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LG: So that's pretty interesting. When you were a child, were there ever moments where the events of the war were brought up to you, especially playing with the mostly white kids?

TM: Yes. I mean, I think my experiences, because it was 1946 when we came back, my experiences were very much shaped by the aftereffects. And I felt racism, it wasn't blatantly there, but I felt it I always knew I was different, just had to look in the mirror. I remember one instance very vividly, I'm sure I was under ten, and kids were always in and out of each others' homes, and I remember my dad was gardening out in the front of the house, and some of the kids came over and were watching him, and one of them called my father a "Jap." And I was kind of frozen. One of the things that really surprised me was my father didn't say anything back to that child, like, "Get out of our yard," or anything like that, he just continued gardening. And it was a moment in time that is frozen for me, because my father was a very, kind of strong personality, and you just sort of take it. It was kind of, it was demeaning, very demeaning. But in another instance, I think as children, we got along very well with our neighbors, and made friends easily. But I remember going back to my high school reunion maybe fifteen, twenty years after I graduated, coming from the East Coast. And talking to some of my friends, we'd gotten together, and I talked about how, on the West Coast, people are used to seeing Asians, and they don't ask you, "Where are you from?" because they understand that Asians have been on the West Coast for close to a hundred years. So I was telling my classmates, I said, "On the East Coast, I find the racism is right out there." I said, "I never felt that going to school." And one of my classmates since kindergarten said, "Oh, well, we protected you." And so I thought that was very interesting that they heard it. I knew it was there, and I was talking to my younger sister about it recently because they're ten and seven years younger. So that whole war experience was completely different. But my two brothers and I really faced it more, because it was more imminent or closer to us. And I know we couldn't date. We had friends, but when it came to having a boyfriend or girlfriend, you didn't have one of another race. And to me, I always kind of disliked it because it was like, in my high school class, there might have been, in a class of three hundred, there might have been less than ten of us Japanese Americans. And they always sort of pushed us together, and I always didn't like that, that I had to be with my "own kind," so to speak. I thought this is, I should be able to have free choice or whatever. So although it wasn't out there, it was there. You always knew you were different, and even today, you always know you're different, because Americans only think of America as either Black or white, not necessarily Asian or Latino. They think of Asians as early or late immigrants who came here within the last ten, maybe twenty years. But Asians have been in America for over a hundred, my family's been here over a hundred years.

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