Nancy Ukai | Interview 1 | March 28, 2022

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Today is March 28, 2022. My name is Roger Eardley-Pryor, from the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. This is interview session number one with Nancy Ukai as a part of the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project. Nancy, it's great to see you today. How are you? UKAI: Fine, thank you. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. Can you tell me where you're located today? UKAI: I'm in Berkeley, California. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. I am up in Santa Rosa, California. We are recording over Zoom. To get things started, Nancy, could you tell me your full name, the date of your birth, and a little bit of the family that you were born into? UKAI: My name is Nancy Hana Ukai. I was born on September 17, 1954, in Berkeley, at Alta Bates Hospital, not many miles from where I'm sitting right now. And I'm the third generation of a Japanese immigrant family, and 00:01:00my Japanese immigrant grandparents came to this country and essentially settled in Oakland and Berkeley. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. What were the names of your parents? UKAI: My father was Henry Ukai. He was born in 1921 in Oakland. And my mother was Fumiko Takayanagi Ukai. She was born in Berkeley in 1921. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. And just to have an immediate family picture painted, the siblings that you have, what are their names and when were they born? UKAI: So my brother is Michael Robert Ukai. He was born in Berkeley in 1956. And my sister is Harriet Ukai, and she was born in 1958 in Berkeley. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. All right. It's cool that you've had this full circle, being born in Berkeley, having this extraordinary life that we'll talk about, and then coming back to Berkeley. I want to ask about language, because as part of the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project 00:02:00we're going to be talking about the experiences of your family, including being incarcerated in Utah during World War II. What terminology do you use to talk about that family experience? UKAI: That's a good question, because I grew up hearing the words "relocation," we were "evacuated," and we went to the "assembly center," we went to the "internment camp." And usually my parents just talked about "the camps." But I don't use "internment" anymore, because that's actually a word which refers to alien enemies who were imprisoned, and my parents were citizens, and my grandparents were permanent residents. So I use words like "incarceration," "camps," "concentration camps," "prison camps," and I only use "internment" as it relates to the Department of Justice camps for enemy aliens. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Around when do you remember that terminology changing for you? UKAI: Frankly, 00:03:00it sort of began in the seventies, when ethnic studies became more prevalent. But I think my own serious personal interrogation of those terms began when I got involved with the Topaz Museum narrative fight, and realized that the terminology they used was the WRA terminology, and their perspective, and it made me look more closely at the words they used and the words that should be used. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. Speaking of words and their meaning, can you share the meaning behind your name, your first name, Nancy? UKAI: Yes, so I love that name. At the time it was a common name, but actually it was given to me because my mother was taken in from the Topaz concentration camp by a University of Chicago family, in Chicago, and Harriet Platt, the wife of a geographer, Robert Platt, 00:04:00visited Topaz. And I don't know all the details but she sponsored my mother and a friend out of Topaz, Utah, and said, "Come to Chicago and stay with us." And so against the protests of the families in the neighborhood who didn't want Japanese Americans living in the block, and saying, "They're going to run amok and murder you at night, and we don't want them," the Platt family stood firm and took in my mother. And so my mother was so grateful that she named me, the firstborn, after Harriet and Robert Platt's daughter, Nancy, and my brother's middle name, Robert, is after Robert Platt, the geographer, and my sister Harriet is named after Harriet Platt. So I always felt very lucky to have a name that had a meaning and a purpose, and the Platt family had such an influence on my mother, and my father, too. It was during a difficult time in my parents' 00:05:00life, and it was about a kind family who helped my mother in her time of need. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's beautiful. Do you have any sense of what brought Harriet Platt to Topaz. Was she religious? Was she a member of the Friends, the Quakers? UKAI: I wish I knew more about Harriet, and actually her children are still alive, but she might have been involved with the Roosevelt administration in some way, and possibly was touring the camps, which is how she would have met my mother. And my mother was actually a lot of fun, and very animated, and I can see where someone would say, "Oh, she's fun. I like her. I'm going to sponsor her out." This is my speculation. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's great. Well, let's dive into some more of these family stories, and we'll bring the deeper family story up to the point of your mother being able to escape from Topaz, and then on into your early childhood beyond that. Start with paternal family, perhaps, the Ukai family. 00:06:00Where would you like to begin in telling some family stories of paternal ancestry, from your dad's side of the family? UKAI: Well, my paternal grandfather's name was Eiya Ukai, E-I-Y-A, and he was born, we believe, in 1857, and died in 1929. And so my father, who was born in 1921, was only eight years old, and my father was the youngest of eleven children, so he really didn't have a strong, I believe, relationship with his birth father or stepfather. And the only reason I know anything about Eiya, because he died in 1929 and I was born in 1954, is because of a photograph we have. And he married my grandmother, Tsuneko Mayama, and the two them lived in Oakland. They ran a nursery. They also had a supermarket, and they seemed to be pretty prosperous, because they had a very large home in West Oakland, with fireplaces and these French doors, and so on and so forth. 00:07:00So he married Tsuneko Mayama in 1903, and she's the one that I remember from that side of the family, because she lived a long life. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you know what brought Eiya to the United States? UKAI: I really don't, and I wish I did. I don't know, but I believe that Tsuneko, who was born in 1877 and died in 1961, I believe she was a picture bride, and she was from Nagano Prefecture, in a place called Mochizuki-mura. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yes, for that early Issei experience [being a picture bride] was a pretty common thing, wasn't it? UKAI: And they had eleven children -- and we couldn't even count them all; we think it's eleven -- and my father was the youngest. 00:08:00And so when you hear the family talk about family life, the span between the eldest, who was born, I believe, right soon around the time they got married, and my father, who was the youngest, there's a span of about eighteen years. And so by the time my father was sixteen, the family was doing pretty well. He didn't speak Japanese. The elder children had to speak Japanese in order to talk to their immigrant parents, and my dad never really learned to speak Japanese at all. He had one or two vocabulary words. One was oyu, which is hot water, which after dinner he would want his rice bowl filled with hot water and say to my mother, "Oyu," and we learned that as kids. Anyway, he was quite athletic and at the age of sixteen he had his own car, so that just shows you how well off they were, and basically how spoiled he was. He used to talk about how the football team would take a bus to practice and games 00:09:00and he would drive his own car. So, yes. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What stories did your dad tell you about growing up in West Oakland, in this big house with this big family? UKAI: You know, he really didn't talk about that, or I guess I should say I didn't ask. He did talk a lot about his football prowess. He was in the all-Oakland city team. He was named to the all-Oakland city team, not Japanese Americans but the whole city of Oakland, and so for a Japanese American that was very unusual. He was around six feet tall, so he was large, and he was very physical and very athletic. He got into trouble and scuffles a lot. So he went to about three high schools -- he kept getting transferred -- and as a result he knew everybody. And among the Japanese American community he was rather notorious, and he was good-looking and a lot of fun and kind of loud and boisterous, so he kind of broke the mold of being this kind of shy guy. 00:10:00And he was very street-smart, which was a characteristic which followed him through life, because later on he gambled, he fought, he boxed, he played football, and later on he became a gambler, and then he became a bookie who sets the odds and realized, hey, there's money here, and that's what later became his primary source of income, although his day job was as a grocery store owner in Oakland. And he did the grocery store job 365 days a year, selling produce and groceries. Christmas was the busiest day. So he was a hard worker, but being a bookmaker was where he could make money, which basically built the home my family had in the Berkeley Hills. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. Your dad sounds like a larger-than-life character, in some ways. UKAI: He really was, and he did what he wanted. That was kind of interesting as a child to 00:11:00observe, because he was loud, and made people laugh, and everybody knew him as Hank in the Japanese American community, but he also wasn't a doting father. [laughs] He did what he wanted, on his time and his agenda, and he would often say, "I make the money; your mother takes care of you, so if you have a problem you go to her." And they also had very separate social lives, where he would watch the games, and he would do the work, and my mother, who was very creative, was playing the guitar, and gardening, and cooking, and later on she became jewelry designer. And so they had, in kind of a typical Japanese fashion -- I'm talking about Japan -- kind of separate social lives, separate groups of friends. And so for us, as children, that was just the way we grew up. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You mentioned that your father's dad, your grandfather, Eiya, passed away 00:12:00when your dad was still pretty young. What kind of influence do you think that had in shaping his character? UKAI: Yes, so Eiya was my dad's father. He died in 1929, when my dad was eight, as I had already said. I didn't know Eiya, but I just wonder if that might have been the role model for him, which is having an older father who -- if you're the last of eleven and your dad's sixty-four when you die -- although maybe nowadays [laughs] that isn't so unusual, and back in the twenties, right, when people had children when they were younger, that would have been, I think, unusual. