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RB: Okay. So for the purpose of the recording, my name is Rob Buscher and this is May the 15th, 2023. Can you please state your full name for the recording, and what generation that you identify with?

MM: My name is Agnes Miyo Moriuchi. I am Sansei.

RB: Thank you. And was that the full name that was given to you at birth?

MM: Yes.

RB: Can you state the names of your siblings and birth order?

MM: Okay. An older brother, Fred Tamotsu Moriuchi, then myself, I was number two, and Carol Kiyo Moriuchi and Nancy Chiyo Moriuchi.

RB: Great. And I guess, just out of curiosity, when did you start going by your middle name?

MM: After I had been in Japan in 1973, I just felt like I'd been "Agnes" a long time but "Miyo" felt better. And each of my sisters also reverted, took their Japanese names. So we still answer to Agnes, Carol and Nancy, but it's Miyo, Kiyo, Chiyo. [Laughs]

RB: And I guess Fred was the only one that...

MM: Yeah, Fred Tamotsu.

RB: Great. Can you tell us your father's name?

MM: Takashi Moriuchi.

RB: And he was a Nisei. When did he come here to the Philadelphia region?

MM: Dad was born in August of 1919 and grew up in Livingston, California, then went on to Berkeley. And as an adult, I figured out that, oh, Dad's exactly thirty years different from myself. So he graduated Berkeley in '41, Pearl Harbor happened in December, and in March of '42 he was in internment camps. And didn't stay there long. He, I think, was there only for about six months, and he came to the Philadelphia area in about 1944.

RB: And for your mother, can you tell us a little about her, her name and when did she arrive here in Philadelphia?

MM: So Yuriko Uyehara was born in Oakland, and as a young child, the family moved to L.A., to the Boyle Heights, now Little Tokyo area, and they were also interned, first to Santa Anita Racetrack, and then were taken to Rohwer, Arkansas. Her brother Hiroshi Uyehara came to the Philadelphia area first, and then Yuri followed. She was in the internment camp... anyway, she followed in '44, which is where she met my dad.

RB: So we'll talk a lot more about their experience resettling, but first I just wanted to ask if you know anything about either of your parents' families in Japan or how your grandparents decided to come to the United States?

MM: So both sides of the family were from Kyushu, Fukuoka, was my father's home area, inaka inaka, back in the village. They were rice farmers, and his father Heijiro Moriuchi left Japan around 1905. He was not the oldest son, and so he would not inherit property. And one of the other influences was the Russian Japanese War was happening, so he also thought maybe that wasn't a good idea. And he was in this twenties and ambitious and came to the U.S. My mother's side of the family were more town people. They were from Kagoshima. Her father, Naotaka Uyehara, let me think, he was... they were educated, they were supposed to be a samurai family, so my mother's description as she knew it was that things were pretty Spartan. Correcting, that was her mother. Her mother's side had some samurai background. And so that was a situation where grandfather Naotaka had left Kagoshima and gone to come to the U.S. in 1905 or 1906. But he had enough money to go back to look for his bride, and went to... the families kind of knew each other, they got introduced, and she thought he looked okay, didn't get to talk to him, no dates, nothing like that, and then he proposed to her parents, basically. And her parents said no initially, and she said, "You have five more daughters and a son to get married, let me go." One part of that was she didn't want to have a mother-in-law, so if she came here, she's more of an independent woman. So that sort of story of the Uyehara grandparents, it'll be interesting to see if Paul comes up with some of the same stuff. [Laughs]

RB: Were your grandparents alive after Pearl Harbor, were they incarcerated?

MM: Oh, yeah. Because you figure they were probably in their late fifties, maybe? So they were not elderly, and I have realized, okay, I have three out of four grandparents who lived to eight-six years old. And my parents lived to ninety-seven and ninety-two, so I need to take good care of myself. But my father's parents, we lived with them, or they lived with us. And so I grew up in a multilingual family, but my parents spoke Nihongo to my grandparents, and English to the kids. My mother would write out the Christmas lists in Japanese. [Laughs] She could do it in front of us. So there was certainly a Japanese influence there, day-to-day stuff.

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