<Begin Segment 1>

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.

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

<Begin Segment 2>

RB: We'll talk more about your childhood in a bit, but why don't we focus a little on the resettlement. You mentioned that your parents met after they resettled here. Do you know how they met?

MM: Apparently, International... International Services had resettlement for all kinds of ethnic groups, and being Japanese American, they were in their twenties, that group, they got together, there would be dances and get-togethers. I think a lot of that had been put on hold for the internment with the not-knowing what was going to happen.

RB: So my dad talks about, he went to a dance or an event, and Mom was there, and I don't know, doesn't make sense, but she had a cute hat on. And then she disappeared and he didn't know what happened to her. And what we found out was that the president of Drexel was contacted by, I think it was... there was a resettlement organization, and Quakers were involved, and he was friends with the president of Drexel who was Quaker or Quaker related, and they needed a nanny for the summer months. So Mom went and just kind of disappeared, and he was kind of watching for her. What's really unique is that my husband, my second husband, Steve Elkington, is a Quaker from way back. His family were at Pocono, they called it Pocono Preserve. And so I'm going, well, my mom might have seen your parents, I mean, Steve wasn't around at that point, but our parents might have seen each other in passing. It's one of those threads of a lifetime when we started talking, got to be pretty interesting.

MM: So your father, when he resettled here, I believe he was working for another farmer initially. Can you talk a little bit about who that farmer was and what the circumstances were?

RB: So Tak really didn't... I think I was doing the math here, he was only in the camps for about six months. So he went in in June of '42, and because so many men were in the army, they needed people to bring in crops, and my dad was certainly willing to go to pick crops and do whatever, so he was cleared in March of '43 and was sharecropping in the Colorado area, and I think also got his parents out at that point. And then in January of '44, he got a pass to go east. He realized if you don't try to go back to California, there's more possibility. So he went to Chicago and Detroit and ended up coming to Philadelphia in Germantown. A side story is that he went to Detroit and he proposed to a woman named Grace Fuji, and my sister found this... my dad kept a journal, not very detailed, more about the weather and what the farming was like, but he went to propose and she turned him down. So we said, "Okay, Grace, we will be here." But he left with the names of Quaker farmers, or Quakers in the Philadelphia area. And he was pretty methodical because he got ahold of, I guess, Philadelphia yearly meetings directory and went to visit some of the Quaker farmers. At that point, I want to know what else, what other kind of farming is along the East Coast, so we got on the Greyhound bus and went down through Virginia and got as far as Raleigh, North Carolina, and then was coming back up the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland. And in Norfolk and Salisbury, he got picked up by Naval Intelligence, and they asked him, "Why were you here, here and here?" And so he realized he was being followed. Maybe I'll go back and see those Quaker farmers and see what happens.

And so Lou Barton, Louis Barton, first gave him a job and he started working for Lou, and I guess was helping with different kinds of management and realized, okay, this is a kid who has a degree in business from Berkeley, has life experience in farming, my dad would say, "I really learned my business," because I had to negotiate for my father. My grandfather didn't speak English. They would take the vegetables and whatever to the wholesaler and Tak as a teenager, as a young kid, was doing the interpreting. So anyway, Lou gave him quite, having gone back through the memoirs thoroughly enough, but Lou gave him work and then he lent him a farmhouse and Dad started renting land and eventually was able to buy a farm, and just kept expanding. So Dad credits Mom, because here she is, a girl from L.A., she's marrying a farmer despite her mother's concern about this, that you're never gonna have a good life. Well, Tak provided, ended up providing a really successful life. But Yuri moved into a farmhouse on Church Road in the Marlton area that had no, I think no running water, no electricity, it was really rough, and they used bottled gas. And eventually that improved, but even as my dad had Alzheimer's in his later years, and we would drive past where that house stood, my dad would say, "That's where the house was, that's the same tree." The tree's there, otherwise it's this big mega-mansion. [Laughs] So they started together very modestly and her in-laws moved in.

RB: Was your dad a Quaker before the war or did he convert sometime after coming?

MM: So they were married in '46, my brother was born in '47 and I was born in '49. And the meeting was helping that. I'm not sure how much, but my brother was in second grade and I was going into kindergarten. And that point, the head of school, Chester Reagan came to my parents and said, "Your kids should be at the Friends school." So I have a feeling that there was an initial, some grants that helped out. When my dad... so they were at Medford Leas retirement community in Medford, which he had helped found, and he was in the Alzheimer's unit for probably a good three years, more at the end. But when he died, I went to go talk to a longtime Quaker woman from our Quaker meeting who was in the Alzheimer's unit. I bent down and I said, "Libby Haynes," I said, "Libby, Tak died this morning," and she goes, "I know." She said, "When your family came to the meeting, we all wanted your family to succeed." In fact, that whole quarter, that whole area, wanted him to do well. She said, "And I made cookies for the children." So it was this, what happens in your life and how other people affect you and what they remember, it's what's builds lives and cares for people. To get back to your question, Dad and Mom became members of Moorestown Friends meeting in 1955, and that was significant in that up until that time, there had been a real rift in Quaker meetings. There were two areas of Orthodox and Hicksite. And in 1955, was the year that this got healed, and my parents were the first members of the healed Moorestown meeting. And I think much of my parents' volunteer work, care for the meeting, was a sense of, the Japanese sense, really of obligation and of returning kindness that's been given to you.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