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, I think it's pretty unusual to have a sixty-four-year-old dad upon birth. [laughter] UKAI: And so he was really, I think, raised more by his siblings. Yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: In this big family, what happened, after Eiya passed away, to your grandmother? What happened in her life? UKAI: Okay, so then she remarried 00:13:00Keizo Hiramatsu, and let's see now. Keizo Hiramatsu was already in California. He was an Issei, an immigrant man. He was born in 1883 in Osaka, and he died in 1970 in San Leandro. He arrived in Seattle in 1907. I know this because my husband has done all of the genealogy here. I don't know how they met, but then they got married, Keizo and my grandmother, Tsune, and they went to Topaz together. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Well, tell me about that, then. So in 1941 to '42, your dad is about twenty, if he's born in 1921. Your dad's twenty, twenty-one years old, and this large family from West Oakland is told to go to prison, during World War 00:14:00II. What have you heard of that experience? UKAI: Unfortunately, I never really talked to my relatives about that, so a lot of it now is reconstructing that story. I should mention my father was already married to his first wife, Katherine Kinoshita so they lived in Topaz with a young child, Stephen, in a completely different part of the camp. I want to get this right: my dad was engaged to my mother, but they broke it off, and he married Katherine. Basically, he broke it off. And so, anyway, mom was in Topaz in a different block, in Block 31. I think he was I want to say Block 2. But anyway, they were in different parts of the camp. So that's one thing. And then dad and Katherine got divorced after the war, soon after the war. 00:15:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. So your dad was already married, with a child, at least had a child in Topaz, in camp. What was his trajectory after his high school football superstar years, just before camp? UKAI: Okay, right. So he actually graduated high school in Oakland -- gosh, I'm not even sure. He went to McClymonds. He went to Oakland Tech. I'm not sure which one he graduated from. But then he went to USF, University of San Francisco, on a football scholarship. And he used to talk about going to school there to play football, and even said, "I would buy my friends' textbooks for them," and stuff like that. The war interrupted it. He never went back to college, so he didn't finish. EARDLEY-PRYOR: He got yanked out of this Catholic school to go to this prison camp in the middle of Utah. UKAI: Right. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. But at that point it sounds like he was married, in college. UKAI: Yeah, I don't have that date at my fingertips, 00:16:00but he did go to camp with Katherine, and also they had a child who died at childbirth at Topaz, and we just know that that child is listed in the list of the dead at Topaz, and died at childbirth, but, for example, we don't know: was it cremated? Was the baby buried? Well, it wasn't buried because no one was buried at Topaz, but there's a few mysteries which we don't know. And then he had a daughter named Suzanne, who I've never met, and who lives in the area, I believe in Redwood City. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Fascinating. The lives people live. UKAI: Who'd be a little older than me, and would have been born right around the time that Katherine and my father divorced. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Okay. Wow. You also hinted that your mother and father knew each other. They were engaged briefly before camp? 00:17:00UKAI: Yes, they dated, and my mother went to Berkeley High School, and my father was in Oakland, and everybody knew Hank. I mean, that was just a given. They were going to get married, and they had even bought a few appliances, so they were kind of far along. And then I, frankly, don't know the details, but that didn't happen. They broke up. My father married Katherine. Katherine and he divorced, and then dad and my mother got married, I want to say in 1947. I'll have to check the date for sure. And he was also in the Merchant Marines. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Your dad? UKAI: Yeah. So he was sailing to Japan, and bringing back porcelain, which I still have some of it to this day. My mother always said he was good at choosing porcelain; he had an artistic eye. He also drove a bus after -- Gosh, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to get these dates correct, but I know he drove a bus in Hawaii. He played 00:18:00pro football. There wasn't an NFL, but he was paid to play football in Hawaii for a little while. And I just remember him saying, "I drove a bus." And he said, "Some of the ladies wouldn't get on the bus when they saw me coming because they thought I drove too recklessly." Anyway, that was my father. [laughter] EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's great. I want to come back to Topaz camp, and ask: how do you think your father and his broader family experience of camp shaped the rest of their lives? UKAI: Of course every person, especially depending on their age and their status -- were they an immigrant? were they a U.S. citizen? -- were affected differently. So my father's sisters, Eleanor and Florence, who were the largest influence in my life on the paternal side of the family, stayed in the camps until they closed, because they stayed with their immigrant parents. 00:19:00They were so hardworking, and were quite different people, but they were both unmarried and lived together until Florence died. My father, on the other hand, was married at Topaz with a young child, and when I asked my father once, "What was camp like?" He said, "I made a lot of money. I ran the poker games." And I saw his National Archive file, and the WRA administrator at Topaz said something like "Henry Ukai walks in the office as if he owns the place, and he's confident." And a friend of mine said, "What did you think about that characterization? Were they criticizing him for having too much agency?" And I said, "No, that's the way he was. He walked into places and kind of took over, so I thought it was actually accurate." 00:20:00But at any rate, he also told us that he went to Idaho to top sugar beets, and you could get indefinite leave, get permission to go help fill the labor shortage in other states, and he said that he also got leave to go to Chicago to work in a cannery. So I heard more about him leaving camp, actually, than being in camp, although later people told me at Tanforan, which was the first detention camp in San Bruno, they said he boxed with Jack Soo -- Goro Suzuki, the actor. So he did a lot of things. He did what he wanted. And I have to find out exactly when he left, but he didn't talk about camp. And then, yet, my impression was that he was out and about, and going out of the camp, and saying, "Oh, I made money in the poker games. There was a lot of gambling." I'm sure he did. And yet, when my daughter once asked him for a report where was he on Pearl Harbor, 00:21:00he started to weep, and he said a bread driver came into the grocery store and called him a dirty Jap. So obviously there are complex stories there. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. And that he began to tear up when your daughter asked him about that? UKAI: Yeah. He was older by then. We were on a break. We were on a vacation, so he was away from his games. We took him to Hawaii because he hadn't been in decades, and he said, "Oh, I don't want to go." This particular resort doesn't allow radios or televisions. And he said, "I don't want to go. I don't want to be away from my games." And we got there and he loved it, and there was an opportunity to talk, and that's when my daughter talked to him. So I think he was in a period of reflecting, because he used to say, "Why did I drive my car to the football games? I was so selfish." He was beginning to reflect on his own life, and how maybe in doing things that he wanted to do he was ignoring the needs of others. 00:22:00And it affected my brother a lot. I think my brother, who was a middle child, was looking for a kind of male role model who he could look up to, and my father was -- I want to say he wasn't a doting father. He just did what he wanted. And so the girls in the family were very supported by my mother, but I think for a young boy, he probably wants to have a father figure, and I feel like my father wasn't really that person. RUSSELL: [from off screen] He got out February '44 to Chicago. UKAI: Oh, okay. So, my father left February '44 to Chicago. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's great. Was that [your husband] Jim? UKAI: Yes. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Hi, Jim. [laughs] UKAI: That's in the final accountability roster. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, great, thank you. That's great to have this genealogy research and deep history to know these stories. You'd mentioned these two sisters of your father Hank 00:23:00who were important, you said, to you and your sense of that family. Tell me a little bit more what you mean by that. UKAI: Well, my Aunt Eleanor and Aunt Florence were both older sisters, of course, and they were kind of the anchor for family gatherings, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, and kind of provided those kinds of times that you think of later as, oh, this is what we do; this is our family tradition. And they have this large family home in West Oakland where we would gather, and it was also very near the church which I attended as a child, called West Tenth Methodist Church. And it was an all Japanese American church, and it was probably blocks away from my aunt's home. So we would go to church, the children, on Sunday, and then go to my aunt's home, Eleanor and Florence, after church, and have lunch and watch Shirley Temple 00:24:00and, I don't know, Mickey Mouse, and it was a kind of comforting space, actually. And then the church turns out to be a really interesting community spot, which I hadn't thought about at the time, but there were Issei, first generation, Nisei, my parents' generation, and Sansei there. And they would have services in Japanese for the immigrant generation, which I didn't understand, and then they would have the service in English after that. And there were a lot of church members who now, actually, ended up becoming strong social justice figures, like the attorney Don Tamaki, who led the coram nobis case, the Korematsu case, and others, and then actually other Topaz people who I'm now engaged with, not always in harmonious ways. [laughs] EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, interesting, attended that same church that you attended as a young girl? UKAI: Yeah. So, in fact, one of the people 00:25:00-- we'll get into this later -- who's on the Topaz Museum Board, and is defending them, went to that church. