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BN: Okay. Actually, there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about, which is that when you came over, you and your sister are not U.S. citizens?

MM: No.

BN: And I know you were naturalized later. Do you remember that? Was that a big deal or was that just kind of...

MM: Well, I think I knew that we were not citizens and we had to go through this process. I think for children, I don't know what the immigration laws were specifically, but we were able to become naturalized, in my case, four years later when I was thirteen. The thing that I remember most about the naturalization process is a very formal but very quick process, go to court. But the thing that I remember most is that we had the opportunity to choose our names. Because to petition for a change of name by itself would cost money and have to go through a whole process, a legal process. But at the time of naturalization, you get to change your name for free, and you could pick your own name. So in my case... should I tell this story? Do you want me to go into that?

BN: Yeah, I think this is relevant.

MM: Okay. As I said, we lived in South Central, and that was an area that was in transition but mostly African Americans, but there were quite a few Niseis that lived in that area, too, Nisei and their families. So there's a family across the street from us named the Satos, and they had a couple kids already, but they were expecting a third child. And so the Satos, George and Mary Sato, the Nisei parents, they said to me and to my parents, "Okay, we picked out Michael as the name for, if it's a son, and Donna if it's a girl." It turned out to be a girl, so "Donna" got taken by them. And so they said to me, "You can have 'Michael.'" And so I said, "Okay, thank you," and I took "Michael." And so I used "Michael" for a while. And so my first elementary school friends called me Michael, but with my Japanese language ear, I kept hearing "maiko," like M-A-I-K-O, with a "K-O" ending sound. And so didn't like that because it sounded like a girl's name and I wanted a boy's name. So instead of changing the whole name, I changed it to Mike, which a lot of Niseis, a lot of people did, is they don't use the formal name. And so I became Ichiro Mike Murase, and that name change, I think that's the most, I mean, that was the part of the naturalization process that, in a way, shaped my identity, too. Not so much that I was proud to be a U.S. citizen.

BN: Years later, during the Asian American Movement period, you had some people renouncing their English names and adopting the Japanese names. And I know like with your Little Tokyo book, it's under "Ichiro Mike Murase." Did you also sort of do that or did you always go by Mike?

MM: No, I pretty much stuck by Mike. You know, if I had to do it over again, I might have chosen a different name, maybe a less common name. I know so many Mikes.

BN: Yeah, Mike, Brian, Craig, Keith, the standard Sansei names.

MM: But no... well, first thing is that if I had a name that was fairly common, Japanese name that was fairly common or easy to pronounce, I might have done that. But Ichiro is very difficult for people to say. And it wasn't until way later, decades later, when Suzuki, Ichiro Suzuki --

BN: The baseball player, yeah.

MM: -- became so... I'm the first Ichiro. He's the second, but he's the famous one, so people learned to say "Ichiro." By that time, I didn't want to change my name.

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