RB: Definitely have more questions about the Friends, but since we're talking a little bit about childhood, I'm curious if you could share some other memories that you have of growing up in your household and also some of the community groups that your family was a part of, other memories that you might have of being in the meeting?

MM: So we grew up in a farmhouse on Fellowship Road, and there were several iterations of that house. We were right up against the apple orchards in the back side of the house. It was a country road, there was one elderly couple who lived in this, what I thought, brick ramshackle house across the street. So we had no really close neighbors, but there was constant activity because it was a working farm. And during the summer months, we had... what would you call it? Workers who came up mostly from Puerto Rico, later from Jamaica and some other Caribbean countries, but they were contracted through a, I don't know, New Jersey farm labor organization that I know was in Glassboro. So I guess during the summer months, we must have had fifteen-plus men down in the barracks, and my dad provided housing and blankets and cots, et cetera, wasn't fancy. So growing up on a farm with parents and grandparents who were just working all the time. The kids, we kind of took care of ourselves to a certain extent. My mom would say, "Don't go near the irrigation pond, it's really deep, and you guys don't swim." [Laughs] "So stay away from that pond." I got to roam all over the farm, and I'd get mad at my brother who would be teasing me, and I'd just take the dog and we'd go for a long walk. And I was reading a lot, I think. I am remembering that we didn't go to summer camps, but my mom somehow found the time to take us every two weeks or whatever the cycle was, to the Moorestown public library and bring back a stack of books. And as we got older, the World Book, there was not a TV for quite a long while, it was a black and white TV with tubes, so you banged it if it was not working right. So we had, the four of us pretty much, with occasional exchanges of some kids from the other farming families or whatever, kind of showed up for meals, and kind of free to roam and to read and to go look for the kittens in the barn. I remember just sort of the... so apple blossoms are white, right? And there's one vivid scene of there's a storm coming up and the sky is dark behind, and it's just this, it's like the hanami, it's like the Japanese sakura blossoms, just an explosion of white blossoms. Tagging onto that, my grandfather was very gregarious and he and, I suppose, Grandmother was involved as well, but they would invite their Issei friends, and they would come out for a hanami, a viewing of apple blossoms. And then my grandfather had built a whole picnic ground down by the stream at the far end. I pulled up a picture of Laurel Marutani and her mother, Vicky, who just recently passed away. But sitting on the back end of the family station wagon, and he would just go, oh, scene from the past. [Laughs]

RB: Yeah, I remember seeing some of those photos as well, actually. Was this a thing that was done on an annual basis?

MM: I think on a regular basis. And then later, because of connections we had with the Shimanouchi family, and I can't tell you how, but one of those, that family, was they were New Yorkers, and they would bring a whole crowd of Japanese, probably Issei down from New York to do the same thing. So that was perhaps in later years.

RB: If you had to guess, what is the kind of date range that that was being done?

MM: I'd have to look that up. '50s into the early '60s. I mean, I was going off to college in '67. And Grandmother had died when I was... so I was seventeen. Grandmother had died with I was about ten, just early years, one of the kids running around.

RB: So then thinking a little bit more about the farm, I know that Tak continued to expand until his farm, I've heard it described as at one point the largest fruit orchard that was in New Jersey.

MM: I know at one point there was an article in the Sunday Enquirer magazine section about Tak being the biggest strawberry grower, and I think he was growing, like, twenty-five acres of strawberries. I think we were probably in school, but there was a picture of Grandmother and Grandfather and Mom and Dad. They would say a prayer before every meal, and there was probably some other article with Grandmother sorting apples or peaches on the production line. And a really good story is, so the workers would come up and they'd have a flat of eight quarts of strawberries, and my mother, grandmother would hand them, it was piecework, so she'd hand him a ticket with their number for every quart of strawberries, and then they'd know how much they'd get paid. So Grandmother's been watching these pickers, and she picked up a quart and she dumps it out in her hand and there are clods of dirt in there. Didn't have to pick as many strawberries that way, and she just dumped the whole thing out. So she spoke no Spanish or English, and he spoke no Japanese, but they knew who was, the boss's mother. [Laughs] So she was out of control.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

RB: I'm wondering if you could share some memories about school, and what was it like going to school where you grew up? I assume probably outside of your siblings, there probably weren't other Japanese Americans? Just kind of curious...

