<Begin Segment 11>

RB: Well, actually, I realize you've mentioned Steve a few times in the interview, but we haven't actually talked about him. So maybe could you just share briefly how the two of you came together?

MM: Through Quaker, there's an organization called Friends General Conference, and they used to meet in Cape May when I was a kid. And we realized, oh, we were in that same space, he was two years older when we were kids, and then we figured out there were several places where our families intersected, like my mother in Pocono. But anyway, so we met about 2014 or '15, I guess. I was divorced at that point, but his marriage was getting closer to that time. And he said, "Do you know Inazu Nitobe?" and I looked at him and I said, "I'm not Japanese." [Laughs] He persisted. And we got into further conversation, but I had been asked to go talk to the Baltimore yearly meeting. What was the topic? Anyway, I emailed him and I said, "Are you gonna be there?" and he said, "No, I'm not." But that started an email conversation. We just moved along and in 2017 we were married. It's a wonderful thing. And he's got this family interest in Japan as well. So this is like, he knows how to use chopsticks, and he'll eat most anything that we have, so that's great.

RB: I think that might actually do it on my end. Were there any questions that you thought we need to go back over? Anything else that we didn't cover that you think we should?

MM: Yeah. I'd looked at some of the stuff about intergenerational trauma and model minority and I'm going, oh...

[Off camera]: Did you talk about Medford Leas?

RB: Not much, actually. Maybe we should talk a little bit Medford Leas.

MM: So Medford Leas is a Quaker retirement community, a continuing care community that I don't know how many people are there, four hundred plus. And I don't know when it, how old it is. Might be getting fifty years now. But my dad was one of the, he was retired, and so he had the time, and he was interested in, he did not want to have, my mother had nursed his mother in her cancer and her illness at home. And four kids, and the farm books and everything else, and my dad figured there was some alternative to that, and Folkways and the Kendall at Longwood had already been started, so there was this model. And Lou Barton was with the group of mostly Quakers who said, "Let's see about starting another Quaker retirement community in New Jersey." So Dad was sent on the exploration trip traveling around the country looking at different organizations and their budgets and their endowments, et cetera. So he got increasingly involved and he's the one who found the farm that the organization bought and Mom and Dad lived there for probably close to twenty years. And this concept's changing, but it's the realization that there's healthy older years and then there's fragile older years. And if your kids aren't gonna take care of you, and most of us don't expect our kids to do that, then what are the alternatives? And a big part of not just physical health, but the social and emotional health is important. So Dad said that helping create Medford Leas was one of the best things he did in his whole life, because it created a home for himself, Grace and Hiroshi, the Murakamis, the Marutanis, a number of the Nisei.

RB: I think that's actually the most remarkable thing about it, because given the relatively small community, how significant an institution that Medford Leas has been for the Nisei in their twilight years.

MM: I was just at Mother's Day, and we had, there were five of us mothers -- this is with some friends -- and two of the women are in their nineties, still driving, still capable. And two are in their eighties and I was the kid at seventy three years old, but there was like four hundred and thirty some years of age. Anyway, we had a great time. So who knew that suddenly, oh, eighty sounds okay. Oh, eighty-five and ninety, that's getting old. Steve's aunt's a hundred and two and doing real well. [Laughs] Got to take good care of yourself.

RB: Did you have any thoughts on either model minority or intergenerational trauma?

MM: Not so much. I think one of the things that happened with at least the Nisei that I came in contact with, was that they were in their twenties and many of them had finished their education. So they had the tools to get going in life. And in the '50s, everybody coming back from the war, that's what it was like. Put the war behind us and let's get moving. And that's when suburbia blasted open. So it was part of the times. Anyway, your kids, my kids, what would their world be like in the next fifty, sixty years, seventy years? Hopefully they are contributing to it and part of it is their heritage. What we learned from our forbearers, gambarimasho. [Laughs]

RB: Absolutely. Well, I think that's a wrap. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.