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Interesting. Things all come full circle some ways, don't they? UKAI: Yes. EARDLEY-PRYOR: All right, well, after camp also it sounds like the family was able to retain the home. What happened to family businesses that had created this success to allow this home and this lifestyle that your father had? UKAI: There are photographs of, first of all, the Eiya Ukai family standing on large properties with greenhouses on them, and then later we know that they had grocery stores, and there's one photograph of a very large grocery store in Berkeley, on Solano Avenue, but I really don't know, and I didn't ask. But I don't think they were able to keep them, because when they came back the immigrants were too old to work, and then the children all went in 00:26:00kind of different directions. So my Aunt Eleanor worked for the Safeway chain for decades, and she ended up working, I believe, in the accounting office or something like that, and was always just a very reliable worker. They offered her a promotion but she just wanted to keep doing what she did. And my other aunt, Florence, worked in the Oakland Coroner's Office, and she would type up the reports. So she just was a barrel of laughs, because she would come home on the bus or something and say, "Well -- " She would talk about how many bodies, reports they had typed up. She was just a character. [laughs] EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. It's interesting that that other aunt also worked in the grocery industry that her family had been a part of, and your dad becomes a part of. UKAI: That's a really good point, because my father had a small grocery store, and then my brother and sister worked in Safeway as part-time jobs, and I guess it's something you know, 00:27:00and you know you're good at it. And so I did not like that business, so I actually never even did that as a part-time job, but my brother and sister did. And they criticized me for not doing it, actually. EARDLEY-PRYOR: There was some family pressure there. Is now a reasonable time for us to transition to some maternal family stories? UKAI: Sure. EARDLEY-PRYOR: And then we'll come up to the point where your mother and father get together? All right, then where would you like to begin telling stories about your maternal family, your mom's side of the family? UKAI: Because I was so close to my mother, and also my maternal grandparents lived in Berkeley, we saw them a lot. We saw them every New Year's for example, so Christmas and Thanksgiving were spent with my father's sisters, Eleanor and Florence, and New Year's was always spent with my mother's father, and his name was Tokutaro Takayanagi, and 00:28:00he was born in 1888 in Kambara, south of Tokyo, in Shizuoka Prefecture. He died in 1968, and he came to the U.S. in the early 1900s around the time of the San Francisco earthquake. But he came up through Mexico, and he crossed over to California illegally, although that was the family story, and, in fact, my mother -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, I couldn't hear. I think Jim said something [off camera], but I didn't catch what he had to share. UKAI: Oh, my husband Jim said that actually he came in through Seattle, so I don't know if this means he was traveling back and forth and came through different spots -- because my mother definitely would talk about my grandfather coming up through Mexico, which is why he used to make Mexican food when she was growing up. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's great. Do you have any sense of what brought him to the United States? UKAI: I was told that he was a younger person in the family, and just was curious, had wanderlust, 00:29:00and -- yeah, it's rather vague, actually. EARDLEY-PRYOR: But that he eventually settled in the Bay Area shortly after the 1906 earthquake? UKAI: Yes, yeah, and was here ever after. And let's see now: he married my grandmother Hide Ishikawa as a picture bride, and -- let's see now. Can we pause for just one second? EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, of course. [pause in audio] All right, Nancy, you were telling me about your maternal family, and your grandfather, Tokutaro Takayanagi, and how he met and married Hide Ishikawa in the early teens, or in the mid-teens. UKAI: Right. So I never met her, but she was my mother's birth mother, and her name was Hide 00:30:00Ishikawa. She was born in 1896. She died in 1935. And she married Tokutaro at age twenty-three in Japan, in Kambara, Shizuoka, in 1917. And she was a picture bride. Now, they met in Japan but we think that they were introduced, probably by family members or somebody in the same area. She arrived in San Francisco in 1918, and, for the record, she was from Fuji-gun, Yoshinaga-mura, Unaiga-fuchi. So, at any rate, when she came to Berkeley, my grandfather apparently was doing some work as a shoe repairman, and she said, "Nope, that's not going to work, because you work with leather and my family in Japan will think you're in the untouchable class." So, apparently, then he changed his work into the flower growing business, and he ran a cut flower nursery, 00:31:00and leased lots in what's called the Berkeley flats. It's near the Bay, on the East Bay side, and grew flowers, and sold them. When I talked to my mother, she said, "We would have cut flowers on the table, and then people would come and buy them." And one particular memory I have is she said there was this very wealthy lady from some part of probably North Berkeley who would be driven by her chauffeur in a car and bought flowers, and she took a liking to my mother. And this all came about because when my mother was passing away of cancer I said, "Mom, what's your first memory of color?" Because she was an artist, and had such a great artistic sensibility. And she said, "It really was from this wealthy lady who used to be a customer, and she took me to her house, and she showed me this beautiful blue velvet cape." And the lady said to her, "When you 00:32:00graduate, I want to put you through college." And my mother's family was too poor to consider something like that, and mom said she just held that as a special dream, but then when the lady died -- I don't know what happened, but it never came to pass. So my mother said, "That probably was the first time I felt a mistrust of white people." And I guess that's why the Harriet Platt story was important to her, because Harriet Platt was an example of a white person who really was a humanitarian, and took care of my mother [and many others, such as European refugees, during the same period in the same house in Chicago]. But, at any rate, my mother's family had these flower plots where they grew their flowers, and there's pictures of the family, for example, at Taka Nursery, a big sign in front of their property, and there's pictures of the family standing in these lots of flowers. 00:33:00And now that area, there's an Apple store. It's a very gentrified, kind of fancy neighborhood of Berkeley -- I mean "fancy" in the sense that it's expensive -- and it's right near the Bay, right near the ramp to the Bay Bridge. But I remember my mother saying, "Oh, we were so poor at Christmas." Her father didn't have money to buy them anything, and she said Toddy, her younger brother, would wrap up a pair of shoes in a box, and she would wrap up something they already had, just so that they would have something to open on Christmas morning. And there are pictures of her -- and you'll see here -- and she's wearing a dress that looks like it's made out of upholstery material, and then you'll see her in a picture two or three years later, and she's wearing the same dress but now it's up to her knees, whereas the other one, it was down to her ankles. So she didn't talk about being poor like being a victim and we didn't have enough, but they definitely had a hard time. And I'm so grateful to my mother because she always made sure that we children 00:34:00-- Nancy, Michael, and Harriet -- had a wonderful Christmas. She wasn't religious, but she just was a very loving, generous person, who always tried to make our life great. And she was a great cook, very creative, had tons of energy, made lots of friends. And so when I think about her having no holidays to speak of, and having a difficult time in camp, and then having this marriage with my father, which was postponed, she had a lot of resilience. Oh, she lost an eye when she had my younger sister, because she had a detached retina, and the doctor said, "You can either keep your eye or you can keep the baby," so she kept the baby. But as a result, from 1958 for the rest of her life she only had one eye, but we never, ever, ever thought of her as someone who was disabled. And, in fact, even when she had cancer the doctor said, "Any other medical issues?" 00:35:00And later she said, "Oh, I forgot to tell him I only have the sight of one eye," because looking at her you didn't see that. But she was definitely an empowered, very energetic person who didn't give us a sense of feeling sorry for herself at all. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow, what clear memories. UKAI: So, at any rate, Hide was her mother, and tragically, in 1935, my mother and her mother and Toddy, the younger brother, were on a trip to Japan to the family village in Shizuoka, and Hide killed herself, and I believe she hung herself. And my mother was only thirteen years old. Her mother was only thirty-nine. I think she was very unhappy in the marriage, and I think the in-laws were being mean to her. And my mother always told me that the night her mother died, her mother came to her, she thought, in a dream and said, "Fumi, come with me." And my mother 00:36:00said, "No, no." And then the next morning, when the relatives woke my mother up and said, "Your mother died," and my mother said, "Yes, I know," because she'd had this dream or whatever, the relatives said, "Oh, you're so fresh. How can you say that?" So my mother always had this kind of sensitivity or openness to what people might call, I don't know, extrasensory perception, or -- she was just open to things, and I think that certainly influenced me. EARDLEY-PRYOR: In what way? UKAI: Believing that there are things outside of what you can tangibly feel and see, and also trusting your intuition, not just saying, "Oh, that can't be." So I definitely know that my mother had that very strong sense of spirituality and connection, and messages from unconventional places, [laughs] you might say. 00:37:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: Fascinating. That story about your mother -- of being in Japan as a teenager and her mother killing herself on this trip, that had to leave a pretty powerful impression on your mom. UKAI: Yes, because she then became the only female in the family. And so not only was she an older sister to my Uncle Toddy, who was younger than her, but she kind of became the quote-unquote mother. She cooked a lot. She became very close to both of her brothers: my uncle Tets, her older brother. And she just did a lot. She did a lot. She was very creative. And then my grandfather himself was really very curious. He was smart. He collected rocks. He hybridized plants. So when the war came, he lost all of his scientific experiments, and I don't know how but UC Berkeley professors found out about him as being this citizen scientist, 00:38:00and they used to come down and visit him and see what he was up to, because he was this Japanese immigrant who was kind of hybridizing plants, and very systematic. And my mother wrote in her written testimony that she submitted to the Redress Commission that my grandfather lost all of his experiments. So I have this image of this Berkeley immigrant family in a neighborhood which is now quite gentrified, or filled with businesses, but there were Finnish families; there were Italian American families. There weren't that many Japanese American families, but I have this image of it being quite a lively immigrant neighborhood. They had a Japanese ofuro, a soaking tub, in the backyard, which my grandfather made, and I believe it was some kind of metal, and then it had a wooden kind of floating grate in the bottom. So you would climb in, and then there would be a gas burner underneath the metal barrel-shaped bathtub to heat up the water. And my mother said you would 00:39:00have to step in and kind of stay on this wooden grate. You'd step on it, because it would sink down, right, in the water, and then not touch the sides, because then you'd get burned by the metal. Anyway, I wish I had that bath, [laughs] but you can imagine how the Japanese were trying to make do and carry over some of these traditional things, like soaking baths, right? Now we have that culture in mainstream America with soaking tubs, right? But anyway, lots of -- So my grandfather was quite handy. He did the electric and he did the plumbing. He did gardening. He did hybridizing experiments. There were Ohlone artifacts that my mother said we found in the ground, like a mortar and pestle. So it was just kind of a time when I feel there was a lot of discovery, experimentation, discrimination, but a family who tried to make do and sell these flowers. 