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BN: Okay. So we're here on January 13, 2023, and we're interviewing Mike Murase. This is a collaboration with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and it's the second interview in the series. Today we'll be focusing primarily on the Gidra years, but we're going to pick up a few other things before and after as well. We're shooting in Little Tokyo at the Visual Communications office, and doing the videography for us is Emory Chao Johnson. So with that, let's get started. So yeah, thank you, Mike, for doing this. And as I mentioned, I wanted to kind of start by picking up on some stuff that we missed the first time around, and in particular, a little bit on your family background. So I wonder if you could just start by telling us what your parents' names were and what you know about their early lives.

MM: Okay, my father's name was Hide Murase. He was born in 1917 in Kingman, Arizona, and I'll get back to that later. My mother is Mitsuko Murase, her maiden name was Oguchi, spelled O-G-U-C-H-I, or sometimes with an O-H-G-U-C-H-I, and she was born in 1924 in Manchuria. And I have to back up a little further than that because the first person in my family to come to America was my paternal grandfather. His name was Eiichi, and he was the fourth son in a farming family in western Japan, not too far from Hiroshima. And by Japanese tradition, the first son got all of the family assets and property, and they were considered what's called atotsugi, or to carry on the family name. But in any case, my grandfather, being the fourth son, didn't have that many opportunities or things to look forward to in his town. So he went out to Yokohama to look for a job where a lot of young men, Japanese men, were going to seek adventure and other opportunities, and he had heard about the U.S. So this would be around, I'm guessing about 1900. And I'll cut this part short, but he went back and forth working on a Merchant Marines ship for an American company. And after maybe thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, he took a wife in Japan and they moved to Arizona where my father was born. And soon after his birth, my father and the family moved to San Francisco, and so my father grew up in San Francisco Japantown from about two years old to about thirteen years old. And at that time, around 1929, the stock market crashed, the beginning of the Great Depression, and among Japanese Americans or Japanese living in this country, there was a lot of movement. And some went back, and people speculate on, some went back because they were successful and they raised, like they had worked on jobs and was able to save money so they can go home as a success. I think that many people went back because, since they didn't fulfill their aspirations, and then also the fact that the economy in the U.S. -- as in all over the world -- was bad in the beginning of '29. And I think there was also a trend of many Japanese sending their kids back to Japan for a Japanese education, and I know that many immigrant parents, even now, shin-Issei, send their kids to Japan or take them every summer. They want to make sure that they have some level of culture and history and language exposed to them. So anyway, so that's what happened to my father.

So he lived in Japan in the prewar years and leading up to World War II. By that time, he was, I think, a young man going to college and studying to become a dentist. But he always had dreams of coming back to the U.S. and living here, he felt a sense of freedom and some attachment, even though he was very culturally Japanese as a Kibei. So he started thinking about that, but because of the war, he was not able to fulfill that dream. And I think it took until... well, in 1945, the war ended, 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act was passed and some immigration policies changed and naturalization policies changed for Asians. But it wasn't until 1956 that he was able to consummate his arrangements personally for his family. So we came in 1956 when I was nine years old, so that's beginning of my story in the U.S.

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