Densho Digital Archive - George Maeda Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

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KL: Did your folks ever seek U.S. citizenship?

GM: Oh, that's another thing. I don't know when they passed the bill saying that they can allow, they can apply for citizenship, I'll say about 1946 or so.

K: It was in the '50s, I don't know the year.

GM: You sure it was in the '50s? Because I graduated high school in '50 and I swear I ran home from high school one day. Maybe it wasn't. Anyway, I remember running home from somewhere, just when I heard about it, and assuming my father was going to apply. Then I came running home and I said, "When are you going to apply?" And his favorite act was when he wanted to explain something, he said, "Sit down." So he says something like, "I've been in this country since 1900, and I was not a good enough human being to be a citizen. And how they sign a piece of paper and I'm supposed to go running to be a citizen?" And I said, "Oh, okay." Not a question was asked after that. My mother didn't say anything, my father never applied. But the ending, happy ending was my father passed away in 1978. And everybody, we respected him for that decision. It wasn't being anti-loyal or anything. In 1980 my mother, shortly after my sister passed away, my mother at eighty years old applied for citizenship, passed the test, voted in her first and only voting, 1982, and she passed away in 1986, having had her citizenship papers. As a matter of fact, I was going to bring her citizenship paper, but I thought, well, this has nothing to do with Manzanar. But she always wanted to be a citizen, but she respected my father's thinking, and never said a word until he passed on. So that's the story of their citizenship. My father died as an alien.

KL: Did he ever return to Japan?

GM: No, he never visited or anything. My mother went once or twice. I've never either. One of my goals before I pass on is that at least I go to Hiroshima and see where my (grandparents are buried).

KL: Yeah, I wonder, did your mom go to Hiroshima?

GM: Yes.

KL: Did she talk about what that was like?

GM: Well, she said she visited the gravesites of her father, and she didn't say too much except I know the purpose. She took my sister, my two sisters took her. And my older sister had the scleroderma at that time, so she really suffered during the trip, but they made it. There were a lot of things my parents went through that they never talked too much about. But I know one of the things my mother always wanted to do was, before she passed on, she wanted to go back to Japan and least see where her parents were buried, and she was able to do that. Another little side story, she trusted everyone, nobody would do anything to her. So two, three days before she left, she walked up and down the block telling everybody, "Goodbye, I'm going to Japan." And she asked my son, my younger son, if he would come over and water the lawn and all that. It wasn't more than two or three days after she left, my son called me at work and said, "Dad, somebody broke into the house," and stole her jewelry and television. [Laughs] Well, she was going around the block telling everybody, "Goodbye." You know, you wanted to tell her, "Don't advertise the fact that you're leaving." But somebody took her up on it, ransacked the house. It's funny now, but it wasn't, not at the time.

KL: Did that change her thinking or make her more trustworthy?

GM: I don't know, I don't know.

KL: It's both, to me, really sad and also kind of powerful that she still would have those feelings toward people, trust.

GM: Yeah, my mother was, she was a trouper. She never wanted to leave her house. She lived alone, she even broke a hip and tripped over her dog, and finally my sister, Take, built a room behind her, an extra room in her house to house my mother. But Take worked at the studio every day, and so I would visit my mother two or three times a week, and every time I went to visit her she was crying just out of loneliness. All day long, nobody there, she can't drive. So after I'd say three, four, five months, my sister said, "Do you want to live with her?" And I said, "I can't." I was single at the time, and I said, "I'd like to, but I just can't." And so she said, "Why don't we put her in Keiro?" Keiro is the assisted living home in Los Angeles. And she said, "Let's try that for a few months." If she didn't like it, we'll think of something else. So we put my mother there, she didn't argue that much. But I had an arrangement with my boss that every day I would take two hours off for lunch, but I'd come to work on Saturday to make it up, but not two hours, maybe an hour and a half. But I would visit her every day at lunch, and then my sister would visit her on the way every day, so she had two visitors every day. And I didn't know, for instance, that she played the piano. And she was playing the piano over there for people. And I remember asking, "My mother? She knows how to play the piano?" She was sort of an educated woman, she came from an upper middle class family, so there were a lot of things that she did that we weren't even aware of, because as far as we knew, she was a farm mother. That's where she spent her last days. I don't think she was too happy, but she made the best of it.