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BN: Okay, great. To back up a little, you mentioned these various rationales that a lot of Issei had for going back to Japan. Do you know which category your grandparents fell into?

MM: Well, the one that I heard most was that my grandmother wanted my father and his brother to get a Japanese education. And I know that living in San Francisco Japantown, they did go through Japanese school, Kinmon Gakuen, which still exists today. And I'm not really sure on Monday through Friday, the regular schooling. I've seen pictures of him in classrooms with white kids, so I know that he went to regular school as well. So I'm not sure beyond that what the reasons were.

BN: And was the parents your father and then one other?

MM: My father had a younger brother.

BN: Younger brother, yeah. So it was just the four of them. Did you know your paternal grandparents?

MM: Yeah. I grew up with them until I was nine, when I was in Japan as an extended family.

BN: Right, but that's kind of, I was thinking more subsequently, I mean, as an adult.

MM: After I came to this country, my grandfather passed away, so I never saw him again. My grandmother came to stay with us for a while in the 1960s, and she was more the vocal one, sort of take charge kind of person, very outgoing. So she was the one that kind of influenced me more than my grandfather, so I did have some connection.

BN: And then what happened to your uncle?

MM: My uncle, unlike my father, did not want to come back to the U.S. to live, and so he went to medical school and became a doctor, and he had his own sort of practice and a small community clinic in a rural area near the Inland Sea. And he passed away in his fifties due to a traffic accident.

BN: But he basically lived out the rest of his life in Japan?

MM: Yeah. I did visit him a few times.

BN: Okay. And then how much do you know about your dad's, or, I guess, both of your parents' experience? Or particularly your dad's, I guess, since presumably he maintains his U.S. citizenship, right?

MM: Once he went back to Japan? Yeah.

BN: So during the war, he's like this Nisei in wartime Japan. Did he ever talk about what he did during the wartime or pressures to enlist or any of that kind of stuff that a lot of the Nisei faced?

MM: I think my family had some history in Tokyo, but like many other families, they retreated to the countryside during the war years. And so my father grew up mostly in the countryside or small town. And he never talked about discrimination by Japanese of him because he was Japanese American. He also never talked about, he was never conscripted and he never served in the Japanese military. I'm really not clear on what the rules or laws were or what expectations were. I've heard stories on, different accounts of being mistreated by townspeople or being drafted into the Japanese military, that didn't happen with my dad.

BN: Was he already... I mean, if he's born in '17, he's already in his mid, early to mid-twenties during the war. I mean, is he already studying medicine at that point?

MM: Yeah, my dad was studying dentistry.

BN: Dentistry, yeah.

MM: Yeah, he was.

BN: That could have been one reason why he wasn't conscripted, because that's viewed as a vital occupation even in the wartime, because he'd be in his mid-twenties.

MM: Could be like a deferment or something.

BN: Right, yeah.

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