<Begin Segment 2>

SF: So what is this "functioning together?" What's that mean, that this is this kind of resultant feeling? What, what causes that?

FM: Well, let's take this young people's Christian organization as an example. The church at this Christian organization emerges out of the Sunday school. That's the background. We, as kids, we grew up in the Sunday school from age five or whatever and we, we come to age twelve or fourteen and now we're young people and we're gonna, we have this thing that somebody, someone suggests or someone proposes of having a young people's organization. And so we organize. We organize within the context of this larger organization called the Congregational Church. And the Congregational Church, I suppose one of the things, items, is the fact the Congregational Church among the Issei (was) a pretty well organized entity. It was never a very financially prosperous church. The Baptist Church for example, established it's own church building. The Methodist Church as you know (now) has this Blaine Church. (but) it used to be down on Washington Street, not (where it is now), as a matter of fact. But, the Congregation Church was small by comparison. Nevertheless, the Issei were organized in a way that made it possible for this to be a very permanent kind of establishment. Now growing up within a context of a well-organized entity, it seemed for us natural that we should be able to organize whatever. And I supposed we got the assistance of the elders in this regard. They could help us somewhat financially, they would provide the facilities for our meeting and so on, and so on.

So the framework of organization in the larger Issei community provides a setting within which the Nisei can organize effectively and then beyond that, there must be something interpersonal that makes it very comfortable for us to live, ah, to work together. That was the element that was missing in the larger white community. I never got the sense that my friends -- all of whom were friends from the classroom -- felt as I did about the interests I had. For example, what about organizing a baseball team? Well, yeah, they would like to get together, for baseball, but somehow you got the sense that they also had other interests. They would scatter away from playing baseball and we never got a baseball team organized. Little league as you know, was never organized much in the larger community before World War II. It was only some dozen years after the end of the second World War that I think little league got organized. But in the Japanese community here in Seattle, we had little league types of organization long before the war, and among the handful of people, many of whom would come from distant places just to be able to get together with kids who would enjoy this kind of organized activity. So I'd have to sit down and go through a systematic analysis to try to explain what it was that brought us together in a way that somehow the Caucasian community did not. But it had to do with things like organizational effectiveness, the capacity for it, and also a kind of interpersonal feeling of being naturally warm to each other in a fashion that the members of the larger community were not. They were going off in their independent directions and you couldn't pull them together. Here in the Japanese community you say, "Let's get together and play baseball," yeah, immediately there's a group of kids who are willing to join in, and not only that, but (would stay together), week after week so, you know, that's how things got organized.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.