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LG: How did your parents meet?

TM: My parents met near where my mother lived. She lived in, her family lived in Burlington, Mount Vernon area, north of Seattle. And there Japanese and Japanese American associations. You have to understand, at that time, there was not much integration, and I think also there were anti-miscegenation laws at that time. So socially, young Japanese Americans would get together, and so she said they met at a basketball game, and it was in these little leagues that Nikkei or Japanese Americans had, so she met my father there.

[Interruption]

LG: Okay, so what was your parents' relationship like?

TM: Well I think it was a happy marriage. My father and mother were both quite busy and active. My father was probably more active in that he had a lot of interests. He liked to fish, he liked to bowl, and he coached Little League and so forth. And so that took him out of the house. My mother, of course, was very involved in sewing and taking care of the children, but I guess they all, parents all have their roles. But there wasn't tension in the family at all, and they were married in 1941. And when my father died, they were married for...

LG: And your parents were incarcerated?

TM: Yes, yes. My parents were incarcerated, which is an interesting story in that my parents were married on November 22, 1941, so Pearl Harbor was approximately two weeks later. And so their world completely changed. So I try to imagine what that must have been like, because when you get married, you think the future is all open to you but the future was not open to them. And I often tell the story that I asked them, "How did you feel, what happened?" and she said, well, they went to their parents, the Issei, and said, "Don't worry, we'll get you out," or, "We'll take care of you. Whatever happens, we'll take care of you." Well, they didn't realize they were citizens, but that meant no protection for them, so they were incarcerated as well. And the other fact is that my grandparents, even though they were immigrants, they could not become American citizens, naturalized citizens, and I think until 1952, the Walter-McCarran Act. So in some senses, it's a little false to say, "Oh, they're immigrants." Well, yeah, they're immigrants, but they'd like to have been naturalized citizens, but there were laws against that. Whereas my parents were citizens.

LG: What else do you know about this time for your parents?

TM: Well, first you went to what they called forced detention centers, and they went to Pinedale where they lived. I think not everyone, not all families were together, so my mother's family went to Pinedale and then Tule Lake. My father's family, I'm not sure they went to Pinedale, the detention center, but they went to Minidoka, so it was two different places. I only learned this recently in the last ten years, was that my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, who was disabled at that time, he had had a massive stroke, he had gone with the newlyweds to Tule Lake and to a detention center. And I had asked my mother, I said, "Oh, gosh, how did you take care of them?" And she said she didn't, that my dad did all the caretaking for my grandfather, because he was pretty disabled. And so when I think back about it, you start your married life, and you're in this 20x20 room with your father-in-law, who's disabled, and then my dad basically is caring for him.

LG: Did they talk to you much about their experiences?

TM: No, my parents did not talk about it. I only knew they went to camp, I think many Japanese Americans of my generation, the Sansei generation, know that their parents were in camp, but they don't know much about that because their parents didn't talk about it. And I remember someone said, "Well, it's like the Holocaust victims, they don't want to talk about it, they're embarrassed." And my mother said yes, they were embarrassed and ashamed. And they shouldn't have been, but you're basically imprisoned. And so when I learned most about it was when the hearings went around the country in the '80s, when people came out and talked. But until then, people didn't talk about it. They talked about, oh, we knew them in camp, or we'd get a lot of Christmas cards from people that I never knew. How did they know them? "Oh, we knew them in camp." But what is camp?

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.