could hardly speak, and her husband is pushing her around and she's partially paralyzed! How could they name her as now (only because) he's authorizing her for marijuana medicine, and she's going to be classified as a drug dealer by this police group.

Okay, so there were about nine of them. One of them was a lovely blond girl, she was about twenty-one, just gorgeous. She's obviously a dealer because she doesn't have any problems. So she gets on the stage and she says, "I'm a patient of Dr. Mikuriya, and you know, I need marijuana because I am rageful. My father has been abusing me, sexually abusing me since I was ten. And when I was sixteen, I was able to escape, but I have very big anger issues, and I could just go off like that. So he has been helping me, and the marijuana has been helping me to find alternate ways of dealing with my sudden bursts of anger." But (just) to look at her, she has no problem in the world, she's just a gorgeous blonde.

The next person comes in, he was a construction worker. Has a long ponytail and everything. His problem is he cries too easily. And construction workers are not allowed to cry and be sensitive like that. So Dr. Mikuriya has him working with weavers who were a calm group of people who welcomed and are kind to him, and don't set him off with anything. So he's very appreciative of Dr. Mikuriya, but he's speaking now because you know, he really can't say this to his fellow construction workers, how he's feeling.

Then another one is a police officer. "See, I got this recommendation." I said to Tod, "Why did you give him this recommendation?" He said, "Just look at his nose, he's alcoholic, you can see all the blood vessels coming out on it." And he said the reason he wanted to get (marijuana), because he lost his guns (which) he left it in the back of his car, and he lost some other things. The police looked down on him. So he's trying to do something to bring up his image, (so) the police look at him (again with respect).

So in the back of this court, which was obviously set up, were these Quakers that had this five-inch circle that said "Witness" on them. They were dressed in three-piece suits, and they would come every day. It wouldn't be the same people, but they would be all dressed in three piece business suits. And they would sit there looking at the judge, who, everybody knew would "just say no to drugs." Well, what else does he say no to? Does he say no to medical marijuana?

(There) was the "expert witness" that they had for this trial, (who) had never prescribed marijuana, she didn't know anything about marijuana, and yet she was their expert doctor.

So as a result of this, (Tod) got fined for the cost of this trial plus he got an oversight doctor to work with him because he kept bad records. You know, he said he had a cut on this index finger of the left hand, it needs one stitch. "You have to write more than that." You know, nobody ever looks over doctors' analysis of patient records, but he had to have his looked over. So you know they were looking for something. And they never got their two hundred and forty thousand dollars for the cost because a lawyer got it removed. I mean, what is the justification for paying for this?

VY: Yeah.

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<Begin Segment 26>

VY: But your brother, it sounds like, that was kind of like his life's work?

MM: Yes, and I think that's why he got sick because he was being attacked all the time. When one of the people he was working with taking as a doctor, going to his clinic, they decided when they were bringing charges against Dennis Peron, that they were going to talk, look at Tod. So anybody that parked in front of Tod's house, the police did a background check on. What a state the United States is in when the police can just decide anybody's parked in front of your place, they're doing to do a background check on. He found it only because (Dennis Peron�s) trial record showed that.

VY: What ultimately happened with all of that? Like what would you like people to know about your brother in relation to that kind of work that he did?

MM: Oh. I think... I mean, I would ask him, "Where did you go this time?" And he said, "Well, I went to Hawaii for this man who had a garage, and he was using cannabis." And so he said, he spoke on the man's behalf and told him why he needed (cannabis). And he said, and the judge was taking (notes) and asking for clarification because there is no information on, accurate information about what medical marijuana does and how many treatments. And so his list of these five hundred or so things that it worked for, it's completely unknown to anybody. All they know is what the government says, and it is... which is wrong. And that's why, that's one of the things that came about from this. And just the idea of how medical marijuana, or even recreational marijuana, there is never a barroom fight with marijuana because it calms you down. So there are all these aggressive things that comes out with alcohol, which is allowed. Yet not for marijuana, (which) makes you go to sleep or something like that.

So there are many more benefits. (Tod) was the psychiatrist at Gladman Hospital here in Oakland, and he had one patient for alcoholism whose son came to visit. She had a nervous (distressed) every time he came because their relationship was so tense. So she had marijuana, so she used that instead of alcohol on this. And so when they had their weekly alcoholics get-together, she reported what happened from marijuana. So he said now, from now on, use marijuana instead of alcohol and see what happens. And so some of the other people in the group started using marijuana, and it is psychically relaxing and enables them to remember what the situation was and (,,,) they could work on the therapy, not just the alcoholism. And this is what he learned from that one patient who ran out of alcohol and had to substitute marijuana. But he was involved with... what do you call them? You put this thing on your head and you reduce your heart rate and everything. I forget what it's called now, but it's a way of...