00:40:00And, in fact, my grandfather apparently told my uncle Tetsuo, "You be a plumber. You'll make more money." So he was one of the rare immigrants who didn't emphasize education, because you always hear about Japanese Americans emphasizing education, and he felt there was so much discrimination that his boys ought to not go to college. So when my family went to Tanforan, and they were sent to the San Bruno Racetrack, my uncle Tets said, "I went to go live in the barrack with my college friends, who I missed, because I was working but I wasn't able to go to UC Berkeley like they did." Anyway. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Fascinating. Let me pause, because we've mentioned your mother and her brothers. Can you just share, again, what their names are, and around when they were born? UKAI: Oh, right. Yeah, I'm sorry I didn't do that. So, Tetsuo Takayanagi was her older brother, and he was born 00:41:00in 1918. My mother, Fumiko Takayanagi was born in 1921, and then Tadao -- we called him Toddy, T-O-D-D-Y -- Toddy Takayanagi was born in 1925. So there were three children. EARDLEY-PRYOR: And you said that Toddy, your mom's younger brother, was with her in Japan when their mother committed suicide there? UKAI: Yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: And also being able to travel, though, back to Japan. That was a part of your mother's youth, to visit family in Japan? UKAI: Yes. At one time, yes. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was the trajectory of the family? You said your mother became the caretaker in the wake of her mother's suicide. What then became of the family life, for the rest of the family, in the wake of losing their mother? I guess what I'm asking is, how do you think that shaped the family dynamic and the experience of the siblings? 00:42:00UKAI: Well, I think the siblings became very close-knit, and my mother spoke fluent Japanese. I'm not sure how good the Japanese was of my two uncles, but this was a case where the immigrant parents' English wasn't necessarily that fluent, and the children have to be learning English at school and assimilating, and they speak enough Japanese to communicate with their parents, but maybe aren't literate, so they're not necessarily reading and writing. My mother was definitely fluent in spoken, because she talked with her immigrant father a lot, and I'm sure my uncles must have been somewhat fluent, enough to just kind of communicate at a basic level, but I think my mother's Japanese was the best, and so I really think she became kind of an anchor of the family. That's my impression. And I know that her brothers relied on her for advice, 00:43:00and so my uncle Tets later ended up in Boston, and he was writing letters to her quite frequently, and then her younger brother Toddy used to always ask her for advice. To the extent that his wife later got a little jealous, because she didn't understand why my mother was always my uncle's confidant, and I think that was just from childhood. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, to have to survive through all of that together. UKAI: Yeah. So then my grandfather remarried, and he married Ito Takayanagi -- or her name was Ito Takagi -- and she's the grandmother who I knew, because I was born in 1954. EARDLEY-PRYOR: For both of your grandparents, you had mentioned your dad didn't really speak much Japanese. Your mother was fluent in Japanese in order to talk to her father, her mother, and then her stepmother. 00:44:00What was your experience as a little girl with these older relatives who only mostly spoke Japanese? UKAI: Yeah. I've thought about that, because when I was in elementary school, because I didn't speak Japanese, and they didn't really speak English, we didn't communicate, and there would always be these [laughs] older people sitting on the sofa, or as a kid you just couldn't joke with them, talk with them. And my grandfather on my paternal side used to go fishing, so I always remembered my Aunt Eleanor would always take Keizo fishing. But I used to remember wishing that I had a grandmother like the kids in my school did. There was a drawing of a white grandmother in a rocking chair, with white hair and glasses, and she's reading a story to her grandchildren, and I remember thinking, I wish I had that. 00:45:00But that's, I'm sure, very typical, or maybe -- I don't know. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You had also mentioned how you imagined this dynamic environment in Berkeley in the prewar period, in this early twentieth century period, with these various immigrant families making their living in Berkeley, and your family being a part of that, your mother's family. But also, it's the United States and it's a racist, white-dominant society. And so before camp, before that very significant moment, what are any stories you've heard about them just simply trying to get by in this American world, particularly around racial discrimination? UKAI: I think that a lot of things were just assumed: that the immigrants couldn't buy land; they couldn't naturalize; 00:46:00they couldn't vote, so they didn't have a political voice. And one thing I do remember my mother saying that my grandfather used to say, "We're going to all be sent to camp," and my mother said, "Oh, no. You might be, but I'm a citizen." And he said, "Yeah, well, you'll see." And she said later when, of course, everybody was rounded up and sent to the camps -- he said, "See?" And ever after he did not like Roosevelt, and he didn't like the Democrats. And so, although my mother was a Democrat, she said my grandfather did naturalize in 1955, but she said he always hated the Democrats because of what Roosevelt did. EARDLEY-PRYOR: When the camps were created and families were sent in 1942, what was going on in your mother's life? 00:47:00UKAI: So my mother -- and I'm kind of reconstructing this -- because she had broken up with my father -- I'm saying "because"; she always just told me, "I was in art school in Los Angeles," and she was definitely interested in art, and very artistic, but she was in art school. And then when it became clear that everyone was going to be rounded up and shipped off, although the official orders hadn't come down yet, she took a train up to Berkeley from Los Angeles, and she kept for the rest of her life the -- what is it called -- Alien Enemy Permit to Travel, in which she's fingerprinted. And, of course, she was a citizen, but at any rate she went up to Berkeley so the family would not be sent to different camps. And she said she just remembers talking to her father about the situation, because north of University Avenue was off-limits 00:48:00to Japanese immigrants, Japanese and Italians and Germans, and south of University was not. So she said that her father would worry about whether he would be caught on the wrong side of the line after the curfew hour, although the Italian Americans could blend in, and so they weren't working under the same restrictions. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. So your mother, who, by your account, was kind of the mother figure in some ways for her brothers as well, returns to Berkeley so that the family can stay together. And then you mentioned Tanforan. Any experiences that your mother shared about her transition to this assembly center, and then being sent to camp in Utah? UKAI: Well, one story that she told was that -- and she said this in the written testimony she supplied to the Redress Commission, although she wasn't part of the 750 people who formally testified 00:49:00-- was that when they were all packing to go, she said my grandfather packed up this box, very carefully, and she thought it was, oh, treats or tools or something -- she didn't know. And she said when they got to camp they opened it up and it was filled with eucalyptus leaves. And she said, "You fool, why did you waste this precious space on this?" And she said he told her, "I thought we may never go back to Berkeley," and he loved the fragrance of the eucalyptus leaves, and they reminded him of the Berkeley that he loved. And so she said, "I wished I had directed my anger at the U.S. government and not my father, who didn't know if he'd ever go back to this place that he loved so much." EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. That's a touching story. 00:50:00You told a little bit the story about the Platt family, and your mother being able to escape from Topaz once there. Did she ever tell you anything about her experience in getting out of camp and getting to Chicago? What else happened to her during the war? UKAI: Yes, because she worked as a housemaid for a Salt Lake City socialite. In other words, she was able to get out of camp. And she would regale us with stories about this very funny, lovely, wealthy woman, who would breeze in and out, and my mother would take care of the baby with her friend. And I am so upset because I didn't write down the name, and I would just hear these stories. And eventually the woman wanted to hire my mother as the permanent nursemaid, but the condition was that my mother had to become a Latter Day Saint member, Mormon, and my mother said no, and so then the family waited for a Japanese American 00:51:00from Heart Mountain, Wyoming to come and fill that position. But my mother was a storyteller. I mean, she had wonderful stories, and I wished I had been paying more attention. There was a wonderful letter that my uncle Tets, who later became an architect, writes to my uncle Toddy, who was working in Salt Lake City at the Hotel Utah, and he's drawn these wonderful pictures of liquor bottles, different shapes, and saying, "When you come in, bring some back because I want to make lamps." So my uncle was already kind of making things later on, and he made sketches. He took art classes and painted when he was at Tanforan, the camp before Topaz. So I was in the Japanese American Museum of San Jose one day, and I said, oh my gosh, that painting which has this kind of flattish aspect, like a Diego Rivera, that period, and it said "Taka," and I said, "Oh my gosh, that's how he signed his name." 00:52:00And I asked him about it. He said, "Oh, yeah, I painted that in Tanforan, in a class with Miné Okubo," the artist who did the graphic novel Citizen 13660. So there's just so many stories I wished I'd asked about more. