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RB: So you mentioned you were born here in Seabrook. What year was that?

MA: I was born here in 1953, and like, oh, well, there were probably, as I do the research, there were twenty-five hundred Japanese Americans that came here to Seabrook Farms in this area, about three hundred Japanese American families. And this was really at the invitation and offering by Mr. Charles F. Seabrook, who was the farmer in this area. And so his son, Jack Seabrook, approached the war department and asked if they could use Japanese Americans that were interned in these camps as laborers. So he was able to get approval from the government, and so he did a little recruitment and went to various camps and offered us new life after they were being released from the camps when the camps closed down in 1945. So my parents and their parents took this opportunity up to be one of the twenty-five hundred people that came to this small community, which in southern New Jersey is very rural. And it's unique because there were no Japanese Americans in this area. So I was born here, born and raised, went to school with fellow Japanese Americans. But one of the, I guess, not lessons, but my mother was adamant that I didn't bring out the fact that I was Japanese. And I remember her always saying, "Don't bring attention to yourself and try to blend in." So I really didn't think I was Japanese or Japanese American because I had Caucasian friends, I had African American friends, I had Puerto Rican friends. And in this area which was really an immigrant concept where a lot of people came in to work the farms for Mr. Seabrook, we had like a global village, like a Model U.N. if you will. And so it was not uncommon for us to have various ethnic friends from different communities, we would play together, our parents would work together, we would go to school together, and then we would have these international, if you will, festivals where we would have different types of food. So we would all kind of play together, we would go to school together, and it was not necessarily segregating that the Japanese Americans would stick together, the Puerto Ricans would stick together, or the Caucasians, we all kind of just blended in. And I never knew how rich that story was until probably after I graduated high school.

And then in 1990, I read a book by Charles Harrison that talked about this global community. And as I read it, I said, wow, I can really appreciate everything that he was saying, but if no one was familiar with this area, they would not believe how harmonious it was growing up here in Seabrook, New Jersey.

RB: It is a remarkable story, and when you think about what time period it was and the sort of prejudice that other minority groups and immigrants were facing in different parts of the country, and what a unique circumstance that it was for Seabrook to be this kind of warm and welcoming place.

MA: Yeah, I share this story often now as I get a chance to because I wish that experience would be able to be displayed now currently in our situation. And I fear that it would never replicate that sort of environment, unfortunately.

RB: As you were growing up, did you have any sense of how unique of a place that Seabrook was by comparison to other places in rural New Jersey or elsewhere?

MA: I did not. I did not really understand, I just knew that we didn't have a lot of money, but my friends, we all grew up together and they didn't have... we knew the affluent families around the town, the businessmen and women and their families. And we felt just privileged to be associated with them, but I never understood necessarily the status that our families or my friends had in this particular rural area. We did make maybe once a year trips to north Jersey, the area I live now, it's more affluent, or in Philadelphia, that was a big trip to go to have Chinese food in Philadelphia in Chinatown. So that was a once-a-year event, and that was quite a trip for us.

RB: Do you recall the name of the restaurant?

MA: I don't remember the name of the restaurant, but now that I live in Cherry Hill, which is right across the river, I do visit Chinatown often down on Ray Street. And I can point to the area, I said, "Yeah, I used to, when I was a child, go into that restaurant here." So it was very fond memories, and all our relatives would go, it was a big deal, and we would go down there to have Chinese food.

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