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BN: Yeah, because it's fall of '68?

KM: Fall of 1968, a really eventful year. Yeah, really eventful year. And so I live in the dorm, and there's a lot of stuff going on. I don't know if I lived in the dorm where the women were most political, but we had a lot of meetings that we had to attend. And they were talking about issues on the campus, we all smoked like crazy.

BN: These are Japanese...

KM: Yeah, Japanese women, I never saw Japanese women like (Koriyama). So they were talking about the campus, and I don't know if I quite understood the issues, but there were some issues with, I think, the entrance examination. And ICU was a school that was hard to get into, because I think your English primarily was people that were studying language and good in English. I had an uncle, actually, my mother's cousin, taught there. I think he taught history, which was interesting, so he was on the campus. My roommates, they had all four years, we had four of us, each of us was a different year, freshman. I was a junior, and then I became very good friends with the sophomore, and she was from Koriyama up in Fukushima, and she was very, I learned so much from her because she was country and very down to earth, and had no airs about her, was just a very simple human being. And at first she said she kind of stayed away from me because, "Oh, American, American Japanese." But we became very good friends, and so I learned a lot culturally from her because at Christmas time, I went to my relatives in Kobe, because my uncle, mother's cousin that taught at ICU arranged for me to go down to his mother's, my grandmother's sister lived in Japan, married to a doctor. So they had a house in Kobe with two other homes, like a complex, which was very interesting. So they had three homes in this area, so I stayed with them for like two weeks during the holiday season and got to know them and another aunt, we called her Aunt Muta, who had lived in the United States before the war and during the war in Texas, Galveston. They apparently had some kind of Oriental goods products, items, in Galveston, and they were the family, I think, that my mother's family had wanted to go to, relocate, before the war if they could have, but they couldn't get it together, they had too many kids, so they couldn't get down to Texas. So that was the aunt, and we had met Aunt Muta before, and she had gone back to Japan after having been in the United States, so she could speak a little English, and so I talked to her a lot. And she always was considered, she never felt comfortable in Japan again, and people treated her like she was odd because she had been in the United States. And she was a person, I noticed, that she had a little notebook around her neck, and she'd always write down things she wanted to remember in that little notebook, I thought, "Oh, how interesting." Now I know the value of that. So from the aunt and uncle, my grandmother's sister and husband, it was very peaceful, it was very quiet, and I enjoyed being there. But she always wore a kimono, they're very formal. So I'd come down for dinner, then they'd sit under the kotatsu, which everybody did, and they'd heat the sticks. And I had a date with somebody that I'd met on the train, okay. So I met somebody on the train coming down, and I said, we started a conversation, and, "Oh, he lives in Kobe, let's meet up." And so I had arranged to meet with him somewhere and go up to Mount Aso or something. And my aunt was like, "No, you can't do this,  you can't go to..." "I have to meet him first." So she rode with me to meet him, and met him, and I guess approved, that he was a student at Keio. And so it was like, I met him, I think I met him later in Tokyo, too, but it was such an odd situation. And I think I actually did something else that probably scared the hell out of them, because I think I had, somebody else I had met, I don't know, anyway. Maybe that's a different story for a different time. Anyway, she was very protective, very old fashioned, of course.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.