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RB: Can you share a little bit about growing up in Seabrook? What was it like? Any memories that you have of school there, childhood activities?

MN: Yeah, sure. I went to Seabrook Elementary School. Seabrook is a village within upper Deerfield Township. This is just to set the stage here. It's located in Cumberland County, which is one of twenty-one counties in the state of New Jersey, and it's one of the few counties in the state that would be designated as rural. I mean, it was farmland, basically. The school during the time I went through the entire system, I mean, starting with kindergarten and going through eighth grade, was heavily populated with Japanese Americans. But the numbers diminish on a fairly consistent basis through the late '40s and early, and through the '50s. So that various friends and neighbors that we had, you know, they would over time be leaving. Some would go back to California, some went to other places to settle. I think  Cleveland was one place where at least a family that we knew and my uncle George, who lived in Seabrook, became a chick sexer, which was apparently a fairly interesting occupation among a number of Nisei men. That at least in that period, in the early, in the early '60s and late '50s, and the operation itself I think, was started in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then moved south. So my uncle's family, my Uncle George's family, settled in Raleigh, North Carolina. So that was our southern branch of the family.

My sense of growing up in Seabrook in this community was idyllic, which, I mean, it's a phenomenal sort of thing, because I think we were of the generation of Japanese Americans who were probably, there was never any, I can't recall any verbal assaults. I can't remember anybody, any Caucasian calling me a "Jap" or, you know, "slopehead" or any of those other endearing terms. And the community itself was an interesting, had a series of interesting dynamics. I mean, one was people, almost everybody there, without exception, and for most of that period, you couldn't live in Seabrook unless you worked in Seabrook. But they were, during the summer, you had you had basically twelve-hour shifts. So, there was always attention paid to not being too noisy. And the area of Seabrook, which is changed somewhat, but very much open space areas for woods and all that. There was a state park on the lake, state park nearby. And, you know, we were in a, kind of a comfortable situation, I mean, there was no apparent threat to our safety or the endangerment of our community.

And I think the "model minority" stereotype, you know, is seen as an albatross, and I wouldn't deny that, but there were aspects of it where in specific situations. It was, it was an accurate rendition of what was the reality, you know, on the ground, that is to say, Japanese Americans did well in school. You know, we were, if I may say it, we were smart and we were also good athletes. So in that sense, there was a kind of social security that existed in the community and among us. So I don't remember feeling like we were inferior in any kind of way because, well, the objective reality that we knew was we weren't. [Laughs] I mean, you know, they didn't, the white kid, the hakujins, you know, they didn't have anything on us. And that went all the way up to high school. People of Japanese, kids of Japanese descent, I mean, they played football and were captains of the team and played baseball, and were captains of the team, and were in the honor society and on and on. So it kind of created a setting which was comfortable, maybe unreal, in certain ways. But I think that that was what it was. So I, you know, I say to other people, that the lesson for many of us was that white people were overrated, you know, I mean, what have they got going for them, I mean, really? [Laughs] And then, I think I'd sort of maintain that position, or since, pretty much.

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