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow, that's fascinating. So your uncle, in some ways, who became this architect, and -- we'll get into it later -- helped design your family home that you grew up in, was taking classes as part of the Topaz Art School? UKAI: Yes. Well, definitely at Tanforan, for sure, because that's where he made the painting at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. And then, meanwhile, he was always making these wonderful drawings, and there's cards, and when he was in the military, in the occupation in Tokyo, he was drawing sketches for the local newsletters. He was quite talented. So, actually, the war, though, really scattered the family, because my mother went to Chicago. She later went to the University 00:53:00-- Excuse me. She worked at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., through an introduction of Dr. Platt in Chicago. So she ended up working in the Cartography Department and being interviewed by the people who said, in her words, "I felt like I was being interviewed by the Gestapo, because they were asking me personal questions about 'There's a photograph of the Emperor on your home in Berkeley. What do you have to say about that?'" So she was surprised, number one, they knew this about the home; and then, secondly, what are they doing? This is my father's picture, and he's a citizen of Japan. And they said, "Your brother, Toddy, said, 'To hell with this damn country.'" And she said in her interview, "I can't be responsible for my brother's statements." At any rate, she ended up working at the Library of Congress. She met other Japanese Americans who had fled there -- Tets, her brother, farmed with my grandfather in Virginia. Toddy and Tets both joined 00:54:00the Military Intelligence Service, which sent Tets to Japan with MacArthur's occupation, where he was selected to shave Tojo, and Toddy was sent to Burma with the OSS, which was a predecessor of the CIA. So anyway, my uncle Tets ended staying in Boston, where he got a job, and never ended up coming back to Berkeley, and then my uncle Toddy ended up coming back to Berkeley. Funny: just briefly, about my uncle, who was like my mother, kind of made a lot of friends, very artistic, and he, when he was in the MIS, was apparently looking at an art book in Tokyo, and his supervisor said, "You really like those things, don't you? What are you going to do after you get out of here?" And my uncle said, "I don't know." And his superior said, "Why don't you go to the Illinois Institute of Technology? That's where I went." He helped Tets get in there, and so Tets started to study industrial design, and who was there at the time as the famous Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe. 00:55:00So Mies van der Rohe ended up leaving for Harvard, and he took his students, including my uncle, with him, so my uncle ended up getting his MA in architecture at Harvard, and then getting a job with the company Hugh Stubbins, and staying on the East Coast for the rest of his life. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. [laughs] That's a wild story. What was the story about shaving Tojo? UKAI: Oh, so apparently when Tojo was a prisoner he was shaved, and Tojo did not want a white soldier shaving him, so he said, "I'll take him," and so that was my uncle Tets, and that's the story we have. Yeah, so my uncle ended up becoming an architect. My mother hated the grocery store. My mother had later on became a designer of necklaces, and then her younger brother Toddy worked in a plastic firm, where he created 00:56:00plastic objects. So everybody did these kinds of work, working with design or art. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, such an artistic family. UKAI: And my grandfather was that way, very handy, creative, problem solver. Yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Later in life you do research in the National Archives about the experience of your family and others, particularly at Topaz. What was that experience like for you, knowing that that's where your mother was during that period, or right after? UKAI: Well, it just opened up a whole new book because one thing the government did was collect records on people, and also they had these data sheets, and the loyalty questionnaire. And so it's pretty fascinating to look at the people in your family and their life at that moment, as seen by the government through their documents, and I actually got more interested in James Wakasa, which we'll talk about later, because he had been murdered at Topaz, shot by a guard, and that's one thing my mother 00:57:00did talk about when I was a child. So it was my first "memory," quote-unquote, of Topaz, even though I was born in 1954, nine years after the war, and I just became very immersed in that research, and to the exclusion, actually, of researching my own family. My husband, being a genealogist, knows actually more about my Japanese American ancestors than I do. Yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Fascinating. But for me to put these pieces together: James Wakasa's murder happens in April of '43, and your mother has a memory of being there for that. UKAI: Yes, and he was in Block 36, and she was in Block 31. And these blocks are really far apart. Nevertheless, the whole camp was in an uproar, and I just have this vivid memory of her saying at dinner one night in our house on Shasta Road in Berkeley, "They didn't have to kill him; 00:58:00he was deaf." And I just remember -- I must have been in elementary school -- thinking, why is her face turning red? Why is she so emotional? And she was a very animated person, but she was very serious and very angry. And that memory is just burned into my childhood memory, because it clearly meant a lot to her. And she didn't talk about it a lot, but you have, as a child, a Sansei, my generation, a lot of memories of Japanese American adults when they meet each other saying, "What camp were you in?" That was like a greeting. "What camp were you in?" "Oh, I was here, I was there," et cetera. But aside from that kind of generic memory of people talking about, quote-unquote, "camp," this Wakasa one really struck a chord, and so that just stayed with me. And then I was later to find out that that's the case with families who talked about camp. Some people never talked about camp, or they never talked about Wakasa, but those who did remembered Wakasa. 00:59:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: In your mom's trajectory, she is -- [video freezes] -- in the archives. Where does she go from there? UKAI: There was a bit of a freeze there. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, I'm sorry. I was asking about your mother's trajectory. After she goes to Chicago and then finds this work in the National Archives in D.C., where does she go from there? UKAI: Oh, so she worked at the Library of Congress, not the National Archives. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Ah, Library of Congress, thank you. UKAI: No, that's okay. And then she goes back to Berkeley. She marries my father. I can't remember the exact year, but I think it's '47. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you know why she went back? Her brother was up in Boston. UKAI: Yeah, I think she just wanted -- you know, I don't know, I didn't ask her. But I think my grandfather was there, her father, her other brother, and, I don't know, 01:00:00maybe Henry, my father, said, "Hey, let's get married." I'm not sure. But she enrolled in UC Berkeley and got a BA in geography -- influence of Dr. Robert Platt. And I remember her saying, "Your father, one thing he always did was say he would support me, my desire to go to college, and my desire to get an education." And her father did not. He was like, "Girls don't get educated." So she was appreciative to my father for that. And so he's running the grocery store. She graduated in the class of 1951, so by the time she graduates she's thirty, so she's not really having a typical college education, but she got the degree she wanted, and I found some of her papers the other day. She wrote about the cut flower nursery in California for one of her papers. And then, meanwhile, so then I'm born in 1954. My dad has a grocery store on Market Street in Oakland, which is kind of in North Oakland, and 01:01:00-- Can I talk about my dad for a minute? EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yes, please. UKAI: After the war? So when my parents were married, I don't know exactly when my dad opened the store, but actually I have an advertisement where it's the opening day, and they're giving away balloons and comic books, and you can see the price of things, and it's really interesting. But in 1954 I was born, and they were living in an apartment right across from the store. It was like a three-story apartment, stucco building. In 1955 my father was shot by somebody who he believes was the man who he threw out of the store for stealing a week or two before. He almost died, so that was a really significant period, because -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: You were one year old and your father was shot? UKAI: Yeah. I wasn't even a year; it was like months. Maybe I was five or six months old. And I just remember my mother, on the verge of becoming a widow and a single mother, was just frantic. And she wheeled me over to the home, she sent me to the home of George Yoshida, 01:02:00well-known musician, educator in Berkeley, jazz musician, wonderful guy. And I ended up staying in a perambulator in their living room for the next several months. My dad luckily survived, because he had this great -- Actually, a Nisei friend said to my Aunt Eleanor, "Henry's dying. He's got a week." And she said, "Come to my hospital," University -- San Francisco? Yes, I think it was UC Medical Center San Francisco. Anyway, my father within a week was apparently back on his feet, and saved his life. So anyway, then he continued to run this grocery store, which he rented from an Italian American couple named Joe and Della Stralla, and that's a real vivid childhood memory. It was a really interesting Italian American neighborhood, which became mostly an African American neighborhood over time. And so, again, 01:03:00a kind of really rich period where my dad was buying all of his produce from Growers' Produce, a Japanese American wholesaler in Oakland, and I remember riding in the back of the truck, and coming back with collard greens and curly greens and watermelons and flats of peaches and nectarines and plums, because that's where he got his supplies. And then the neighborhood itself was near the headquarters of the Black Panthers Party, so Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were our customers, and it was just this period of a lot of political ferment, and yet this neighborhood of Italian Americans, African Amer -- [Zoom video frozen, followed by pause] Did I mention about the truck and how we would go to Growers' Produce? EARDLEY-PRYOR: No, I had to pause it. The sound cut off right as you were saying "My father had this great produce, and I remember the different kinds of produce," but then it shut off on my end. UKAI: So he had this yellow pickup truck, and we would drive to what's called the Jack London area 01:04:00of Oakland now, and at that time it was all wholesale area, and there was a company called Growers' Produce, run by Nisei Japanese Americans, who would buy from the valley. And so I just remember as a child going in there, and we would return to my father's store on Market Street with the back of the truck filled with flats of nectarines, peaches, plums, crates, wooden crates of curly greens, collard greens, turnip greens, and handpicked watermelons. My dad would pat every one and listen to it, and he would tell his customers they're guaranteed, so if it's not sweet come back and I'll give you a new one. So at any rate, that was that neighborhood. