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LG: So, yeah, I guess, what was it like growing up? Do you have specific memories of your time in --

DM: Oh, yeah. I know, number one, I didn't like school. But during the summers, we used to just, I used to play marbles, hopscotch, jump rope, Pick Up Stix, we had very few things to play with. So we did a lot of improvising, played Kick the Can, hopscotch, we just drew in the dirt. Then we used to play a game where it was Toss the Ball Over the House, and if you caught it, you ran around and tried to hit people with it before they got around to the other side. I mean, it was very simple games, not elaborate Legos or anything like that. I mean, Kick the Can, you had a can.

LG: Were you mostly friends with other Japanese Americans?

DM: That was it. We all lived in Seabrook, that was it. You were isolated. So when we went to school, we were with Caucasians and Blacks, but when we went home, there were no whites or Blacks to play with. You were just like, you were back in camp, except there was no fence around it. So you played with your Japanese friends. Of course, I was, in camp I was too little so I don't remember a single friend from camp, but I do from here.

LG: Did you grow up speaking Japanese?

DM: No, never. So my Japanese is very poor. My husband was a "no-no," so he went into Tule Lake, and so he went to just Japanese school. So he was fluent in speech and writing, and so when he came here, he had to adjust to American school. So what they did was they put him down behind two grades, and the same thing with the sister who became my good friend, they were put down two grades. And to the day he died, he said when he would multiply, he would multiply in Japanese and transfer it to, translate it to English. But that amazed me. He says, "I still multiply in Japanese." And then his parents spoke Japanese, so he... my parents didn't. They were fluent in English. They spoke Japanese, but they were fluent in English. That was their first language, actually. So they encouraged us -- you know, they discouraged us. They figured if we didn't speak Japanese, people would think we were white. Amazingly enough, it didn't work. [Laughs] So we should have learned to speak Japanese. I kick myself now for not learning Japanese. It's wonderful to be bilingual.

LG: Growing up in the home or in the community, did you go to, did you celebrate any Japanese holidays, did you have cultural events?

DM: You know, they did. But being Christian, and my mother thinking that a lot of the events were Buddhist, she sort of frowned upon us participating. So she wouldn't, she didn't tell me I couldn't go, because it was out in the field. So, you know, anyone could go. So I would go, but I didn't participate as much as my friends whose parents were Issei and they were, they had kimonos, we never had kimonos. They had kimonos, their mothers would dress them all up and they would dance during the Obon festival, whereas I never participated. Because number one, I didn't have a kimono, and number two, my mother didn't encourage it, so I didn't. But now, because I look at it as a cultural thing, and culturally I am Japanese. So I let my children participate, and my grandchildren, and they love it. And now it's my great-granddaughter, she goes out and she does the dance with me. So now it's... this is where I said my mother was sort of straight and narrow, she couldn't be flexible. So anyway...

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