<Begin Segment 5>

TI: Let's talk about your sister. Why don't you tell me a little bit about her?

HM: Okay. She wanted to be the total American kid, I guess. She had some very interesting idols. One of them was Kate Smith. At that time, Kate Smith was a singer that was coming up through the radio media. And she represented the "God Bless America" type womanhood and she was kinda on the chubby side, and so was my sister at that time. She felt that it was the ideal idol for her to follow. And so she was kind of preoccupied with being totally American, not being Japanese, and I think this was a problem later on. But her education process was geared to going into tailoring and being a seamstress and all this kind of stuff. I guess my parents didn't think that was totally ideal for her but nonetheless that's what she pursued.

TI: And how much older was your sister?

HM: My sister is seven years older than I. So she became a big sister and tried to influence my thinking a little bit. My brother was one year younger than my sister, he was six years older than I was. My brother was kind of a free wheeling character and he liked to do things like model airplane work, he was a ham radio operator. And he was screwing around with hot rods, putting v-8 engines into model-A chassis and shaving down the cylinder heads to get higher compression, and they were doing all kinds of funny things. He helped build a boat which was about a 26 foot mahogany hulled boat, and I helped do some of the work on that also.

TI: These activities sound pretty extraordinary. Was he pretty extraordinary in doing these things or was this common activity for the Nisei?

HM: I think the area that we lived in -- we had Minoru Yamasaki, who was the guy that designed the Science Center here in Seattle as well as the IBM Building and a whole bunch of other places -- used to be a neighbor of ours, used to live about a block and a half away from us. We had guys that had graduated from the University of Washington in our area that were honor students when they graduated, but lot of them couldn't find work. In the case of Yamasaki who became one of the best known architects in the United States, he could not find a job in architecture when he graduated from the University of Washington. So consequently he was a swamper for North Coast Importing Company who used to service our grocery store and they used to deliver like rice, and shouyu and everything else and he was the swamper guy that used to bring the stuff to our store. He was an honor graduate student at the University for architecture and he couldn't find a job.

TI: So it was a group of peers that your, your brother had, and they were all pretty extraordinary?

HM: They were all fairly good performers but they were held back in their endeavors because of the discrimination functioning at that time. So my brother instead of going to an academic realm, seeing all this happen around him and knowing how smart these kids were, decided that he was going to go into a more useful practice of being involved with electronics or radio, automotive work and all this kind of stuff. So he wanted to be a practical individual. And he was, I mean, he was a good radio amateur and they did this all on their own. They had a group of young Nisei kids that studied radio and they passed their ham license, and they taught themselves radio Morse Code and some of these other things that were essential to pass the exam. And fortunately, I was the benefactor. I benefited from all the work that they did. And that enabled me later on to get my FCC licenses and my ham license and so forth, but they did it on their own. I was a, kind of a beneficiary of all those functions that these kids were doing.

TI: Because you could watch them do things and then you would learn as they did these new things?

HM: Yeah. And also like for instance, Morse Code, they would teach me the fundamentals of it and they'll take... probably it strained their patience just to try to teach me some of the low speed Morse Code. 'Cause I could never teach anybody, I never had the patience of teaching anybody else but these guys were able to teach me.

TI: How old were you when they were teaching you Morse Code?

HM: Well, I was supposed to go after my ham license exam on Christmas vacation of 1941. That was what I was scheduled for and that time I was twelve years old, I guess. I was going after my ham license then. I had passed the written part of it but I did not pass the Morse Code part of it. That's thirteen words a minute at that time and that was what I was programmed to go to. But since the war started on December 7th, all the Federal Communication License examination stuff was all postponed.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.