What was it like growing up half-Japanese in post-WWII America?
It was interesting—it was right after the war so there was a lot of hostility, still, towards the Japanese, and it was difficult, more so of course for my mother, because she looked so Japanese. We lived in a small town about sixty miles south of Pittsburgh and my mother insisted that we go to the city every two weeks to see people who looked like us, because in this small town, there was no one. So we would go to Chinatown, to the fish market. I remember standing there in line, we had all these bags of fish, we were just turning to go, and this fellow, he had on—I still remember this—he had on this red and black lumber jacket, and one of the sleeves of his jacket was pinned up. You could see he was missing his arm. And he looked at my mother and he spit at her, and he said, “Go back where you belong, Jap.” And my mother froze—she didn’t say a word, she walked really quickly out, we followed her like little ducklings. We got in the car, we drove sixty miles home, and we never said a wo
