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HH: When and how did you meet Mary?

WW: In Cambridge when I was at MIT. [Laughs] And that's a typical JACL story, I suppose. In 1948, after I got to Cambridge, or, yes, at MIT, I knew someone there back from San Francisco, Jin Kinoshita. Jin and I had been friends in the San Francisco community. He himself had gone to Harvard. I think he either was in the middle of taking a PhD degree, or had already gotten one. The Boston Japanese Americans had just formed a chapter of the JACL. So Jin says, "Hey, come on down, let's go there." And that's where I met Mary. It was a short-lived JACL chapter. I think it lived for maybe two or three years, and then it vanished, and it might have sprung up again and again, maybe two or three times since. I'm not sure whether it's alive today or not, but I met her there And we got married in 1950 and came down to here to Philadelphia together.

HH: Let's see. When you came to Philadelphia, you didn't really know anyone except for the person who invited you to come down.

WW: That's right. Oh, no, I did know someone. I knew the Inouyes, yes. I think I knew them from San Francisco. There were always these connections no matter where you go. And I knew all the, I knew the father and the mother and they had their hotel here. They were marvelous people, wonderful. I knew your father, I don't know, was he here then? I don't remember. So I'm sure I saw him at the Inouyes more than once. So there were, that makes two, you see, the Inouyes and your father. And that's about it. So I spent most of my time at work. You know when you're newlywed, you don't really need very much in terms of contact with people, because you're very much wrapped up in yourselves, especially when we were both starting out on new jobs.

HH: In your life, there seemed to be some kind of trend. When you were in San Francisco, you lived in a Japanese community, stayed there most of the time, but gradually as you grew up, you started spreading out to the larger part of San Francisco, of course you were into the larger part of San Francisco. Certainly when you went to Cambridge, you were in an area where there were very few Japanese Americans. So seeing a person whose identification with Japanese Americans was probably intensely strong, especially with your father's activities, intensely strong one time, changing radically through the course of time. That sounds about right?

WW: I think so. I think, yes, of course. You start out highly concentrated, and then you spread out. I don't think I was ever very conscious of what I was or who I was. Even from early childhood. I'm sure I was conscious that, say, when I went to grammar school, there were a number of people of Asian ancestry, young children, and I was one of them. But we were obviously still a minority in that neighborhood. And when I went to Chicago, it's hard to say, but Chicago, of course, was full of people from all over the world. And when I went there, I lived in International House, which again, was a collection of everybody from everywhere. When I went to... but my contacts were almost exclusively within the Department of Chemistry and my colleagues there who were, there were no other Asians there. And then when I went to Boston and to Cambridge, there were very few Asians.

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