Densho Digital Archive - Mas Hashimoto Interview (denshovh-hmas-01-0035)

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TI: So I'm going to switch gears here now and talk about your family. And wanted to find out or ask you, how did you meet your wife?

MH: Okay. I, when I was teaching, after three years, I realized that I didn't know anything about American history. So I bought a car and, but I didn't put air conditioning in it. You don't need it for Watsonville. But anyway, I thought, "I'm going to travel around the country, I want to see what this country's about. I want to go to the sites." So anyway, there was a young kid, Tets Hojo, who was a, finished his Stanford, first year of Stanford, he wanted to join me and I needed the company and such. So I traveled around the country, and it was the segregated South. I mean, Jones Motel was for colored and such. We had to be careful where we ate, where we slept.

TI: And what year was this?

MH: 1963. And traveled through Dallas, and five months later, the President of the United States is going to be assassinated, John F. Kennedy. Tets got a speeding ticket in North Carolina, the ticket said, "White/black." They checked "white," so we didn't have to pay as much. It was a different kind of a South, different kind of a country. So anyway, when we got back, Marcia's YBA group in San Mateo asked us to speak, so that's when I first met her. I was twenty-eight, she was sixteen, and, "Go away, little girl," and so on. Later on, when, two years later, she was a freshman in college, and I had just gotten back from Japan. They had a conference in San Francisco and I saw her again, and so we started dating. Her mother was concerned because, I mean, the difference, twelve years' difference. But it was a five-year courtship, and we waited until she got her teaching credential, and then we got married, and that's thirty-eight years ago. And she's the love of my life.

TI: So that was 1970 you got married.

MH: Got married in 1970, and she got a job here in Watsonville, and she loves it here. She's, she is so wonderful. We never argue. We've never had an argument. There's nothing to argue about.

TI: That's special. How about children?

MH: We have thousands of children. She has thousands of kindergarteners who are grown up and so successful and so beautiful. I've had seven or eight thousand students, and I still have a few more because I go around teaching about the experience. So we're very fortunate.

TI: Okay, good. Anything else that we haven't covered? I've gone through my list of questions and wanted to know if there's anything else that, that I haven't covered that you'd like to, to talk about?

MH: The Japanese American experience is unique. We need to tell the story, Densho is so important because it, it permits us to get out there to the public. I couldn't do it; I just do it with a few. You can reach millions, so your work is tremendously important.

TI: Well, thank you very much, and thank you for participating, because this is part of getting the story out.

MH: Thank you.