MM: Moorestown Friends School. Quaker school, a day school, and I was a lifer, I went from kindergarten all of the way through twelfth grade. When people ask me how I feel or thought about myself as Japanese American, I really thought of myself more as Quaker, as the biggest part of the identity, and then part of this farming family. When I was in kindergarten, a white American Quaker teacher, Mrs. Hess, had been in Japan, and her daughter had been to Japan, and so they had some kimonos, they had parasols, and they set up a Boy's Day, carps in the middle, I think, with streamers. And I was dressed up, my big brother came down from second grade, and the little bit of home movies that I remember seeing are that my brother first went up, and he had to... no, I went up first, and I was supposed to demonstrate how to use chopsticks. Well, I was five years old, not very adept, and she probably had peas or something, and I was having no success. So I walked away, and my brother came up and he could do it. [Laughs] So that's how we were, I guess, sharing some Japanese culture within the school. It was strongly Quaker at that point, because most families were, they were rarely an only child. There were three and four and sometimes more kids in families. So there was the Decole clan and the Roberts' and David Ritchie's two daughters, but we were the Moriuchis, and everybody kind of knew who we were. When I got to seventh grade, there was one Filipina young woman, but most of the diversity probably were the Jewish kids, and we would ask them to share matzo with us in Passover. And I think my dad felt that we should be protected and that the Quaker school would get that to us.

RB: It seems like a really welcoming environment, both between the Quaker community and the meeting house as well as the school environment, do you recall any instances of racism that either you or your parents faced?

MM: I was incredibly shy, and I've verified that with some of the people I went to high school with. So I don't remember anything significant. I have had an incident within, during the pandemic years, and I can talk about that now or later. So I lived in the edge of Mount Airy Germantown, and this happened about two or three years ago. And I was driving across on Wayne Avenue, across Lincoln Drive, going, okay, I've got this errand to do. And I'm at the light and I realize, oh, there's a car that's stuck going uphill. And I thought, well, do you do the good Samaritan thing? And I thought, well, if it's still there when I finished my errand and come back, then I'll ask. So it was still there, came back, parked my car, crossed the one lane of traffic, and I said to the man, "Do you need help?" He said, "It won't go." I go, "Yeah, but do you need to call a tow truck?" and he says, "Yeah, I did that," and I said, "Okay." So I turned around to go back across, because it was getting close to rush hour and I didn't want to get killed on Lincoln Drive. And this car comes from behind him and goes around, and a woman hangs out of the passenger side and said, "Go home and take your virus with you." And I was taken aback, and they were speeding up Lincoln Drive. I was going, 'That's not appropriate." And my kids were later in hysterics that that was my response, and well, good. But what was interesting was the car that was stopped was a Jaguar. The man who was in the car was African American. The car that went around, and the woman who yelled at me, she was African American Muslim. And I'm going, "This is a whole scene of misplaced identities or expectations and stereotypes," but it's really been one of the only times where somebody has... I'd say that we walk around in this world from the inside out, and we don't usually make, are aware of how other people are viewing us. Do they view us as, oh, it's just a person, or that's a woman, or that's a person who's different, or a person who's stereotype A, B or C. So it was shocking to me, and it hurt, and I've told the story a number of times, but it's really one of the few times that I've had that.

I've had the reverse happen, because... oh, this will be out of sort, out of timing, but I taught in Thailand in 2005 to '06, and taught English, and people spoke Thai to me. Then, well, backwards, the first time I was in Japan in '73, '71 to '73, people assumed I was Japanese until I opened my mouth, and then they would go, "Oh, she's not." And then I traveled for three and a half months. Egypt Air opened to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Bombay, Cairo, Rome, Paris, London, and I traveled with a backpack. I had a place to land in most of the countries. And people spoke whatever the local language was, and then they try a few more, Chinese or whatever else, and I realized, I'm traveling with a pretty effective disguise. They don't always look at your clothes, they look at your physical features and make certain assumptions. And so I realized if I had been traveling with somebody else who was maybe Caucasian or whatever, that it would have been a different experience. And in Malaysia, I was in a household, a Chinese Malaysian family, and the five year old start speaking Chinese to me and I shook my head. And she switched to Hindi because one of the relatives was of Indian Malaysian background, and shook my head. And then she spoke Malay to me, because the servants in the house were Malay. And I go, "She thinks I'm really stupid." [Laughs] So I'm very much learning to not judge people as much as you can to try to be open.

RB: I think I have one more question about childhood and then maybe we'll move into, more about college and then your career. You talked about the meeting house and Quaker identity being a big component of your identity as a child, adolescent, I know your parents were very involved in JACL, a long period of time. Were you also present at JACL gatherings?