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of smells come back to you when you think about the grocery store? UKAI: Really wonderful smells of a mix of wet concrete, from being hosed down, and all of the vegetables, which were extremely fresh 01:05:00because they'd just come from the fields, and mixed with the fruit, the smells of summer. And I'll always remember that my father's store was on a street where there was a bus, which went from San Francisco to Berkeley, and I remember once the bus driver stopped his bus and ran in and bought some greens. I mean, that's how good my father's greens were. And [laughs] we had to hurry, because I think we sold them for two for twenty-nine, and we wrapped them up in newspaper and then tied them with kite string, and, anyway, that was always a strong memory. Before Berkeley became this foodie place, the Japanese Americans were really doing farm-to-table, or farm-to-store-to-table kinds of work. And that led to the Berkeley Bowl Market, the Monterey Market, and I feel that's an untold story of that Japanese American middleman, middleperson link between what later became 01:06:00California cuisine -- Chez Panisse, et cetera. Anyway, my mother hated the grocery business, wanted to be in it one or two years; my dad was in it for like forty. She said, "Let's have a liquor store. Then at night you turn the key and you're done." But nope, you have to go through all the grapes, the produce every night, throw out the stuff that isn't selling. But we always had three or four colors on our dinner plate every night, because we were eating the vegetables and produce that was kind of not spoiled but wasn't at the peak. So anyway, my mother was really frustrated in the grocery business, and she would work there, but as our windows were getting broken and we lost our glass insurance we had to board it up, so it got kind of dark. We had this Chinese butcher named Dick Fong; I don't know what his real name was. He fled the Communists, and he was our butcher, and he would sit and read art books while he wasn't selling ham hocks and chitlins 01:07:00and whatever he was selling in our part of the store. But my mother, meanwhile, went off on her own, and in the '60s started taking macrame courses, which is tying knots with string, and she later developed that into a necklace art business, and just started selling her macrame necklaces at the Oakland Museum and local places, and then ended up later selling to Bergdorf Goodman in New York, and Saks Fifth Avenue, and the dancer Martha Graham bought one of her necklaces and gave it to Betty Ford, who was photographed wearing one of my necklaces. So my mom had this wonderful kind of trajectory. She had a lot of energy in self-starting. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. And that was happening in the sixties while you were in junior high and high school? UKAI: Yeah. And then, meanwhile, in 1958 -- so I was born in '54. My dad had the grocery store. He's beginning to get more of his 01:08:00income -- I don't really know the exact trajectory, but he definitely was getting more money from his bookmaking business. Highly illegal. Now gambling's legal but at that time it wasn't. They bought land in the Berkeley Hills, and they paid $4,000 for this property, which had a view of the Bay, and it was always my mother's goal to move from the "Flats," quote-unquote, of Berkeley and to the Hills. That was just something she always said was her goal. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Berkeley has this history of redlining, for any people of color, but I would imagine certainly Asians. That lower area, the Flats as you were talking about it, was relegated to people of color, and the Hills were only for white people, for a long time. How was it that your family was able to purchase this land? UKAI: They bought it through a realtor, but my mother always said -- and this stuck with me -- that the realtor after selling it never put up their sign saying "sold," and she just feels 01:09:00that they felt they would be stigmatized, or people wouldn't be happy that they sold this land to an Asian family. And it was really interesting growing up, because before that we had a house west of Sacramento Street, which was the area where a lot of Japanese American families lived, and my kindergarten -- I was in kindergarten at the time in Franklin School in Berkeley -- was quite integrated, and I even had a Japanese American kindergarten teacher, but it was a big change. And then, of course, our store is largely African American clientele. So it was quite a change to move to the Berkeley Hills and everybody was white, and there was one Chinese American student who I wasn't sure if he was Black. I wasn't even sure what race he was, my mother said. So then they built their house, which my Uncle Tets designed. He never saw it till years later, but he supplied the architectural design for that. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, that's really cool. So from Boston, he drew it out and then shipped the plans back? UKAI: Yes, yeah. 01:10:00And so it was built, I think, in 1960, or around then. It's a wonderful story, because they had an Italian immigrant contractor, whose name escapes me right now, but he was so happy with the project that he said, "All right, I'm going to end now," and then he went back to Italy, Mr. Paisal. And I remember my parents had a party, and he came and was so happy. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, that's great. Whatever became of that house that you grew up in? UKAI: Oh, so we sold it after my parents died, and I remember the marketers said "first time on the market since it was built." And then since then there have been two or three families. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, wow. Your uncle designed that, having studied and trained at Harvard for his architecture degree. Was there any kind of particular flair to the house that either had Japanese influences or traditional California style? What kind of design was it? UKAI: It was what they call mid-century, 01:11:00which was influenced by Japan: simplicity; natural materials; unobstructed views; the ability to have kind of a porous -- what would you call it -- a seamless interconnection between nature and outside, so a patio, that kind of thing; and then exposed beams -- it was redwood. So she loved that house. We all did. We were very fortunate. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's great. Do you mind if we pause for just a sec? Great, thanks. [pause in video] Great. So, Nancy, I want to ask about your childhood experience. What was it like for you living in Berkeley as it was changing and all these cultures that were meshed there? UKAI: Right. So because I was working at my father's store on a pretty regular basis on the weekends and after school, which was mostly a Black neighborhood -- the schools were racially integrated. 01:12:00Almost everybody went to public school at that time, in the sixties. And my church life and my family life were Japanese American, and my schools, though, in the Berkeley Hills, my friends were mostly white and the parents were professionals. And so I was the odd kid whose father worked at a grocery store. Nobody in the Hills had that kind of occupation. And obviously my father was supplementing his income, and that's why we had that. But I remember once going to a church picnic, which was traditional for that time in the sixties, when it mimicked a Japanese tradition of having an athletic day, and families would all come, bring a blanket, and bring out this amazing spread of Japanese American food. And I remember bringing my fourth-grade friend, Cathy Nestor, and her saying, "This is the best food I've ever had in my life." And then everybody would run around to each other's blankets and share, and I was so proud. 01:13:00And it was really fun, and we would have relay races and that kind of thing. But I also had the feeling, as I got older, that it wasn't cool to be Japanese American, and I remember my very best friend -- and it must have been in junior high school or high school -- said, "Nancy, I consider you to be white." And she was Jewish American, actually. And I remember being so happy, and it was like, oh, I've made it. Lisa thinks I'm white. Lisa was my best friend forever. And yet I was also taking Asian American studies classes at Berkeley High, which was just beginning, and the Vietnam War was going on, so the ethnic studies movement was growing. S. I. Hayakawa at San Francisco State pulled the cord out of the megaphone of students who were advocating for Asian American studies, Third World studies. So all this is happening around me. When I was 15, my mother took me to Alcatraz. 01:14:00The Native Americans had just occupied it in order to claim it as native land. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, so this was '69? UKAI: Sixty-nine, and they occupied in October 1969, and the Japanese American Citizens League, a small group, went over in February 01:15:00, so three months later, in support, with food, water, clothing, and I went with her and some friends. And I just remember, again, that was such a powerful moment, being in this federal prison that was empty, and these Native Americans from all over the country had gathered there to claim the land, and assert their right to the lands that had been stolen from them. So, at any rate, I guess what I'm saying is there was this period of political ferment and assertion of your ethnic identity and your civil rights. But personally I was still pretty confused. [laughs] EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, as a young woman just processing all of that, 01:16:00and as this was all happening around you. Berkeley's such a dynamic place, especially politically, especially in the 1960s. For you, coming into young adulthood and becoming a young woman through the sixties, where did you feel like you belonged? UKAI: So I would say that the Berkeley Hills were where my friends were at that point. They were the kids I grew up with, elementary school, middle school, and then you go to high school. But my social life, also, I was getting invited to dances in the Asian American community, so that would be in a different geographic part of Berkeley. So it was sort of like what I think you would call now code switching, because you go to the store and your customers are Black, and my dad, he's always able to kind of switch into this kind of jive talk that he did. And he was supporting the Black Panthers. James Brown had a hot 01:17:00breakfast program, so he was always supporting them with giving bags of food and stuff like that, but that couldn't be farther away from the Berkeley Hills, per se. And yet the campus was very active, People's Park. There's massive marches in San Francisco against the war. So, I don't know, it was a very lively, rich, exciting time to be in Berkeley: the hippies, all the art that was happening, the music. A friend of mine -- not a friend, but somebody who I knew at Berkeley High School who was kind of the tech guy, later on went on to become basically Bill Graham's assistant for Bill Graham concerts -- anyways, that kind of period where there was just a lot of flux. And then I went to college at UC Santa Cruz, and I think with that background that's how I got interested in Japanese. It's like, oh, I can learn Japanese. I can study Japanese. 01:18:00And that's the language, of course, I never had to speak to my grandparents with. And so that opened the door to learning things that I wanted to know about but I never knew that I did. