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HH: When you were teaching at Penn, that was a different field from the field in which you got your doctorate in.

MW: Yes, Herb. When I was teaching at Penn, I was teaching in a field in which I was not degreed, let's say. That happened because the labs for which I was working moved away. And there was a little period in which I was finishing up paperwork connected with the previous job, and then I learned that they were offering Japanese at the University of Pennsylvania. So I went over to Penn. And this is a time when you could go and take courses on PhD courtesy and not pay for them as long as you didn't want to take another degree. And at the time, I did that. I thought, oh, I don't need another degree. So I didn't pay for the courses, I took all of the courses in Japanese and related Japanese studies that were offered at Penn. The professor that I had for teaching -- and then I took these courses, and my Japanese language professor one year got a grant from the Ford Foundation to help with the development of the Japanese language program at Penn. And he's looking around for someone to instruct the first and second year classes. Warren and I were at Penn for a chemistry lecture, I think. And this professor, Dale Saunders, saw me and he said, "Mary, how would you like to come and teach Japanese?" I really thought he was kidding, and I said, "Oh, sure." He wasn't kidding, he hadn't found anybody that he quite liked, and he knew me, we got along in the classes okay. And I was a good enough student there, but that really was a tour de force.

HH: Any regrets for having done that?

MW: Not at all, because I did learn a lot of Japanese, and it got me reacquainted with a lot of areas of Japanese history, Japanese art, and all of these cultural aspects that have always been very important to me anyway.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.