MM: My parents, my mom, I think, tried. [Laughs] So there would be, the two things I remember were JACL, and summer picnics at Friends Central, and Christmas parties someplace downtown in Philadelphia. And at that point, there were all these other kids. I knew Lisa and Chris and Paul and Larry, my cousins, I knew the Marutani kids. A lot of the other kids, we kind of knew who the families were. And not very often, but now and then, my parents would have a party or would see more the kids. When the Marutanis arrived, it was a big deal, because there were eight kids. So I wasn't involved with JACL except in high school, I guess I was. Because there was a junior JACL group, and I went to San Diego to the National Convention, I'd say probably '66, '67, and Ted Hirokawa and Marsha Murakami and I went. So that was a big deal. But it felt pretty foreign, because I was not used to being... and the West Coast Japanese American experience is really different. So I didn't have as much maybe in common than my mother would have liked. [Laughs]

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

<Begin Segment 5>

RB: So where did you go to college and what did you study?

MM: Well, I went to Occidental College, which is a private liberal arts school in L.A. When it came down to it, I go, okay, I got accepted everywhere, my brother said I can't go to Colby because he went to Bates in Maine. Earlham College is Quaker and I've already got five other classmates going there, and maybe I should figure out something else. So it ended up between Middlebury and Occi, and my dad said, "You can go wherever you get in." I came down and I said, "Mom, if I go to Middlebury, I can ski, it's New England. And if I go to Occi, well, there's Los Angeles." Yeah, I didn't know what that would mean, and she goes, "There are more Japanese boys in California." [Laughs] So the irony is I came home with the Pennsylvania Dutch guy.

RB: So living in Los Angeles at this time, in the late '60s, the first time in a larger Asian American, Japanese American community, at least in the sense that...

MM: Yeah, there were more around.

RB: Did you interact with the Japanese American community?

MM: If you didn't have a car, and still, if you don't have a car in L.A., it's hard to get around. So I wasn't roaming much off campus. The Hawaiian kids were interesting because they're saying, "My god, it's freezing cold here in L.A." [Laughs] So I have to say no, that I wasn't particularly close friends. There was, by chance, a friend of a friend type of thing, and at one point, I had a blind date with a Chinese American class, not classmate, but next class. And her brother was at Cal Tech, that didn't go anywhere. Went to see Hair on stage, and that was kind of cool. But there was this big separation between '67, '68, and then '70, '71. Because the campus was still girls, the women had hours, you had to sign in and out of the dorm after seven o'clock at night or something, you had to be in the dorm at a certain time, so there were all of these traditional rules that I'm sure were in place in most small private schools across the country. And then '70, '71, it was all student head residents, and there were co-ed dorms. And I was a resident advisor, then head resident. And it was more the "Black is Beautiful" movement, Angela Davis was speaking. I took some Black History classes, not particularly interested in Asia, but my summer of '69, when we landed on the moon, and go, "Why don't I remember this?" And I go, "Oh, I was in that Ghana that summer."

And there is a program called Operation Crossroads Africa, and the minister who was head of it had come to speak. I called home and I said, "Mom, Dad, what do you think if I go to Africa this summer?" And later my dad said, "You could have heard your mom without the phone across the country," because she went, "Africa?" But I thought, I've saved the money, and I could pay for it myself, and it was an integrated work camp kind of program, so we had Canadians and American college students. Then there were Ghanaian and Ivorian students. And little did I know at that point that Africa, the continent, would become a focus for me, because my daughter lives there, she's married to a South African who were half Zulu. But that was the experience of living with that electricity, living with that running water, and they provided us a house and we were literally helping mix cement to build a school. And they had provided social workers, women who cook for us, and so we didn't have to go bargain for fish or figure out how to cook on a burner. And I just kind of realized, you know, all the conveniences we have in the world and in the United States, people live perfectly well without them. I mean, certainly, healthcare and sanitation might be some of the issues. The skies above were filled with stars, and not to romanticize it, because there was a bunch of racial tension. And at one point the five American Black African American students had kind of pulled away, everybody was, had been grouchy because of the food and had been sick at different times. And the one African American guy is that we're having a meeting just with the Africans. And then he looked at me and said, "Oh, you can come if you want." [Laughs] I chose not to, but it was an odd moment.

RB: Yeah, I mean, that's always fascinating, being Japanese American, being Asian American, somewhere in the middle and seeing how different people in different spaces interpret. Aside from that particular moment, do you have other examples in the time you spent in Africa, either that summer or it sounds like you spent a considerable amount of time there.

