<Begin Segment 16>

CN: Did your family experience any sort of other kind of prejudice that you know of? You mentioned something about housing a little bit, but were there other examples?

JM: Well, I remember... well, I don't remember, but I was told that in the case of my grandfather, when he passed away, at that time he was living with my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Earl. And they were looking for a funeral home in St. Paul where they could have a visitation. And they couldn't find a place that would accept Japanese, and so my uncle talked to his pastor at Unity Unitarian Church, and he searched around and he found one called the Godbout Funeral Home. And they were willing to have the visitation and service for my grandfather. And then they also were trying to find a cemetery where they could have the cremation performed, and they couldn't find one easily, so Lakewood in Minneapolis would accept my grandfather. So our family has a crypt there at Lakewood as does my Aunt Ruth and her family, they have one from there, too.

CN: Were there other Japanese in Lakewood? Isn't Lakewood the famous cemetery where Hubert Humphrey is?

JM: Right, yeah. Yeah, I don't know the background of Lakewood, because my brother passed away in 1947, and he was the first, he was put into the Lakewood crypt, so it could have been that even back then they were having some problems trying to find something for my brother, but he was cremated and his ashes are in the chapel, in the Byzantine chapel over at there, downstairs.

CN: That's interesting because I didn't realize that it was difficult to have a funeral, even though your family was Christian, too. That was interesting. One other thing, too, you talked a lot about your father. Your mother when she was living here, did she, was she a housewife or was she able to work?

JM: My mother was mostly a stay-at-home mom while I was growing up and then my brother, my oldest brother passed away as a child, and my parents then had another child, Philip, who was born in 1949. So when he was in elementary school at Ramsey, my mother went to work part-time. She used to call herself the milk lady, so they would provide milk for the little kids at ten o'clock in the morning. And then later on, when he went to high school, she got a part-time job as a sales clerk in the infant department at Powers, it's a department store in Highland Park. She worked there on and off part-time for quite a few years. And then she even worked part time with Kimi Hara and some of the other Japanese Americans at Fuji Express, kind of a fast food Japanese American food place in the skyway in Minneapolis.

CN: Is that the precursor to the Fujiya restaurant?

JM: I think it's related in that family, I think that... is the daughter or the mother, whoever owned it...

CN: Oh, that was Reiko Weston.

JM: Reiko Weston, I think it was one of her restaurants also, but they worked there for two or three years or so. Quite a few Japanese Americans were working there. They worked there because Kimi Hara was kind of in charge of everything, and they all wanted to work with her.

CN: Okay.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.