VY: Biofeedback?

MM: That's what it is, he was a biofeedback doctor. And was very interesting with Dad, he could put 'em on Dad and Dad was his, almost his best patient, and able to do these controls. And I think, I said, this is what I think. When I go to Japan, you see all these little holes in the shoji screen, this white paper, and then all these little holes in there from the children. So then they put butterflies on it, so there's a lot of butterflies on the bottom of these screens. Well, you learn in Japan, if somebody's on the other side of this screen talking, you do not hear them. There is mind control built into the Japanese way of life, so they do not year the other person talking. And I know that's true because my girlfriend and I are talking, and we're doing wallpaper and everything in the other room, and didn't hear a thing.

VY: It's like a discipline, right? You discipline yourself to just sort of not hear what you're not supposed to hear?

MM: Well, you don't hear because the door is shut, and it's a Japanese thing. Because, you know, their houses have so many screens in them, yes. And I know it works because he does not hear a thing if he decides that he's not supposed to hear it, and I know that's from his past. But I see it in Japan, too, when I'm visiting. It's just interesting that, how this mind control -- and he's always in his, talking to us, "Control the mind, control your mind." And that's... and we have picked up a saying from one of Dad's things that we like is, "All talk and no do," that's (about) keeping your promises. "All talk and no do." [Laughs] So we get a lot of learning lessons from him.

VY: Yeah, I can tell, I can tell. And I think that your, the work that your brother did is just another example of this sort of family, sort of, drive and commitment to just doing what you think is right and not being deterred by other stories that people say, tell other people, tell everybody else, or misinformation. You all just kind of move forward and do what you know is right, you just don't let anybody talk you out of it.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 27>

MM: And I must say, the Japanese community in Philadelphia saw Mother and Dad as a couple, and they never treated Mother as being white.

VY: Talk more about that, because we didn't talk about that very much. So before we conclude, I think it would be good to kind of revisit that time and what it was like when you as a family were around other Japanese Americans, and any other activities that you did together. I know your dad was involved with the JACL for a bit, and I think you had mentioned that you gone to some community picnics at one point.

MM: Yes. My father and mother were equally (respected) seniors in the front (...). So my mother would be the only white (person) there. She didn't realize that, just like she's the only woman on the stage, because she was so involved in supporting the Japanese American situation during the war and after the war, before, very pro-Japanese. Education about Japan, Japanese and so on, welfare. And I was always amazed, my mother stood out to me because everybody else was Japanese in the front table, and there would my mother be, right there. And, of course, she knew everybody and they knew her. And they welcomed her because they always did things for Japan or the JACL together. And there were, after the Second World War, there were a lot of people from Seabrook Farms, and I went to school and one of my classmates was from, Larry Seabrook and his brother went to this George school. And so we were acquainted with the farming of these Quakers. They went into the frozen food, I think that was, at that time. And Mother would always be helping Dad get involved with the administration, because she was the English writer for him. So he would often want to speak up, and she would always sit there, smile, and help him, and would be putting it in proper English. So that's why you have that article you'll see, is well-written by Tada Mikuriya. But she was always so proud of her husband, and she would let other people know he did this and that and consider that. She didn't ever think about herself as doing anything special, but she was a (usual) mother, (wife/supporter).

And Dad didn't think he was anything special either, but the two of them together, when my father got dementia, I found a place for my father to go, and there, it was all for dementia people and they walk around the lot. So this lady is walking, holding hands with this person, this lady thinks it's her mother, that lady thinks it's her sister. And they're walking happily together in this dementia -- my father would have fit in there. My mother couldn't let him go. She said, "I will feel, (I would be abandoning him) leaving in this place." And then when he died, my mother said, "I can't believe it, I feel like he's abandoned me." I said, "Mom, he died." She said, "Well, that's what I feel like. I feel like I've been abandoned." So there was this close working relationship with him, and the Japanese community (which) saw them as a unit, and I was very appreciative of that. And I was always seen as the child and put at the child's table, even though I was sometimes twenty years older than some of the children. But that's the way it was. [Laughs]

VY: That's interesting. Why was that?

MM: Because the Issei were one generation. And my father came over here so much earlier (in 1923). So I was his child and I would be there. I mean, I remember in 1956, I went to a JAC picnic, and with these twenty-year-old, and I was forty (seated at) the children's table. So you can see that the other (JACL members) were much younger.

VY: I see, it was all a generational category.

MM: Seating, yes.

VY: Oh, interesting.

MM: Well, we didn't have as much Japanese food at home like they would make for the holidays, so my brother and I liked to go there because we would get all sorts of extra different types of sushi, so we really liked that. And my mother didn't make that. She made sukiyaki as a guest dish, and she would do that. And I remember she was serving raw egg once, and they were just amazed that people in Japan eat raw egg with sukiyaki. That isn't the culture here, but that's what it is like in Japan.

