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MN: Because your family had ties with Japan, some of your siblings are living in Japan, your mom and dad sometimes would travel to Japan, your father was in that contingent of Islanders who went to mark the 2600th birthday of the Imperial House. When it came to U.S.-Japan relations in the late 1930s, what do you remember about family feelings about this situation between the two countries?

KM: You know, I've talked about this on different occasions, and my evaluation at this point is that, as a Nisei, you reflect on our cultural upbringing. As a Nisei, I remember being aloof. As a stranger looking at this relationship of, say, for instance, the emperor and his people -- this is Japan -- I already had been exposed to the custom of reverence that the Japanese people had to the emperor as god. Because in the movies and in the... I recall that, for instance, one of the things was that throughout Japan, no Japanese were allowed to own a car -- although not too many people owned cars -- but nobody was allowed to own a car with maroon color, because the emperor was the only one that was allowed to use, I think his car was a bright maroon-colored car, the limousine that he was riding in. And the white, pure white horse. And another thing was whenever the emperor walked among his people, nobody could look at him directly, they always had to have their head down. And this was also true looking at the shogun movies, samurai movies. The samurai shogun of a clan or a... it was han, so not prefecturally, but it was a...

MN: Clan.

KM: Clan. If he was coming, they could not raise their head to look at him at eye-level. So reverence... as an aloof observer, because we never had any direct contact with the emperor. As you reflect, what did we learn about loyalty and reverence? It was... the Japanese emperor was kind of a distant entity from the general population. The more direct contact the general population had was with the clan, the prefectural leaders, different laws of the very different han. And you owed loyalty to them, very little contact between them and the emperor, even between the samurai, the emperor was completely isolated. So I was brought up with the idea that loyalty, you owed your loyalty to whoever was your lord. Which is comparable to working for anybody. Like if we worked for the railroad, we owed our loyalty to the railroad boss. He's the boss, he was our big boss. Came new year, my parents were always all aflutter as to what kind of gift we were going to give him for that new year. It was a big deal, how much are you gonna spend? And my recollection quite often was that the most common thing that I used to deliver was a gallon of sake. [Laughs] For the Japanese family, sake was the number one prize. Because I remember delivering sake to Mr. Walsh every new year. So this was, to me, reflecting upon this business. And we had nothing to do with the emperor in Hawaii. He never came here, we never knew anything about him. But to all our movies that we saw, especially, you know, the yakuza movies that was very popular, you owe your boss, the yakuza boss, you had this perennial... came back on the cowboy show, we always saw the same thing over and over and over. The same thing with chuushingura, we saw it over and over in different form, different actors, but the same subject matter was loyalty to your boss -- from our point of view -- to your boss, because we didn't have lords or anything like that. But this is what was talked to us and this is what we grew up under. So I saw very little contact between the emperor and myself. In fact, there was no connection between the emperor and myself, that's how I looked at it.

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