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BY: So I want to talk a little bit about how you, how your identity as a Japanese American came to be. So do you remember when you first became aware that you were Japanese American and about what age you were?

SM: Well, I have to tell you this kindergarten story. First day of kindergarten, some of the white kids did the "ching-chong-Chinaman" and were chasing me around the yard during recess, the schoolyard during recess. And I was defiant, and I said, "I'm no Chinaman, I'm a Negro." And my Black friends from the block all started laughing, and I didn't understand the difference between Japanese dolls and Japanese food and Japanese language, and the fact that my friends on the block were Black and so they were "Negroes." And so I didn't understand the difference of all of that. And my parents later told me that they stayed up half the night trying to figure out how to explain ethnicity to me without being demeaning of Black people and everything. So anyway, I don't know when I finally learned what being JA was, but I remember running for office in high school and a teacher telling me that I had to take my lanterns down. Because I got these paper lanterns, and then I wrote my name and pasted it to the lanterns because I thought, hey, these signs will really stand out. And I got in trouble for that. And other kind of little passive aggressive racist things happened to me from the teachers in high school. And so then I became more defiant and more defiant, and by the time I was in college I was kind of really defiant about who I was.

BY: And strongly identified as Japanese American.

SM: Oh, absolutely. But based on my early childhood, I also really embraced what was going on with the Black students as they were starting to emerge as a political force on campus. And the first activity that I organized on campus was bringing James Meredith to campus. Because the student body, in their imminent wisdom, were bringing George Wallace to campus, and I was, like, outraged. And so I found out how you could get money from a speakers' bureau, and I organized bringing James Meredith to campus as a counter to George Wallace.

BY: I want to circle back to your college experience in a minute, but I wanted to just ask you another question about your childhood. So as a child, I mean, you sort of touched on this a little bit, but just if you can think of another example, did you ever feel like you were treated differently by anyone in either a positive or a negative way because you were Japanese American? So any incident?

SM: You mean when I was a kid?

BY: Yeah, yeah.

SM: Well, in elementary school, because it was a mixed school, I mean, like I got to be a junior drum majorette marching in front of the band, that were, like, seventh and eighth graders. I got to ride on the Rose Parade float and stuff, but they didn't put me in a kimono or anything like that. I was just one of the kids. Moving to Normandy Park and being at Highline, when they asked me to do similar things, it's like they wanted us in kimonos, so it was like we're Japanese. And that happened several times. Also had teachers who, you know, now, reflecting back, I can say were really racist. But at the time, I just got upset. Like Highline was a big gymnastics school, won gymnastics first or second place in the state every year. So we had a girls gymnastic gym and a boys gymnastic gym, and everybody in PE had to go through gymnastics, that was required. So I was on the balance beam and I fell off, flat on my back. And I can remember like it was yesterday, the teacher coach standing over me and saying, "What is wrong with you? Your people are supposed to be good at this." And that happened to be at a time when there were several Japanese superstars from Japan in the Olympics in gymnastics. Not, "Are you okay?" "Did you hurt yourself?" anything like that. And those kind of things happened periodically in high school, from the teachers, not from the students.

BY: Interesting.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.