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gky: So you think that their cultural heritage did have a lot to do with how, how they faced the war, I guess.

JM: Many of the fathers and grandfathers of the Nisei were actually veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army, and those Issei veterans had a pride and they knew what it was to fight for their country. When their sons grew up as Americans, I think some of that Japanese tradition was passed on to them, that you have to fight hard for your country because it's your country. And they could say, "I fought for Japan back when I was a young man because Japan was my country, but you are an American, and you have to fight just as hard." And so the family pride now, all that weight was put on the Nisei to serve in the U.S. Army, to fight for the United States of America, so yeah, that's a cultural tradition. Yeah.

gky: But any more, any more than, say, German Americans were, had had that burden, or Italian Americans, who were facing the same sort of prejudice, albeit not a racial prejudice or not because their face looked different, or not that you could always tell?

JM: There's a big difference with the Germans. I think the American perception of Nazi Germany was, was set up so that we could distinguish between the Nazis and the Germans, so our wartime propaganda was we were fighting the Nazis, most of the time is, that's how it was phrased. Well, in Japan we were fighting the Japanese. We were fighting a war of nation against nation. So let's say fighting the Germans, every American knew that the Nazis were trying to destroy the Jews, and so they knew that there were Germans of Jewish descent who were fighting against the Nazis, so in their minds they could understand that you could have some Germans that were pro-Nazi and some Germans that were anti-Nazi, but it was very hard for the average American to make that distinction when they were thinking of Japan. It was a racial war much more.

gky: And has it been won?

JM: We're not fighting anymore. I don't know if it's been won. As a nation today, we, I don't know if the attitudes have completely evaporated. We're still very conscious. If you go into a restaurant and you're seated at a table next to a person of another race from yours, you're aware of it, but we don't, we don't fight about it as much anymore. We don't have laws about it the way we used to. We don't have laws that say who you can sell your house to or who you can buy a farm from anymore. So all that is gone away, so I think that's healthy, but the attitudes, part of it is the mystery. Part of the fear is mingled with the sense of mystery. If you don't know who those people are, they look different, they eat different food, they talk funny, it's easy to be prejudiced. But if your kids are sitting in a classroom with their kids, if your houses are side by side, if your kids are on the same Little League team or the Boy Scout or Girl Scout troops, gradually that kind of prejudice breaks down. I think we have to do something like integrate the armed forces first so that you no longer have a segregated Japanese American unit, and at first it's kind of tough because people are thrown into that social situation or that professional situation before they're ready. But then gradually they learn, hey, we're both rooting for the same baseball team and maybe even we both grew up in the same part of the state, we both like the same food, and pretty soon the fact that there's a facial difference melts away, for most people.

gky: We're talking about, you can talk about racism from a Caucasian point of view. Have you found very much in your research or in talking with the men or people you've talked with that there's also racism on the other side, on the part of the Japanese Americans?

JM: Americans of the World War II generation were taught to think in terms of roots, so that everybody knew that Polish Americans were this way, everybody knew that Jews were this way, everyone knew that blacks were this way. That's the whole way American society thought at that time, so yes, within those different racial groups they also had these stereotypes of other groups. You had Koreans who were living in America who didn't want anything to do with Japanese Americans. You had Japanese Americans who didn't trust black Americans. You had black Americans who didn't like Jewish Americans. It's just we tended to think in terms of racial categories at that time, so certainly different Asian American groups, well, I should say, Asian Americans as a category, was not a concept that, that most Americans used in the World War II time period. I should say that differently, actually. White Americans tended to think of, quote, "Orientals" as all the same, and what happened right after Pearl Harbor was there was an effort to educate the American public that there were good Orientals and not good Orientals, and you had some explanations about the difference between Japanese racial type and Chinese racial type. Well, that's because white Americans were just confused because up to that point they thought that Orientals were Orientals. It's all just Oriental food, right? So there was that kind of an education process going on, and so within the Asian American categories there was a lot of stereotyping going on. For example, right after Pearl Harbor, Filipino Americans lashed out at Japanese Americans just as much as Caucasians did. Korean Americans, in many cases, did not want to cooperate with Japanese Americans because of the long antagonism between Japan and Korea due to the long term colonial occupation of Korea by the, by Japan.

gky: Anything else you can think of?

JM: I think we've covered it pretty well, all that I can think of at this point.

gky: Thank you very much. Thank you very much for coming in on a Saturday, on your weekend.

JM: Oh, no problem. I have plenty of work to do.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.