MM: I have, since in the last... Jesse's been there twelve years, I guess. No, just kindness of strangers. When I've traveled, it's just, we're in a lorry, in a truck, going into Accra, I'm holding onto the outside of the truck, we're bouncing along the road, and the Ghanaian woman sitting next to me just takes my hand and holds it, and I go, "Oh, this is interesting." And then this big branch goes by, and she knew it was coming, so she was just protecting me. So I think that's been one of the realizations of travel was how that kindness of strangers, you don't have to have the language. Easier if you do, but it just makes the difference if you're open to people and not too loud and not too insistent. It opens many doors.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

RB: So following college, how did you come back to this region? Did you come straight back to the Philadelphia region?

MM: I said to Mom and Dad, "You know, I'd like to go abroad," having had that experience in Ghana. And, "I think I want to go to Japan." My dad says, "Well, you don't have any Japanese," I thought, "Yeah." But the Quakers from the 1860s had a relationship, Philadelphia Quakers and women with Japan, with Tokyo, and the Friends School there. And at that point, there was a Quaker committee here in Philadelphia that was assigned to send two young American women to teach English conversation. And between the two of us, we were supposed to teach half the school each, six hundred kids, English conversation. [Laughs] So it was a ridiculous assignment. But anyway, so I went, and I learned to... well, that was '71 to '73, so I say that to anybody else, and that's like ancient years ago. But it was the experience of learning I'm never going to be Japanese. I don't have the depth of the language, I don't have the culture. I was going over with women's rights and why do these girls have to wear the uniforms of these roles, et cetera. Just that I didn't have the culture and the language. I appreciate the aesthetics, I could learn tea ceremony, but there was, the United States was home.

RB: In your time in Japan, were you able to connect with any distant family? Did you have any relations that were still alive in Japan?

MM: We did, but there was, again, without the language and working full time teaching, I didn't have big hunks of time. I did go down to Fukuoka twice. And before I left Japan in '73, I thought I should take a practice trip and see if I can land in another country and still feel adaptable enough. And there was a Quaker woman who had taught at Tokyo Friends School, and she was in Korea. So she welcomed me to come over and sort of set up, go visit here, here and here, and then I took the ferry. So this is maybe over a ten-day, two-week period, came back across from Pusan to Fukuoka, and our relative met us. And Keiko-san, Moriuchi, she was educated, she had enough English, some English, but she could simplify her language so I wasn't totally lost. So she and her husband lived, were very much working class. Life wasn't easy, I think. But she was off in the kitchen fixing supper, and so her husband is trying to entertain the guest. And I'm listening to him, and I'm going, "I can't understand anything he's saying, because he had a very strong Fukuoka dialect, accent." I don't think the whole time... he didn't understand that I look like I should know and understand, and the communication just wasn't happening. That was one of those instances of realizing, okay, I've been in a comfortable little nest within this Tokyo Friends School where people knew who I was, that my Japanese was limited, and that I was learning, they were sending me to Japanese school. I was never going to get fluent. [Laughs]

RB: So did you have any other memorable experiences in Japan around maybe cross-cultural misunderstandings or other moments where you either felt out of place or suddenly connected in some way?

MM: Good question. I think in general, there was just always this kindness within the culture. I can't remember any particular... I'll probably remember something afterwards, but not right off the bat.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

RB: Well, I guess, moving on from your time, what did you do after living in Japan and teaching at the...

MM: Friends School? I did this three and a half months travel, which was totally one of the best things I ever did in my life. I got to India on that trip for about three weeks. And again got to stay with people, traveled, got to the middle of India and thought, "I might never come here again in my life, I'd better to see the Taj Mahal," went on up to Agra. But it felt so different from having been in Japan and Southeast Asia. Partly because of the poverty, but also Hinduism was just very different from... so the second daughter was married to Siddharthja whose family is in New Delhi, India. So I have returned to India. And with WhatsApp, there's ongoing family connection to both South Africa, not daily, but several times a week, South Africa to India, so it makes my life outward looking in many ways.

RB: I can imagine it must. So did you start your family after your international time?

MM: Yeah. So I came back, and there was a boyfriend from Hanover, Pennsylvania. And so we kind of went back and forth between our two homes, mine and Moorestown with my parents. And Bruce said, "Well, why don't you just move over here?" And this was the situation that worried my parents. One, they didn't think you should live together without being married, and two, I was going into his hometown where his family had been for generations, and it's pretty much all white. There was one Chinese restaurant at the time, and one McDonald's at the time. It was 1974. And a friend of his was putting together a photography studio, and so I was down in the basement learning how to process black and white and color photos, and putting together wedding albums and worked for Jim for a year, and then decided, okay, enough of that. And anyway, eventually we got married in '78. His grandmother suggested we move into one of the family homes, which was a 1905 twenty-plus room mansion with a 40-foot tall marble floor. So we moved in, and that's where my two daughters were brought up. And there was this whole family network there, grandmother lived up on the hill and had the swimming pool. I mean, life was... and I made friends but through a lot, a fair amount of volunteer work. I was involved with Planned Parenthood and with the YWCA and the Literacy Council, which was one... and I ended up being president of different organizations. So I called myself a professional volunteer at that point, and I was also able to not get stretched as much as my daughters are now in terms of working and raising a family.

