<Begin Segment 5>

KL: What was the, I mean, your parents were of different citizenship I would presume -- I guess we don't know about your father's citizenship, but certainly different childhood backgrounds and family backgrounds and stuff -- what do you think drew them to each other, and what was their relationship like?

MM: Well, I think my father saw my mother working out in the fields and he kind of liked her, from afar. [Laughs] And my mother said she liked him, so... but she was sixteen and he was eleven years older. I think he was twenty-four when they got married. And then my father was very jealous of my mother, because she spoke English so she could speak to the repairman or whatever, or other people, business people that they have to do business with. And he didn't like her talking too much to the, to other men, I guess, so he would get jealous.

KL: Did that cause problems for her?

MM: Yeah, it did. Because one night when I was three years old and my mother put us into bed in the crib -- I was three, my sister was two -- and I remember her twirling us around with the baby blanket 'cause, plus a diaper, whatever, and she put us down to bed. And I'm very sensitive to noise, and I heard my father beating my mother, and that's the one and only time that I heard. I didn't see it, but I heard it. Yeah.

KL: How did you react to that? You were little.

MM: My mother did not say a word. She did not fight back to defend herself, and I when I remember that it made me mad, when I grew up, you know. And I think I remember that so vividly that when I got married and I started, if Saburo did something that I didn't like I would really blow a fuse and be angry for my mother, and for all women that can't, that keep quiet. And so in my mind I was acting out my vengeance or my anger for these women who couldn't yell out or who wouldn't speak for themselves. And so one day Saburo asked me, "What happened when you were little?" And I remembered that scene and I told him, and he says, "Do you think you made a decision somewhere along the way in your life that, some kind of decision?" And I says, "Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Definitely." Says, "I'm not going to be quiet if I, I'm going to fight back." And I said, "Not only for my mother, but for all those women." That's what I did. [Laughs] It was a really eye-opening moment for me. Yeah.

KL: How did hearing that affect your relationship with your father? Or do you think it did?

MM: My father? Well, I kind of hated my father for a long time, but when I became an adult I began to understand a little bit, because my father wasn't always mean, I mean every day in and day out. He wasn't. And I thought what it was like to be my father. I put myself in his shoes. He has eight children, nobody speaks to him in Japanese, nobody talks to him. We talked through our mother. How do you suppose he felt, you know? And I said to myself, that must not have been a very happy situation for my father. And yet, there's another scene I remember; this was when I was married and we all went home to Salinas, San Jose, to be with my parents and have dinner. All of us kids were there. We were around the dinner table and my father looked around and he said, "The food tastes so good with everybody around the table." And I remember that in the concentration camp, for those three and a half years we were there, we never ate as a family. So now my father has all his family around the table and he's looking at each one of us, and he says, "Ma, gohan oishi." He said, "My goodness, the rice, the dinner tastes so good with everybody here."

KL: Did he learn English ever?

MM: No, I mean he said it in Japanese. I understood it. By now I understand a little bit of Japanese, because serving in the church, you have to serve Japanese people, speaking people, and I just learned all the polite words to say, like "welcome to church, to, yoku irashaimashita." You say that to Japanese from Japan or Japanese-speaking person. You have to say something in Japanese, so I said, "Give me some words to say." [Laughs] So I knew some of the good words. And with that, I was able to bulldoze my way into speaking Japanese, what little that I have heard through the years, through my grandmother and the church people, I picked it up. And then I taught myself the easy ABCs of Japanese, and I would write to my grandmother in Japanese. I taught myself.

KL: Did she keep in touch with her mother, Yasuno keep in touch with her mother?

MM: Oh yeah. And this is what my grandmother did in appreciation: she, when she had her last son, which was George, at the age of fourteen she sent him to San Francisco in preparation for him to go to Japan to take care of Great-Grandma in her last years. So he went to live with this priest, the same kind of church that Great-Grandma started, and so he lived with this family in San Francisco for I don't know how many months in preparation, and for his room and board he had to work for that minister in San Francisco.

KL: How old was he?

MM: Fourteen. And then he had to sail and leave the family. He said, "Why do I have to leave the family? I don't want to go." But my uncle next to him, he said, "You go. You go because Grandma needs you to go." I mean, "Mama, Yasuno needs you to go."

KL: When was that?

MM: This was before the war, before the war. And then... no, excuse me, was this before the war? Yeah, I think it was before the war. And then he went to Japan and when war was about to start, Great-Grandma sent him back to America, but in the meantime he was able to look after his grandma, but he had to go to school in Japan and learn Japanese so that now he could speak to her. 'Cause we all speak English, and he had to learn that Japanese language well so that he could speak to her and converse.

KL: Did your grandmother learn English, Yasuno?

MM: No. No, neither did my father, I don't think.

KL: How did she communicate with the kids, with you and --

MM: She spoke Japanese, but we understood. Now, that's the uncanny thing of it all. She spoke to us in Japanese, but we understood, but we couldn't speak back. I mean, that to me, it boggles my mind, 'cause I understood everything Grandma said.

KL: Yeah.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.