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BN: Were you conscious of your dad being American by citizenship and so forth? Did you know about the history, that in a sense, he was going back at that time?

MM: Well, I only knew vaguely that he was born in America, and that was about it, and he had fond memories of America. I think the other context, too, is that having been defeated by the U.S. in World War II, my grandmother used to talk about how, was just conjecturing about how great a country the U.S. must be to be able to beat Japan, which is kind of an interesting take.

BN: No, it is.

MM: And the other thing that I think I got from my grandmother, and the whole Japanese educational system postwar, based on the peace constitution, was a lot of emphasis on "no more wars." Because they had seen the, firsthand, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo and all these other cities being bombed, and the war did happen in Japan, right?

BN: Did you have a sense of your dad's or, I guess, both of your parents' politics, having lived through that? I mean, did they talk about that at all?

MM: Well, I think they were very traditionalist, I mean, farming family, small town. And I think there's a little bit of emperor worship, but they were mostly apathetic, apolitical, not very social. And I know that both my father and mother spent most of their energies on the family, the extended family. So I don't know. I mean, I would say with Japan in general, they've been very accepting of the Liberal Democratic party, which is the only ruling party that that country's had for the last seventy years, postwar. And the Liberal Democratic party is neither liberal nor democratic. It's the equivalent of a conservative Republican-type party in Japan, it's a very traditional party. And I think they were not resistant to that, they didn't question it, so they accepted most of what was going on.

BN: Did you have any family members in the U.S. who went to camp or that your family maintained contact with during the time that they were in Japan?

MM: No, not that I know of. Although like my grandmother, who had lived in this country, had several friends who, Niseis who always lived here, but I don't know anything about their stories. There's one family that I remember by face, and I came with them and things, but I don't know what their background or story is. I assume that they went to camp.

BN: So when you were coming to the U.S. and kind of didn't really know anyone then?

MM: Didn't know anything about camps, didn't know JA history at all.

BN: Right.

MM: Didn't speak the language.

BN: Right. How was your dad's English, having gone, because he was, what, twelve, thirteen, when he went over?

MM: I think his comprehension was probably very high. He's academically oriented, anyway, he studied science. He liked gadgets and was interested in innovation, so he read a lot. But he was not a talker, he didn't engage with people a lot. In fact, I rarely heard him speak English. He only spoke English when he had to.

BN: So in your household you were speaking Japanese?

MM: Yeah. In the beginning, in '56, four of us naturally spoke Japanese to each other. And as time went along and I learned to speak more English and got comfortable with it, I would speak in English and they would speak to me in Japanese and we would understand each other. That's also not uncommon.

BN: Yeah, that's a common Nisei-Issei family.

MM: Yeah.

BN: And then occupationally, right, he's a dentist in Japan. Is he able to continue with that in the U.S. or how does that work?

MM: You know, I don't know how much he pursued it, but he was not able to continue. What I heard was that he would be required to go back to dental school for another three or four years to get American dental -- as if American teeth are different from Japanese teeth. And so being thirty-nine, having a family, couldn't afford to do that. So he got a job as a dental technician in a lab basically doing crowns and different kind of things, because he had that skill. He also took other secondary jobs, worked at Grand Central Market for example at night, things like that. So he never practiced here.

BN: Was your standard of living different in Japan versus the U.S. that you noticed?

MM: Well, standard of living, both economically and socially, in Japan he was called Sensei, which was a term of respect. And he was looked up to in that way in the community, and we had our family home with extended family. And as far as I know, it was our ancestral home, so there was no mortgage, no pressures to keep up payments and stuff like that for my father. Coming here, we rented an apartment in South Central L.A., went to find a job, and took the bus to go to this dental. And my mother, who spoke no English at all, she found a job as a seamstress within a week. And I remember her telling me stories about, we lived in South Central, and she took the bus to downtown where most of the factory work was. And to come home, she would remember the landmarks like stores and buildings and things because she couldn't read any of the signs and she couldn't understand if they had any announcements. So that's how she used to commute. So for both of them, I think in terms of lifestyle, they left a pretty comfortable lifestyle both economically and sort of being engaged in the community and all. And had since threw that away for myself and my sister's sake, and I think they, in addition to my father wanting to be here himself, I think he thought that there would be more opportunities for us here, too.

BN: Have you thought about what your life might have been like had they not done that?

MM: Well, not too often. It's too difficult to imagine. I remember my classmates, I was in the third grade in elementary school, and when they threw a going away party for me. So I could remember episodes like that, but I never kept up with my friends, so I don't know what happened to them. Occasionally, after I became an adult, became an activist, I thought about what it would have been like, especially when I had the opportunity to go to Japan on these delegations and things, and met people my age that were in Japan. I learned that my family was not politically active, but there were lots of progressive-minded people in the '60s just like they were here.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.