RB: You have two daughters?

MM: Two daughters.

RB: And what are their names and when were they born?

MM: So Jessica Kiku Revert was born in Hanover, January of 1981, and Trudy Sumiko Revert was born March 22nd of 1984, and so Jesse's the one in South Africa, and Trudy is in Queens, New York, and Jackson Heights, and moved to Washington to work for the Department of Labor as a policy advisor. And each of them have had... I think my grandparents who came over to this country, and I think the grandmothers probably only had about a sixth grade education, would be astonished that their great grandchildren would have PhDs and law degrees. Education was important from the beginning, because my paternal grandmother had said to her husband, "We have to stay in one place, we can't be migrant farmers. We have to stay in one place so Takashi can go to school." He ended up being the only child, but they made that commitment.

RB: What was it like raising biracial children in that time period?

MM: Well, it was fine for the first... it was fine. Because the family was known in the community, and initially, versus Mom, who was very taciturn, she said, "You know, you should get married." So we're getting the same message from both sets of parents. And Bruce said, "Well, we're not ready," and so we moved into an apartment on our own. And I had not known that he had said to his mother, "If Miyo is not welcome to family events, I'm not coming either." So he kind of pushed the issue. My kids grew up, we'd left the front door unlocked, the cars were unlocked. This was a town of thirty thousand people. And now it's well known for Utz potato chips and Snyder's. [Laughs] So it was a good place to bring his kids. They went to a small, I'd say, progressive, private school, which was kind of a one-woman schoolhouse, and she taught from K through eighth grade with the help of some mothers coming in. And we had a great time. There weren't grades, they called her Bobbi. Not even Miss Bobbi, it was Bobbi. And when my kids started doing homework from kindergarten, and then they, I had them shift over in eighth grade to the public school. At which point, Jesse, the older one, got asked, "Where are you from?" And she'd go, "Hanover." And they'd go, "Where were you born?" She goes, "Hanover Hospital." My family has been here ten generations," and we'd go, "Oh, you don't look like you're from Hanover." So Jesse had some of that, but Trudy never talked about it, but Jesse got some of that. They also know she was, knew they were the borough manager's daughter, so there was one time Jesse was a senior in high school. She's in her dad's jeep, and I don't know if the inspection was past or something, but she got pulled over. She came home from school that day and she said, "That was the most embarrassing day of my whole life." But they realized, "Oh, oh, you're the town manager's daughter." [Laughs] So small town growing up.

[Interruption]

RB: So I guess picking up on what we were just talking about, did your daughter spend a lot of time with your parents?

MM: Not a lot, it's a three-hour drive. And so there was, Christmas would always be in Hanover, but then a week later, it was New Year's, and we did Oshogatsu, and my mother would... by the time they were living at Medford Leas, we were making the whole range of Japanese New Year's for sixty people. Because it was family plus all the Nisei who were living over at Medford Leas. So we got pretty good at it. [Laughs] We also had a series of exchange students who lived with us. So my daughters had a Swedish sister, a Danish sister. Ritsuko was from Japan, she was the oddest of everybody, and an Australian young woman. So I was pretty, didn't realize, but pretty purposefully saying to my daughters, "There's more to the world than Hanover." Because Hanover you'd see in the newspaper, five generation photos. People just sort of stayed put, there were people in Hanover who had, would rarely go even to York, which was sixteen miles away, the Black people were over there. And there were, the Ku Klux Klan came through one time. It was a non-diverse area, it's become more so. So part of my volunteer work was with Literacy Council, and it was with international folks from all over the place. And I realize that also was part of my, being personally in touch with people from other countries. And when you had the experience of living abroad, and not knowing the language, you realize you're silenced, that you are not who you are unless you have, that's why groups, that first generation comes over from anywhere and they stick together, because they want to laugh, they want to share stuff. And I guess that's sort of the, maybe the transition of why I had all this volunteer experience doing ESL.