VY: What kind of food would your mom bring to the get-togethers? What would she cook to bring to the picnics or the community gatherings?

MM: I don't remember, I don't remember. Because I don't remember... I (only) remember eating, enjoying going table to table and eating, but I don't remember what she would bring. But she may have made some her good bread, she was a good baker, I don't know.

VY: But it was a good opportunity for you and your brother to eat Japanese food?

MM: Oh, yes, it was the only opportunity to cook foods that took a lot of time to roll up. I mean, she could do the sukiyaki type, but that's the only thing she would make for special guests and Japanese food. And my father was a fisherman, so he'd go out fishing, and that's how you strengthen your ties with the business community, take other people out there. But the funny thing is, they go out on the boat, New Jersey shore, and they bring the fish back in. And then Mother and Dad would clean it right away and put in the freezer, and they would save all the fish heads and make fish head soup. And, of course, they loved it and they loved the eyes. There were just certain thing as children we couldn't adjust to. But it spoiled us for having any kind of fish because we always this very super-fresh fish since it was frozen the same day it was caught. But we couldn't go along with fish head soup as children, but Mom and Dad would sit at the table and enjoy them. So, yes, there were some things. When I went to college, I didn't know what black bottom pie was, I didn't know what pigs in blankets were. I mean, it was all this stuff that I've never had, and my mother was a natural food (advocate). So we didn't have hot dogs, let alone hot dogs wrapped with bacon, yes. So that's when I realized we weren't raised as Americans when we had all this food that was so different.

VY: Yeah, it's a different, definitely a different experience, I think, that you had, than probably most people. You were children of two immigrants from different countries.

MM: And we didn't go out to each much, and when we did, we were like the show that walked into the restaurant. So it was just very interesting.

I feel very appreciative my father inculcated into us that we were Japanese, and that Mother was very supportive of it because she would tell about her wonderful experiences in Japan and laugh at herself doing things and what would happen (there). So it was a very positive feeling of being Japanese, even though that was a bad (thing during WWII). She never emphasized the German part of her at all because the Japanese overrode (our) background, because I think she identified more with Japanese, just like my Black daughter identifies with my Japanese cousins, because she knows them. It's hard to explain, but I see it, because she lived in Japan with these relatives and still, and they come and they stay in the house and she's so comfortable helping with their English. And one my cousins, first cousins came, Yoshiko, and she came when she was eighteen. And Mother would not allow her to not drive. She said, "Driving is a skill that you need in this country." And they didn't have a car in Japan, so she didn't have a feel about the car, riding in a car. (Yoshiko) got her master's in chemistry, worked in a research group. So, you know, she's so happy she's driving now. It's a great opportunity to step in both worlds. And her world, though, she speaks Japanese, her husband is Jewish, their child was raised Jewish and Japanese-speaking. (Her son Lenny�s) married, a white woman who was Japanese-speaking, and they speak Japanese to their child. And Yoshiko babysits her grandson. So, I mean, each culture, each custom does differently when they're mixed, but it's interesting to see that the families are carrying on the Japanese tradition.

VY: Yeah, it's so interesting. It's so interesting. I've had such a wonderful time getting to know you and your family, I mean, it's very different and inspiring, really.

MM: [Laughs] That's a good word.

VY: It really is. And I only have one more question for you, but before I do, I want to make sure that we've talked about all the things that you think are important today to talk about. Is there anything else you want to add that you think that we maybe missed or that you want to make sure people know?

MM: I think my mother's comment, when you marry somebody of a different culture, being a partner in that relationship, you have to think twice because you don't know why the no is there. Is it cultural? Is it personality, or is it a new belief, you don't know. So I think they both tiptoed around this awareness of cultural attitude of trying to understand each other. So there was a lot of conversation in our house all the time about understanding this or that, or different points of view. And I think that's what made their relationship interesting and very good for the children because we never heard them argue. We never got hit because my mother would talk us to death until, "Did you understand the importance of this or the meaning of it?" or so on. So talk was very important, and respect for one another was very important.

VY: That really comes through. It comes through so much, I can tell it's such a strong core value in your family.

MM: Yeah. And you know, I went to college and I thought everybody loved their mother. What a shock. I didn't know that there were families that didn't even like their relatives. But when you come from, it's really hard when you get, meet somebody, and you come from a family that gets along, it's very difficult to understand when people come from a family who don't get along. Very hard to even empathize, because you can't envision that. So I feel very fortunate. [Laughs] Thank you for having this conversation, and I hope Tadafumi Mikuriya will be acknowledged for all his good work in Japan and in this country.

VY: Yeah, thank you so much.

MM: Thank you.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.