<Begin Segment 2>

AF: I can go ahead. Do you want me to start on the questions?

KK: Sure. So Alison is going to steer tonight. And she's ready to do that. And I'm just here to help out or in whatever way. So anyway, glad to hear some of the stories.

AM: Okay. Well, I can talk, so that's not a problem. [Laughs]

AF: Great. [Laughs] And feel free to take your time answering any of these questions. Don't feel like you have to keep talking or anything. Yeah, take your time. I guess to start off, just for like a little background information, could you tell us about your family history? How and or why they came to America, their World War II experiences, and what it was like living in Denver, Colorado.

AM: Okay, so I'm a Sansei. My grandparents came over from Shikoku, and they came because there was just much more opportunity. If you weren't the firstborn child, then you really had no opportunity. So my grandparents came over. My grandma, she was really young, she was only about seventeen, and she was a "picture bride." She came from Iwakuni. And I feel so much empathy for her because she went to Utah. And in Utah, there was a tiny, tiny Japanese community. She was totally isolated out on a farm, sort of all by herself. There was no Japanese food, there's no Japanese community, even though now there is a Buddhist church there. But it was a very small, tiny community, and she didn't have the opportunity to learn English. She had twelve kids, so my mother was the oldest of twelve. She was the oldest daughter. So that was a big giant family. And then my father's side, he had five, they were a little bit more wealthy and they came over for business opportunities. They came to Tacoma. And I guess their parents had a restaurant, his parents had a restaurant, and it was getting pretty successful. The Japanese community was centered in Tacoma at the time. First wave of immigrants. But both of his parents died. So one of my aunties said, "Well, I thought we were going to be rich, but then they both died, so then we all had to go back to Japan." So they did. They were Kibei. So all the kids were sent back to Japan to Shikoku to a small village and then were raised there until after high school, and then they came. So my dad went to Broadway High School in Seattle, even though he finished high school in Japan, and he did that to learn English. So in Japan, he studied accounting, at Broadway High School, he studied accounting, and he was houseboy, probably for the rich people on First Hill. Yeah. So both my parents were interned out of Seattle and they were in Minidoka, and they were the first work released family because they had relatives in Denver. So my grandmother's family, my grandma and all my aunts and uncles, were in Denver after moving from Utah on the farm. She had to raise those twelve kids by herself. Her husband died when the youngest was two.

AF: Wow.

AM: So my grandma used to be a janitor, a commercial janitor, she used to bring all twelve kids, the middle kids would watch the babies, and the older kids would help her clean. So my whole family, we have a joke in my family, we're like clean freaks. [Laughs] We just have this legacy that we have to clean everything all the time.

AF: That's so funny, oh my goodness.

AM: That's to honor my grandma.

AF: Oh, that makes sense. [Laughs]

AM: So during World War II, Denver was the center of Japanese America. And I didn't actually realize that, that was before I was born. But so many of the incarceration camps were right around Denver, it was sort of a crossroads. So slowly, all of my relatives from California and from Seattle got to join my parents in Denver. They were work released. So it was strange that my parents, my dad picked beets because there was a labor shortage, and that's why they pulled the Japanese to Colorado. So he picked beets and my mom had a tiny little grocery store. But she was really popular because she had rations for sugar and rations for meat. So I think they had a good time during the war in Denver. Of course, Minidoka has totally terrible memories for my mother especially. So...

AF: Yeah, thank you.

AM: Yeah so I grew up in Denver after World War II, everybody left when they closed the camps. And what was left was a small Japanese American enclave. And it was probably about two thousand people and we knew everybody, everybody knew each other. And so it was a very tight-knit community. And I actually didn't leave the Japanese community until college, maybe even at the end of my undergrad. I hung around with Japanese Americans totally. There was a Buddhist church, there was a Methodist Church and that was it. So when I came to Seattle was amazing to me, there was a Presbyterian Japanese Church, and there were Catholic Japanese and I just didn't know that. I just thought we were Methodists or Buddhists and that was our only choice. [Laughs]

AF: Got it. That's crazy. Oh, my goodness. [Laughs]

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2020 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.