And about 2004, well, it was earlier than that, 1999. A friend of mine who had been coming over from York, she said, "Miyo, you should get a degree, you should get a master's degree in this." And she said, "I've been going down to American University," and she would go down, like for the summer, take her three kids down there, and she would, she blasted through her master's degree. I stretched it out for quite a few years, but it seemed pretty evident about 2003, '04, that we were heading for a divorce. So it would behoove me to get a degree. So that worked out, and I ended up then, because of this friend who was a mentor, she said, "You should apply for this fellowship. It's for people who have new master's degree," and he saw to work abroad for a year. And so they interviewed me and they said, "Is there a country you want to go to?" And I got, "Oh, we get a choice?" I go, "Thailand," and they said, "Why?" I said, "The people and the food." And that had been the experience I'd had thirty years before that. So that sort of opened the door to kind of redoing life again in a way of going, "Okay, I'm going to live abroad, and let's just see how the doors open. And returning, people would say, "What do you want?" And I go, "I want to live within an hour of Yuri and Tak, my parents. I want to study tea ceremony again, I want to dance, I want to live in the community with Quakers, and I guess I need a job," and it all happened. And so I ended up in Chestnut Hill, and the doors kept opening.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

RB: So I want to sort of jump around chronologically a little bit. Going back to Tak, I know that he was pretty involved in redress, and the way that I've heard it explained was that he had relationships with some of the politicians as a donor, and so was able to then ask for meetings, which usually someone like Grayce Uyehara...

MM: Well, Grayce told Tak... I mean, Grayce Uyehara and Tak Moriuchi were two similar people in terms of, kind of being out in public, having opinions, and pretty driven to get stuff done. So when Grayce is saying, "We're going to do this," and Tak was saying, "Okay." And he had the money to support a number of different things, including the redress, including the move from, on Shofuso here. And so I think we would see the commendations Dad would get, but I think we're younger adults, we're not paying attention to what our dad's doing. [Laughs] But he was generous.

RB: So I guess you were probably quite busy with your family in those years, active in that time period. Did you ever talk to either of your parents about redress or what was happening? Was it a topic that they shared with their kids?

MM: Not particularly. Okay, so go back to high school, junior year American History class, and there was a paragraph in the history book a hundred thousand Japanese Americans incarcerated. And I might have this wrong, but I think I remember coming downstairs and saying, "Mom, Dad, is this you?" And they go, "Yeah, what did you think we were talking about when we talked about camp?" I said, "We don't know." And I think from that point, my father was buying every single book that was about, anything about Japanese Americans and the internment, et cetera. So it was stunning news to me, as a high schooler, and the following year, for my final paper, it was on mass hysteria, and sort of a precursor to my interest in psychology. So Japanese Americans, we studied the Salem witch trials and then Germany before the Holocaust, and kind of big subjects, but I drew some parallels.

RB: So in that sense, there wasn't a whole lot of conversation up until that point?

MM: No, not really. We'd hear about camp, and the Nisei would get together and they'll go, "Oh, where did you live?" and they'd say, "Seattle," and they'd go, "Oh, do you know so-and-so?" Or, "What camp were they in?" So those were the two regular questions that people shared.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

RB: So I guess, pivoting back then to some of the topics related to your own life here in Philadelphia once you returned to the region, had you already known about Shofuso, or was this something that you...

MM: This is pretty new to me, and it only came through as I started studying under Taeko Shervin in King of Prussia, and this is the Urasenke School of ocha-no-yu. And they were doing monthly demonstrations here from May to September. So we'd come and we'd whisk and we'd scrub bowls and we'd come serve and try to make sure... I had not been asked to demonstrate until just this past year. I'm going, "You know, there's a shelf life to doing tea ceremony, and it's your knees, it's your hands, and your mind, and memorizing steps, many steps, and learning how to put on a kimono, and YouTube's very helpful." [Laughs]

RB: Do you remember the first time that you heard about Shofuso?

MM: Oh, I think I knew about it vaguely, because Mom was putting arrangements in here. She was Ikenobo master, she demonstrated at the Philadelphia Flower Show, so I knew about it, but I hadn't gotten to the point of kind of knowing every nook and cranny and staff people.

RB: So she was involved in the ikebana community and did some of the arrangements here?

MM: Yeah, she was president of... there was an ikebana group, and then more precisely, the Ikenobo School. And she taught, she went to Japan several times to take more training.

RB: Do you know, was she involved in that throughout your childhood, or was that something that she did only...

MM: She started doing that, once the kids went off to college, kind of thing. So I remember coming back one summer, and she was taking ikebana lessons, so I went, and I don't know what I was doing. And I thought, okay, I'm not getting anywhere with this, because I don't know when that was, but the teacher was Nihonjin. And so her language to me was in Japanese, and you know, little clearer explanations.

RB: And I think you mentioned earlier that Tak had helped to pay for the roof restoration?

MM: Well, he was involved with the fundraising.

RB: Do you know to what extent? Were they involved with the, there was a group called the Friends of the Japanese House and Garden?

MM: Probably. I think there were quite a few Nisei involved with that. So I remember as we were sorting out my mother's final stuff, she had secretarial training, and she had all of her different groups that she had been involved with, their minutes were all in a book, and I think I just handed over whatever it was to Shofuso. My parents were connected.

