<Begin Segment 8>

SF: Frank, when you were talking about the Language School, you mentioned the undoukai and then the, this issue about feeling a little uncomfortable with the Japaneseness, I guess, of the event in the public park, where you had all these Japanese and probably a lot of Isseis speaking Japanese and like you said, using chopsticks. And this seems to be kind of a theme that runs through the kind of Japanese American experience, a sense of how much, how much we want to look "Japanese-y" I guess, or be Japanese or whatever.

FM: Or you mean avoid looking that.

SF: Or avoid looking like that in different historical periods and so forth. Like, so in the '30s, when the Language School used to have these events...

FM: Well this was actually in the '20s.

SF: Or in the '20s, I'm sorry. What was the feeling, I mean did most, were. How self-conscious were people about acting Japanese and being perceived Japanese in, in public so to speak or in the, in a larger American context? Were they self-conscious about it, not self-conscious about it? How did the Issei feel about it, how did the Nisei feel about it? Was, were they on the same page or were they looking at this a little differently?

FM: Uh-huh. You know, there's this article by Kurt Lewin on Jewish self hate, hatred. And what he indicates there about the Jewish people and their feelings of what he calls self-hatred in a country like the United States expresses precisely the kind of feelings that I'm talking about with respect to being the Nisei in the Caucasian community. Now for the Jewish people and for Japanese people -- Japanese Americans -- I think the problem was essentially the same. That there was a lot of anti-Japanese feeling, as there was anti-Jewish feeling, in the 1920s. Particularly in the 1920s, as a matter of fact, because this was the period in which the anti-Japanese agitation to remove, to restrict Japanese immigration was going on, and until the passage of the Immigration Act in 1924 there was a lot of sentiment against the Japanese people on the grounds that these are people who are going to come in and overrun the country with their high birth rate and with their aggressiveness and so on. Now I felt that it was -- personally as a kid in the 1920s -- felt that it was a serious disadvantage to be of Japanese background given this kind of hostility that was directed against the group. In addition, being, being Americanized in the schools as I was, that is, I was taught to sing My Country 'Tis of Thee and to pledge allegiance to the flag and then I would read the history books and so on and learn all about the history of the country and the, which of course was all in terms of, of the Anglo background from which the country, this nation particularly arose. Given that background then, I somehow got the feeling that Japanese-ness was kind of an inferior quality. It was also a time when Japan was as a nation, just barely emerging as one of the developing nations of the world. And I didn't feel that Japanese cultural background was inferior, but somehow I felt that there were, that compared to the capacity of white America to move ahead as it did as a national power, that there was that kind of inferiority of the Japanese society. And given that, somehow I had the feeling that I should become more a part of the Western, the American society. And for that kind of motive, for that kind of aim, being Japanese I felt was a handicap.

Your question is, "How did the Japanese people, the people in the community feel about this?" Did they show this kind of self hatred in a sense? And I would say that probably most Nisei felt this in one way or another at some point in their life, but by and large, the Japanese community was isolated from the larger community. The community was residentially separated. We didn't live up -- most Japanese did not live up on Beacon Hill at that time and they didn't live in an area where they were exposed directly to Caucasian contacts. In fact, my Japanese community friends were curious to know what American community life was like, simply because they didn't, hadn't experienced it. And as far as their Japanese community life went, why it was an isolated, but very active and very interesting life as I have already described. And to them, that was their world. Whereas for me, growing up in the Caucasian world, I constantly experienced in one way or another, some degree of hostility from the community in which I lived. I had lots of friends, I felt, among the Americans, but then there were lots of guys who were strangers to me and many of them were kids who didn't, who took a little, certain amount of pleasure in making things uncomfortable for an alien in their group such as myself, and so I would feel the, the tension of being someone who is different. In the case of the Japanese, there's also the racial factor. The fact that visually, physically we're different. And that too was a problem. There was in our neighborhood a girl who was very American, or very Caucasian in her appearance. She lived very close to where I lived and her name was Dorothy and she was a blonde, with curly hair and very white complexion and so on. And all the kids, the boys in the school thought she was a doll, real doll. I suppose by Western standards, she was in a sense. But I constantly felt the distance from myself from the Caucasian world especially in light of this girl who is somewhat admired by my Caucasian friends, but who for me was at the opposite pole from myself. She was blonde, she was fair skinned, she was everything that the boys thought was admirable. And as for me, I could not possibly think of being in that kind of a circle. And in that sense, I think I felt kind of a self-hatred for being what I was because I could not be part of that world which was white and Anglo and different from myself.

Nevertheless, I also from such knowledge as I had of the Japanese history and background felt a lot of pride in being Japanese. And so there was this conflict within myself of being Japanese, of being something that I thought was worthwhile, and yet at the same time being something that was made fun of by the larger society who -- or the kids in the larger society -- and which, therefore, was for me a personal problem. Among the kinds of problems that we faced was the fact that living in this Caucasian community, kids who were strangers to me would run by and say, "You skibby!" Or "You Jap!" Little kids for example would, they shout at me and then run off and that was fun for them. And so I got the sense of being different, of being non-acceptable and so on from that type of experience. At Halloween especially, we as a family anticipated trouble at our house because kids would come by and throw eggs at our door or they would pull up, turn up dirt and throw it on our porch and this kind of thing and it was very painful to experience this type of confrontation.

So if you ask what was the feeling in the community about this type of thing, I would have to -- I'm guessing -- but most kids did not directly experience discrimination of this kind. There was more talk about it than anything. That is they knew that it existed and that they would have to meet it if they went out into the larger community, but most Japanese, both Issei and Nisei spent much of their life within the community and didn't have to experience this kind of thing personally or directly. They knew it existed because for example, in school, they might experience from time to time some kind of an encounter with the Caucasian world that would tell them there were boundaries, beyond which they could not go without encountering difficulty. They knew it also from the fact that the mass media, especially the newspapers who with big headline, "Japs did this" or did that and so on, would be shown. And there was a lot of feeling about that kind of expression. And even in the cartoons and in the movies, there would be stereotyped Japanese, which were shown in a fashion that made one feel inferior or handicapped for being what he was. So there was a basis of Japanese self-hatred. Now, I recall that in my -- I told you that my father had the feeling that in spite of whatever difficulties you might encounter in a foreign land -- his feeling was if you go there and you have an intention of establishing yourself, you better try to become a part of that society. And I remember that in our commun -- small group of Japanese families on Beacon Hill, he led an effort to become involved in the PTA, for instance, by Japanese families getting together and purchasing a movie projector for the school, at a time when movie projectors were not commonly available in schools. And the Japanese families, three or four of them, living on Beacon Hill got together, and I think my father was one of the instrumental people involved. Purchased a machine that cost a few hundred dollars at a time when a few hundred dollars meant a lot more than they do today. So, this is the way in which some Issei then try, having moved into the larger community and confronted by this kind of difficulty, try to meet the problem by making themselves good citizens within the community. I would say that this type of effort was succeeded in some degree, but then it didn't stop the anti-Japanese hostility or discrimination, even of the personal kind or certainly of the kind that appeared in the newspapers.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.