<Begin Segment 1>

LG: All right, well, we can go ahead and get started.

MR: Okay.

LG: I'm the interviewer, my name is Lauren Griffin. We're here with Miki Rotman, it is May 15, 2023, and we're here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. So first question, when and where were you born?

MR: I was born in on Maui, Hawaii, in 1942.

LG: And what generation are you?

MR: I am Nisei. Second? Second generation.

LG: What was the full name given to you when you were born?

MR: It was Susan Miki Rotman. Susan Miki Maehara, and people used to call me Susie, or Susie Q. And Louise and several didn't like Suzie Q, so they decided to take Miki. My grandma gave me a Japanese name, Miki, so decided to call me Miki from then on.

LG: How old were you when they made the name switch?

MR: I have no idea, I was very small, I mean, I was a baby. [Laughs] I think "miki" is supposed to mean "trunk of a tree," but I'm not sure because I've talked to another Japanese person here, and it could be something else depending on the character. So I don't know, I have no idea what the character looked like. But my grandma always used to say it meant "trunk of the tree," meaning "first child."

LG: Do you have siblings?

MR: No. Because I think they met when they were in college and at the University of Hawaii, my dad Saburo and Louise, but my mom insisted on going to school, she wanted to work, she wanted to get her degree, her master's degree in social work. The other interesting thing about my mom is that my grandpa was a very traditional Japanese guy, and he did not believe that girls should go to college. But my mom was very, very insistent that she wanted to go to college, so she would go... the way it worked out is he would go to Grandma and get the money, right? And somehow my grandmother got the money from Grandpa. However, when they got married, Saburo and Louise, she got a bill. And she thinks the bill from Grandpa, she got a bill from Grandpa, which she thinks was for the money to go to college. I have no idea. [Laughs] But she had a, my mom had a younger sister, Nobu, I think that was her name. And by the time it was time for her to go to college, my grandpa had realized that all his friends were sending their daughters to college. So my younger sister had no problem, it was just my mom. But anyway, after college, I think my mom went to the School of Social Work here in Philadelphia and got her Master's. So it was like seven years before, when they first met, Saburo and Louise first met up and sort of were interested in each other, they had to wait, Saburo had to wait seven years before she got, Louise was willing to marry him at last. [Laughs]

LG: Was that because she was because she was...

MR: Because she was doing that master's degree in Philadelphia.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.