RB: So you became involved, though, in the space when you started to do the tea ceremony? In your opinion, you described this space as having been a Japanese and Japanese American community space, or was it something different?

MM: Just a Japanese space. Because I haven't been as involved with Japanese American groups, just individuals, like friends and family friends. So I considered it, you're stepping into Japan as I would when I would enter the tea room.

RB: Aside from the tea school, have you been involve with other Japanese or Japanese American organizations?

MM: Uh-uh, I have not. I've been solicited, and my sister Kiyo goes. I don't know if Fred does at all or not. So my brother traveled there just for like two weeks as a tourist right after college. And then my middle sister, who lives in Moorestown, Kiyo, was in Japan for, I think a year abroad. And Chiyo, the youngest, also did a year abroad from Mount Holyoke, and then she went back and lived there for nine years with her family. So she has the most in-depth knowledge, the business world is what was, all the stuff they did bringing up the kids, but they were living in a very nice, nice area of Tokyo. So I guess I'm the only one of the four of us who's ever had this... I don't want to say deeper interest, but continuing involvement with tea with, Nihongo with wearing kimono, and I just inherited a bunch of stuff Vicky Marutani, which was, her daughter said, "Can you use any of this?" I go, "Yeah."

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

RB: So I guess, thinking about the role that Japanese culture has played in your life as an adult, to what extent do you think that that's sort of shaped your identity or inspired you to do different things that you did, either as a volunteer or even in the places that you chose to travel or study?

MM: Well, I think one of the questions there had been about values and your values, and what did you learn from your parents. And as my parents got older, I realized their values are very Japanese because their parents were Nihonjin and were speaking to them in Japanese. So gaman, and working hard and not being too obnoxious aloud sort of thing, all these things. And so there's an intersection between Quaker values and Japanese cultural values. So there's respect for others, and in tea ceremony there's this sense of hospitality and taking care of who your guest is, and honoring them. And this aesthetic of the architecture of nature. And then with Quakers, it's seeing each person that you meet as having that of God in them, or that potential of having spirit in them. Peace and simplicity, integrity. I think maybe integrity is the one that's the strongest, that crosses over from both my parents and from Quakers. My dad had a very strong sense of your word is your bond, and honesty. Try to live up to that. [Laughs]

RB: Yeah, trying to think what else we haven't covered here. There were a lot of things that we asked specific questions. From your perspective, are there any things that we haven't covered that you'd like to spend some time talking about?

MM: Well, this is probably true of most religious groups and churches, the question of, are your children following your lead? I'm pretty sure my kids identify Quaker and have those values, even if they're not finding the time in their lives right now to attend meeting. But each of them with their weddings, especially Jessie's in South Africa, she said, "Well, Manga's parents aren't going to think we have, we're getting married unless there is a minister up in the front." And the friend who's a minister said, "It's Protestant, it's thirty minutes tops." Then we had a Quaker meeting for worship with intention to marriage, and everybody got it. People would speak, I'd bring the mike, they would say what was on their heart, and so we did that, I think with the Indian service, and no, I guess not, Trudy's was not the Indian craziness was different. [Laughs] I wonder if there's anything else I'd like to touch on.

RB: I guess just one thing, I know that you are still very involved with the Friends, maybe just talking a little bit about the role that that's playing in your life currently?

MM: Well, right now, I have recently, Quaker meetings are, there's no minister. There's a spectrum of Quakers, so there are some Quaker churches that had ministers. But the tradition in Philadelphia and East Coast area is that of unprogrammed Friends. And so committees do all the work, and I have, for the last four years, had the, I was the clerk of Care and Counsel, which is the pastoral care. So you kind of go, okay, so meals if somebody has been sick, rides to the doctor, but there's been a number of cases where it's, the intensity of assistance has been a lot. So I happily passed that on to somebody else, and what are the next doors to open? So there's been a group that put together an end of life issues handbook. And I'm going, we never, that got pulled together right before Covid, and we haven't had the opportunity to really share that with the meeting and to educate ourselves and be better accompaniers to families when someone dies or is very ill for a long time. So it's partly I'm old enough to do this now, maybe. But we're planning a trip to Japan in the fall, and somebody asked me, "What do you hope will come from that?" And I go, "Oh, okay, I need to think about that more deeply." It's not just seeing places I've been to before or new places or figuring out the hotels and all that stuff. And it's touching base again with some people who are dear and... just to refresh those tender precious friendships. One being with Steve's... it's the last of the Nitobe relatives, and she is in her seventies. So we will be visiting with her... so I'm up to day three hundred and thirty with my Duolingo to try to get my Japanese in better shape. I can understand a lot more than comes out grammatically correct.

RB: That's a tricky part about second languages.

MM: Yeah, it sure is.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.

<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.