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SF: When you went to Chicago, there must not have been too many Asians, so-called Asian Americans there.

FM: I was the only Asian (American). I think there were some Chinese students, possibly. But in that period, China was sending over some of its younger people who were wealthy enough -- they came from wealthy families, all of them -- to come to this country and study. China had the policy of trying to encourage their young people to study abroad. Japan might have had a similar policy, but at that point, Japan had turned into a nationalistic orientation. So it was not internationally minded, and therefore was not sending its students across. There were not, therefore, any student I can remember, of Japanese background, living as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, although there were quite a number of Chinese. Now, as for black students, there were two I can remember, three, at the University of Chicago Department of Sociology. And they were all very good students; otherwise they could not have gotten into the Department of Sociology at that time. But I was the only Asian (American). I was certainly the only Japanese American. And, historically, there had been one other Japanese American that I knew of, from Hawaii. There probably were others, but I... there just were not very many of us going into sociology.

SF: Well being the only Japanese American at that time in sociology, what was it like to be in this kind of elite, white-orientated, institution?

FM: I never thought of myself as being very special in that regard. I simply thought of myself as a graduate student among graduate students. And I was competing against guys who came up from, through their own schools, wherever they had gone. One of the best friends I have now is a guy who went to Dennison in Ohio, and came to Chicago. Others came from the East Coast, you know, New York City, or wherever. And my thought, my orientation was that I competing against these guys. I had no trouble making friends with them, feeling comfortable with them. So that was the way I felt about it, they were simply graduate students, and I was one of them.

SF: So being Japanese American didn't impact your academic career, or your housing situation?

FM: Not in, not at all in terms of self-identity, no. I didn't think of myself as Japanese American, in that context.

SF: Did the worsening international relationships, somehow affect anything?

FM: Yeah, except that in Chicago -- it's a curious thing -- the orientation was towards Europe. And I was not thinking of what was happening on the Pacific side, but there was a lot of concern about the rise of the Nazis. In fact, one of my friends told me that, "You know," he says, "Out on the East Coast, the concern is that there is going to be a Nazi invasion of the East Coast." And this kind of orientation, being in Chicago, we weren't concerned about that, perhaps. But he told me of how this type of concern existed in the New England states. And it kind of opened my eyes to think that, that would be the kind of thinking that would be prevalent in some part of the United States. Now if I had lived on the, remained on the Pacific Coast, I perhaps would have been more aware of the rising tension between Japan and the United States in that period. But for whatever reason I was not. And you know, as a graduate student you're so buried in your studies, that you don't pay too much attention to world events, unless they're right in front of you. And the newspapers were full of the Nazi stuff, not so much of the Japanese, and therefore that was the orientation I had.

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