<Begin Segment 26>

SF: Well, you yourself, as a sociologist, say in around 1950, did -- would you have predicted that Japanese America, circa 1998, would still...

FM: Yeah.

SF: ...be viable, in the form it is today?

FM: Okay, after the war, for one thing -- and in my case personally -- I was not looking for a job in any particular location, but one of the places where I was naturally gonna look for was in Seattle, at the University of Washington, because that was where I'd grown up, I'd always been happy with the Seattle environment. And my friend Steiner, and some other people were here. So I inquired about a faculty appointment here, and Steiner again came to my aid, and helped line up a job for me, and he made it possible for me to come back. So, in my case, I came back here, and my wife Michiko, her family came back here, so we were all happy to be here. Ah, let's see, your question was what?

SF: Yeah, as a sociologist...

FM: Oh, yes, as to what I expected in a way of the future of Japanese Americans in the country. I didn't expe -- my honest opinion was that the Japanese American society would now steadily disperse into the larger community, and that there was, there would be minimum chance of it's recreating the community, kind of community life that in fact has occurred. I didn't... I saw churches cropping up again, when we first got back here. You know, the Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church, and so on. They were reestablishing themselves, and my thought was that temporarily this might occur, but that as soon as the Issei were gone or no longer were around in any number, that the churches would decline, and that the Nisei would disperse into the larger community. I would not have anticipated many of the, well, organizations like the JACL persisting. Certainly the athletic, sports organizations, basketball teams and things like that reforming. So my thought was that the continuance of the Japanese community hinged largely on the presence of the Issei, the immigrant population, and as they declined, that the community, the so-called community, would pretty much disappear.

If I were as wise a sociologist as I am now on that matter [Laughs], I think I would have thought differently, but I felt sociologically, and I'm sure I was thinking in Robert E. Park terms of how this kind of thing happens, that people, the Japanese Americans would lose their sense of identity, steadily, and become more and more diffused into the larger population. So I was totally wrong about that particular anticipation.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.