<Begin Segment 14>

KL: Has it been, I know you went to Rochester from Iowa. Has it been a surprise to congregation members or others that you've met in Iowa or in Rochester that this removal of Japanese American people happened?

MT: Some people didn't even know about it until they got to know us. They didn't know the West Coast had all that taken care of.

MJT: Yes, that's the first, lot of people, that's the first time they ever associated with...

MT: With an Asian.

MJT: And when I went to, then was called to a small rural church, Washington Mills in New York outside of Utica, the Utica paper, which was the city, in which Washington Mills was a rural community outside, came to send a reporter out to interview me. It was, the church said they called a Japanese American to be the pastor. So the morning, the next morning, I get a call from a woman who says, "My name is so-and-so, and I'm the president of the Herkimer..."

MT: Gardening club.

MJT: Oh, yes, Herkimer Garden Club. "Would you come and give us a talk on flower arrangement?" And I said, "What?" They said, "We just heard this story about you, and we thought it would just be wonderful if you'd come and tell us about flower arrangement." And I said, "Well, I know just about, as much about flower arrangement as you do." And I said, "What I will do is I'll go down a week before I came to make the talk, to the library, and take a book out on flower arrangement and tell you about it." "Oh," she said, "that's all right, come anyway." So I finally said, "All right, I'll come." So we set the date, and the week before I was to make the presentation, I went to the library and got a book on flower arrangement, got the fundamentals, and took my drawing board with me so I could draw a flower and what this flower meant, and when you put this flower, what that meant, and so on. And they told me it was just tremendous. I got home that afternoon, after the meeting, and no sooner than I lay down my drawing board, and the phone rings. And the lady says, "I'm the president of the Ilion Garden Club, and I just heard you made a wonderful talk on how to arrange flower at the Herkimer meeting, and won't you come and be our guest speaker next month?" Well, that's interesting because the association of flower arrangement and Japanese...

MT: They were stereotyping.

MJT: Stereotype that every Japanese was a gardener.

KL: Yeah, ikebana expert just by virtue of...

MJT: Yeah, every Japanese is something. But that's not only Japanese, we have stereotypes of all kinds of people. But just interesting because they had never seen a Japanese in the flesh.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.