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Can I ask about youth and holiday traditions? You had mentioned earlier that New Year's was a big family experience in your mother's family, and this incredible food. Were there other kind of traditional Japanese experiences you had, like Girls' Day or anything like that, that you celebrated? UKAI: You know, that's a great question, which I'd forgotten about, but every Girls' Day my mother would bring out these traditional sets of dolls, which is the emperor and the empress. She'd always bring them out about a month or two late, because she was very creative, and rather unorganized. So there's a saying in Japan, I think, that if you're late you won't get married; if you put the dolls up late you won't get married. So she always used to joke, "Oh, you and Harriet are never going to get married." Anyway, 01:19:00we did things like that, and she made wonderful Japanese food, and at New Year's we didn't have the massive extended family that some families do but we would gather together, and my grandmother Ito -- my grandfather's second wife on the maternal side -- would make home cooking, and my grandfather would wrap up a hundred pennies -- this is when we were little -- in red paper. And being little, you'd go, "Wow, a hundred pennies!" And I remember sitting and counting them. And being a Japanese American immigrant house, it was a small home in downtown Berkeley, and it just had the smell, to me, of that time and that generation: a lot of incense, because they had a Buddhist shrine, and I remember him hitting the gong, so that sound of the metal gong being hit, and chanting, and incense, and it was a very comfortable, small cottage. But yeah, 01:20:00it's funny how those sensory memories are so strong even now. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. So in this part of your family, the grandfather, it sounds like, had a Buddhist tradition. You were going to Japanese American Christian church. And you've also talked about your mother having this sort of intuition sense that you also have, shaping your sense of something "more than," or beyond. I'm wondering about your sense of religious development or spiritual development. UKAI: The church never really was an important part of my mental or spiritual life. I think in the sixties it was kind of this mélange of human rights and art and expression, and so I wouldn't say it manifested in a religious way, but I think, actually, thinking back on it, it was more a period when I started to think, especially when I went to college, 01:21:00about my ethnic background, and then how did my family fit into that, because my mother, part of why she wanted to move to the Berkeley Hills was to get away from what she called this kind of gossipy culture of Japanese Americans, which develops when you're in kind of a ghetto situation, or you're restricted to living in certain areas, and immigrant communities, right? But I remember her saying, "Ugh, I want to get away from that." And people talk notoriously about the gossip and the kind of culture that existed in the camps, as well, where everybody's Japanese, and nobody's kind of used to that, although we think of it now as, oh, they're all in the camps together. When people arrived it was a shock to look around and see nothing but Japanese faces. But I guess to go back to your question of family and identity, one thing I should mention is that my father, in addition to having this illegal occupation, our phones were tapped, 01:22:00and he was a very feisty guy, so when somebody confronted him, whether it was a person, just a regular person on the street, or even security, he just asserted himself. And we would go to Lake Tahoe on a regular basis, because not only was he doing the bookmaking but he was doing sports betting. And now it's very difficult because everything's computerized, and the odds are just calibrated to the moment, so you can never get an advantage, but he would take advantage of the inefficiencies of different casinos, and walk around and place a bet at one casino, Harrah's, and then walk across to Harold's in Lake Tahoe and make another bet, and then he would kind of get into that sweet spot where whether he won or lost he would make money, and to the extent that some of the casinos started banning him. But he also played dice, because he liked to do that, and he actually became so well-known 01:23:00at the casinos that Bill Harrah, of Harrah's Casino, would fly my father up in his private plane. And we would get literally picked up by a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce. My dad lost enough money to be worth it for them to do that, so we went to a lot of dinner shows, we got comped, and we were just like grocery man's kids, and we'd arrive at the casino, a kind of motley group, and my mother always used to say, "They think Bill Harrah's new Chinese cook has arrived." [laughs] But at any rate, he got arrested. He got turned in for tax evasion by we think it was probably one of the bread drivers, and he had a trial. He was arrested. It was a very difficult time in my family's life, although we were little. I would say I was probably upper elementary, or maybe middle school. And I remember my mother saying a lot of her friends stopped talking to her. It was obviously very embarrassing. Everybody knew my father was gambling, 01:24:00but at any rate the jury convicted him of a felony, but actually the judge was very sympathetic and said, "Your people were in camps," and he fined him but didn't give him jail time. So anyway, that's all to say that I grew up always with this feeling of embarrassment and kind of shame and fear. I mean, on the one hand my father was extremely flamboyant, and told everybody what he was doing, and he would carry bundles of cash around, and I'm sure some psychologists would talk about masculinity and being an Asian American man. I don't know, but that definitely was part of my psychology of being around this person who was fun and larger than life, but also always feeling like you're going to be exposed as doing these illegal things. 01:25:00But he wore it very proudly. So, I don't know, I could never quite deal with that. Whereas my mother was extremely artistic and had a lot of -- she had gay friends at a time when the gay movement wasn't that strong, and so she was the person I went to more. And then when I sort of brought everything -- I shouldn't say brought everything together, but when I went to Santa Cruz and started studying Japanese I just found, oh, this brings in the art, and it makes me understand more things about my grandparents and my parents and myself. And although I'm making it sound really analytical, it was more of an impressionistic thing, like, "This feels right." And I ended up going to Japan as an undergraduate. And then when I graduated, I went -- And I ended up staying for fourteen years, to the point when my father would say to people, if I was visiting, he'd say, "This is my daughter from the old country," and they'd think I was some adopted kid from Japan. [laughs] So anyway, 01:26:00I don't know if I answered your question. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, you've answered a lot. There's so much to dig into. Just the experience that your mother took you to Alcatraz during the American Indian Movement and the occupation. You mentioned her having gay friends at this time. She just seems very engaged politically, especially progressive politics. And I'm wondering how much you think her experience of camp and having her civil rights removed from her shaped her engagement and her mothering of you? UKAI: I don't think it was overt. She wasn't trying to, quote-unquote, "teach" me to be a certain way, but I think I really absorbed her example, and her indignance at being treated wrongly. So I remember once we were in Berkeley, and believe it or not there was a ten-cent store -- I think it was Kress -- and we weren't served for a really long time, and it was weird because we were sitting there at the counter, and the waitress kept going back and forth and back and forth, and people were coming and going. And my mother said, 01:27:00"Nancy, let's go." And it was very clear that we were being discriminated against. And I just remember moments like that. Another time at a store, it wasn't necessarily racial but she wasn't being treated right, and she talked back to the person. So she was always this example of someone who said when she thought something was wrong what she thought. And so I don't quite know where that sense of agency came from, but to realize now that that influenced me -- because I thought, oh, that's how all parents are. And I recently met this guy who's my age, and who said that when he wanted to be a conscientious objector in Canada his father said, "If you do that, I will disown you." So this guy ended up joining the military and serving for several years, and I was thinking, oh, wow, I remember my mother saying -- and my brother wasn't of draft age yet during the Vietnam War -- "If Michael were to be a conscientious objector in Canada, I would be so proud of him." 01:28:00And so when I thought of this person who I met recently saying what his parents' response was, and then to my mother's response, I thought, wow, something I took for granted as being the right values were not necessarily everybody's, and that must have affected me in some way that I wasn't necessarily aware of. Because she wasn't didactic; she just was who she was, and that's the beauty of her. And she was very artistic, so she would even say, "I'm kind of conservative, because I like to think about things before I push for change," but she had a very strong sense of right and wrong, and humanity, and justice. And she was so much fun, and so loving, so I just think she had a really strong influence on me in that way, whereas my father was pretty apolitical, and he was very much like, "I'm here to make money. I'm here to make a living." As I said before, "Your mother provides your emotional needs." I don't think he used that word. 01:29:00And he was all about sports, reliving his high school glory days, and just basically trying to make a living. EARDLEY-PRYOR: This time that you're in high school in Berkeley, this 1968 to 1972 period, is just so dynamic for American history, particularly in the Bay Area, particularly at Berkeley. Are there any memories that strike you from that time? I'm just thinking about Martin Luther King's assassination, RFK being shot later that year down in Los Angeles, and you'd mentioned People's Park and the riots that happened at Berkeley's campus with Governor Reagan dropping teargas all over the place. How do you think those experiences of yours, going through those moments, might have shaped you? UKAI: I think, actually, now that I think about it, I probably had the feeling that your voice counted, and that you could do things that could make a difference. 01:30:00So I had a Girl Scout troop, and one of the things we did was we participated in a peace march against the Vietnam War. And when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, I remember, in ninth grade, all the classes were canceled, so you would go to math, you would go to whatever, but in every class you sat and talked with your fellow classmates and the teacher about what happened. And I remember one student, who I still saw at a reunion a few years ago, I remember him coming in and saying, "I was in a store, and somebody came in and said the N word" -- it was a white guy -- and I remember the class talking about that. So it was a time when there was a lot of sympathy for talking about what people were feeling and experiencing, and so since this was like fifty years I think the schools were pretty ahead of their time, and I think schools probably try and do that now. On the other hand, things are so much more extreme now, and with media, and 01:31:00the fragmentation of the country -- I had this experience where I think ninety percent of kids in Berkeley went to the same public schools -- I mean, they went into the public school system -- and it's much lower now. So I just think that I grew up in a time when people shared similar kinds of experiences, whether that was through media or news or public schooling or whatever, even though you're going to different churches and so on, that maybe it was easier to have that sense of unity or community, having that sense of community, yeah, or being able to create it, and feeling like if you have these ideals other people will share them, which I don't think is necessarily the case now. