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HH: Can you think of any specific practices, values, that you have? Your taste in art, religion, the way you decorate your home, that could be traced to your Japanese heritage?

HT: The question is, are there things in our life and our home that could be traced to Japanese heritage?

HH: Values and practices?

HT: Yes, I think so. Because in our home, although my wife is not, my wife's father is Japanese but her mother was Caucasian, but she did retain a good deal of Japanese culture also. And so in our home, we do have a good many Japanese paintings, dolls. We even have a Japanese teahouse, you might say, which is authentic Japanese made up of tatami floors and shoji doors, that I think you've seen. And a lot of our hakujin as well as Japanese visitors have remarked about the number of Japanese items in our house. We did try to teach our children some Japanese culture, but I don't think we were very successful, particularly in the way of speaking and reading Japanese. We tried to teach them Japanese when they were growing up in grade school, I even hired a Japanese student from University of Penn to come up to our house every Saturday morning to teach them with basic Japanese textbooks and so forth. But they didn't care for it very much. But after about a year, they gave it up completely. And I do recall that even when they were growing up, I used to sing Japanese songs to them. But they would put their hands over their ears, they just didn't like the sound of it. So I don't believe we were too successful in imbuing them with Japanese language or Japanese culture to any extent.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.