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VY: And you've touched upon this a little bit throughout our discussion today, but I'm just wondering how you feel the incarceration affected your family psychologically, if you're willing to talk about that?

MM: Well, I think it was a very difficult thing for my dad and mom. Well, obviously with my mom, because of physical things she had to go through. With my dad, it was both physical and... because he couldn't eat that food. I mean, you should see a picture of him. When he got out of camp, he looked, have you seen that picture of him on the porch? Anyway, he looks really old and skinny, like he went to a Nazi camp, practically, I mean, he looked so skinny. But just generally speaking, I don't know. I mean, it certainly affected their lives because if they had gone to camp, they weren't wealthy to begin with because they had just gotten married and come from Japan. But they could have built something and they lost four, five years of their lives, and my mom lost more because she was so ill from having lost all that blood. And it took her a while to recover from that, not to mention the psychological trauma that they went through. And I'm thinking that, had they been able to continue their lives normally, that they might have done what they actually wanted to do. Like maybe my mom would have gone to beauty school, haircut, whatever it's called, earlier on in life. And my dad might have been able to do graphic design as a job. But as it was, having to scrabble from nothing, because I don't think they came out of camp with much money at all, if any. And they never talked about it, but I know that they had these ambitions. And I know my dad is very smart, and I know my mom is very, very smart. So, I mean, they have intelligence that makes you think this is just such a waste. But they didn't get to utilize all their intelligence, and in a way that made their lives easier. But as it was, it made their lives very hard, the whole incarceration. And then I think it has affected my life, and I didn't realize that until that Densho thing, you know, that dinner, and we had that speaker, she was from my generation, starts with an S. She's from San Francisco, and she used to do protests down in...

CC: Is that Satsuki Ina?

MM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she talked about it, it made me want to cry. I mean, because, oh, somebody who understands me totally. My friend and I, Frannie, you know, the one who's my age -- [interruption] -- we can't talk about it because we don't know how to talk about it or what it was that affected us. But you know that we don't feel like, I mean, when I see my white friends, even today, they have no... what am I trying to say? They aren't held back by what they want to do, what they want to say. I always have to think about it, but I don't so much. [Interruption] It might not have been just the camp, but because we had to stay in our own little circle after camp, and how we had to treat each other, you felt really like in a jail, practically, I mean, you couldn't say whatever you want to. I don't know if it's a Japanese trait or whether it's, having been like that, we didn't know. We don't know how to address it. But there's so much more freedom in the white community maybe. I don't really know, I'm not a sociologist, but talking to some of my friends, they don't have these "you shoulds" and "you shouldn'ts" as much as I do, or that I've learned. And more so even with my friends, sort of, who've grown up in that same community. So that's why it's easy for me to talk to Frannie and my (cousin) Kinu, because we have experienced the same kind of things. And so no matter how old we get, whenever we get together it's like old times. Because we sort of understand each other although not in the sense of psychologically understanding each other, it's just a natural kind of thing that we grew up with. So I don't know, I kind of wish I knew more. But that dinner was the first time I was sort of enlightened about the fact that we might have had PTSD this whole time and didn't know it, but it makes sense.

And one of the reasons I think that I couldn't become a soloist is partly because I had this dual thing of not wanting to be seen, and yet I liked playing in front of people. And I liked doing this music, but I really hate being seen. I liked the applause, but I'm too shy in some ways to do it, and I care what people think, and that you cannot have that if you're going to be a soloist. You have to just do the music and you can't say, I played that, what would this person think? What would that critic think? Blah, blah, blah. And I don't know if that's a Japanese thing or if that's because of the way I grew up. She was talking about how her parents said, "You can go out and demonstrate, but don't have your pictures in the paper, and don't be seen. Well, you want to be seen if you're going to protest, that's the whole point of protesting, right? So I think there's a connection there somehow, or even though there may be other people, too, not wanting to be seen so much, I think the experience amplifies that whole feeling of not being seen. You want to just kind of hide and not be seen as a person. Because they think of, first, they see you and the first thing is, "Are you Japanese?" "Are you Korean?" "Are you Chinese?" And it's a thing. So I don't know, is basically what I'm saying. But it is a problem, and I realize that more now in this day and age where people are more concerned now, the Blacks and browns and everybody, they want to be seen and heard. And I think that I don't know if it's because of racism. I think it is, but partly it could be culture, I don't know. But I watch NHK because it kind of helps me identify.

VY: Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that, that's really powerful, and it actually does make a lot of sense the way you're describing it.

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