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LG: So, shifting a little bit, I did want to cover just a, more biographical details. If you could talk about children, if you got married.

MN: Oh, yeah, sure. I am married, my partner is Jean Hunt, we've been together for now fifty-one years, the first twenty of which were out of wedlock and the rest in wedlock. I have two adult children, a daughter named Michiko Hunt, in good feminist fashion, took her mother's name. And then a son, Kenzo Nakawatase, in traditional fashion, took his father's name, last name, and my grandfather's, his grandfather's name. They both have their own families, they both have two kids. My daughter works as an all-around staff, development staffperson at Greene Street Friends School in Germantown. My son is a writer, I mean, I think a writer for pay. [Laughs] It's not, he's not working on the Great American Novel, at least not that I know of, but it's a living. And they both live in Germantown. My son moved back to Germantown after his wife finished her coursework for her PhD in urban education at Teacher's College, so they moved back last spring. And so I have four grandkids, and they all, everybody lives within ten minutes, so it's a nice thing.

LG: Raising your children, did you share stories about your experiences, your activism with them, even with your grandchildren?

MN: Well, not so much, not yet with my grandchildren. It's interesting, of our two children, my daughter feels the strongest in terms of racial consciousness or a sense, they're both socially conscious, but I think she at least has been first in sort of thinking about these issues, but they're issues not only of the Japanese experience, but also being a hapa, you know, her being Japanese on one side. And so, and her kids, her husband is half Italian and half Jewish, my son's wife is Cape Verdean. So that adds another degree of, you know, change, difference. So it's an interesting mix within our own family. So I call it "the wave of the present" in terms of, you know, the American experience now, in terms of this rather polyglot sense of who is an American. But they're both, as I said, very socially conscious, and I suspect they're very clear about how that's affected things in their lives, and probably are going to learn more about it. As for how much they know about me, you know, a little bit, but some of it's just kind of implicit. But a lot of it's not been told by me, but maybe by other people, and the grandkids don't know much. Of course, one of my grandkids is only about seven months old. Anyway, that's who knows what, at least today.

LG: So, maybe if you didn't talk to them so much explicitly about your experiences, were there certain characteristics or qualities that you tried to instill in them?

MN: Well, they have a clear sense of justice, and a very clear sense of what's right and what's wrong, and what's just and unjust. And they certainly are not afraid to express those feelings and sentiments. So that's very much the scene, and I'm very proud of that. I'm glad about that. They have their own tastes, you know, all kinds of things. My son, like my son is a big music person, and we generally agree on much, but he's much more of a fan of rap than I am. And you know, I think we're kind of on the same progressive page, if you will, and we support and deplore some of the same things as you can imagine.

LG: How did you meet your wife?

MN: Well, it was through the American Friends Service Committee. We were active where we were members of a committee, and we got to know each other that way, the committee looking at what a new society would look like. And that was in the early '70s, so the rest is history, or her story. [Laughs]

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