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You talked about ethnic studies developing around this time in universities, particularly in California, and that you even took ethnic studies courses in high school, at Berkeley High, and then really dove into 01:32:00an exploration of Japanese culture and learning the language when you went to UC Santa Cruz. So just to follow up on that, where your interests -- you eventually get a master's degree in anthropology. You have this deep, lifelong learning and interest in other cultures, but also your family's culture and history in general. So I'm thinking about how your high school experience and then your diving deep in college into these things that you were just attracted to, how they shaped you. What was driving you then to become the person you are now? UKAI: Well, I was so fortunate to go to UC Santa Cruz, which at the time was very experimental, and it was actually hard to get into because people were attracted to that style of the Oxford College system where you were accepted into UC Santa Cruz but you chose a college which had an academic theme, and so you would live in a quad with the same people. And 01:33:00so it was a very -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: What theme did you choose? UKAI: I started out at Stevenson College, which was kind of social sciences, and I was majoring in anthropology and East Asian studies. That was my double major I ended up in. I ended up leaving Stevenson and moving to what was Cowell College, which was more Third World studies. And the reason for that was I think when I was a sophomore I was just tired of always being one of two or three Asian people who were always being pointed out and sort of confused with the two other people, who were saying, "Oh, that's not Pat; she's the other one," [laughs] because there's only like two Asians. So I just got tired of that and ended up switching colleges, which, at that point I was off campus so it didn't matter that much, but I guess that's to say that there was an increasing awareness of my sense of being an Asian American, but also looking at my 01:34:00ancestral roots. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You'd said you eventually went to study in Japan, and then, of course, lived there for more than a decade in the wake of college. Share with me that trajectory. What brought you to Japan first? What is it that you were seeking? And what did you find that you stayed for so long? UKAI: I didn't know I was seeking anything, [laughs] but a friend of mine came into my dorm room. I just remember exactly the sunshine coming in through the window, and Pat coming in through the right and saying, "Hey, the Japanese class is going to Japan next year," which I'd never been to, and I said, "Oh, I'd like to go next summer." It was fall. And she said, "Well, you've got to be enrolled in Japanese," which I was not. And, at any rate, I hurried to study over the winter break, and I caught up with the class, and the teacher said, "If you pass the final at the end of the winter quarter I'll give you credit, 01:35:00and then you'll have enough to go to Japan." And I did, and that was what was life-changing, because I just loved it. I loved sort of being in a crowd and not sticking out. And then all the things that kind of make Japan interesting: the food, the art. Being in this urban area that's just so interesting really grabbed me. So I ended up doing research at a middle school there, which developed an interest I had in education, and just living with a family, and experiencing that kind of thing you do when you're a freshman in college. And then after -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where were you in Japan? UKAI: So this Japanese class was held in a youth hostel in Yugawara Onsen, which is in Kanagawa Prefecture, near Odawara. It's about an hour south of Tokyo. And we studied there 01:36:00for, I think, six weeks, and then we traveled, and I still know some of those people, and good friends. And then after that, they all went home to the United States, and I had arranged to live with a family for three months in Fukuoka, in Kyushu, the island of Kyushu. And somebody who was a visiting scholar at UC Santa Cruz made that arrangement for me, so by then he was back in Japan, and he introduced me to this family, and the daughter, who was like six at the time, just recently reached out to me on Facebook, [laughs] so that was unexpected and fun. But I loved that so much that I knew that when I graduated from college that I wanted to go back, and so I applied for a Fulbright English Fellowship, which is now called the JET program, and it basically brings in English-speaking students now from any English-speaking country -- New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., the United States -- hundreds every year. 01:37:00When I went there were only five students, so it was a very small, wonderful, intimate group. But after that, I ended up staying. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You'd mentioned you did some education research, and I know later in life, when you were living in Princeton, you get a master's degree in education. So what was it that you were doing that spurred this interest in education while you were living in Japan? UKAI: Well, I had this incredible professor named Thomas Rohlen, R-O-H-L-E-N, and he taught Culture of Japan, and he taught very popular classes, and he was quite a storyteller, in addition to being a scholar. He was very interested in anthropology of organizations. So he had written a book on a Japanese bank in Kobe, and at that time everybody was interested in Japan, and why was this non-Western country so competitive and strong economically, and so on and so forth. So he was analyzing 01:38:00the kind of inner workings and the human infrastructure of this company [sic]. He was very interested in high schools, and I was interested in having a project in which I could do something while I'm in Kyushu for three months. And so I came up with the idea of -- because I looked young then, didn't wear makeup, and I was like eighteen or something -- immersing myself in a Japanese public middle school, and observing everyday life there. And so he was my sponsor, and I got a university grant of $500 to support my work and plane fare, which wasn't so expensive in those days. And had a wonderful experience: got better at Japanese; was able to see how a Japanese school works, in the sense of having very egalitarian 01:39:00ideals -- for example, there was no tracking -- but then learning that many of the students got private tutoring afterwards, which counteracted the no tracking at schools. This school had kids who were in the Untouchable class, as well as the children of corporate executives. So it was a really interesting cross-section of that urban city, and I was able to do a really interesting comparison, because in Japan compulsory schooling ends at ninth grade, so the kids at that very young age have to take this determinative high school entrance exam, and in the United States you have until high school. And just the kind of comparing the educational system, as well as the life of kids, was just really interesting for me as a freshman then. And that developed my interest in education, and then also definitely in going back to Japan. 01:40:00So after I got this Fulbright English scholarship in 1976, I lived in Toyama Prefecture, where I was a full-fledged member of the Board of Education, and I lived in teacher housing, in a big apartment, and worked for the Board of Education, and traveled around the prefecture, visiting schools, but got really interested in the festivals and just the culture of that rural area. And ended up getting an apprenticeship at a Buddhist temple, where I was taken in as a live-in weaving and dyeing apprentice of silk, and that was also life-changing, because it's kind of like being in a boot camp. You had no autonomy. Life was very regimented. We woke up at six o'clock every morning, and we scrubbed the floors every single day, and then you have Buddhist prayers at, I don't know, seven o'clock, and then you eat breakfast, and you wash the dishes, and then you weave, 01:41:00basically, for the next six hours, and then you go to bed and do the same thing the next morning. And you had one day off on Tuesday, but you were strongly encouraged not to do anything other than work. So anyway, [laughs] it was great for my Japanese, it was great for learning about temple life, and the people who ran the temple were extremely connected to even national living treasures and various arts, like ceramics, pottery, lacquer. Hamada Shōji, famous ceramicist. But mentally it was pretty tough, and my family all worried I was going to have a nervous breakdown, so they were happy that after one year I went to Tokyo and decided to try and be a journalist. The temple wanted me to stay because after one year of training, you start to get good after a year and become a better producer of weaving. But by then, mentally -- I'm not a Japanese who does this for ten years and -- [laughs] EARDLEY-PRYOR: This is wild. So you have 01:42:00this job as a young recent college graduate, as an American living in Japan, traveling around, on the school boards of these rural school districts, and you transition to living as an apprentice in a Buddhist temple doing silk weaving, which I guess is like a decade after -- UKAI: Right, and dyeing, with four other women. And so the five of us were living in this big tatami room in this temple with no heating. It's a wooden building, 500-year-old temple, in snow country. And so these women are from all different parts of Japan. One is married and away from her husband. So we just all had our futon in the same room. We had one TV with one channel. We would watch the NHK daily drama at lunchtime, fifteen minutes every day, and so that was the life. But spectacularly beautiful, in the middle of rice fields, surrounded by mountains, incredible vegetables growing, 01:43:00and a three-generation family of -- let's see, five, six -- there were a lot of people in the family. So about thirteen of us altogether. So, deep immersion. An anthropologist's dream, but it was difficult as an American, because I was doing American things, like not walking properly, and one day I actually -- . Life is on the floor in a rural area, so the thirteen dishes would be put on the floor in the kitchen, and that's where it's spooned out, because there weren't a lot of tables, and you're sitting on the tatami. Anyway, one day, out in the big formal area, I kicked a tea bowl -- [laughs] I kicked it -- of a national living treasure named Hamada Shōji, and it got chipped. I can almost see it in slow motion, this tea bowl rolling over, and they had to mend it in gold. And ever after the teacher would say, "One of these apprentices, 01:44:00they all look Japanese but one of them isn't. One of them is an American. Who is it?" So ever after I was kind of pointed out as this clumsy, big-footed, destructive American. [laughs] So there's all that kind of trauma. But the family was really wonderful, and I actually was in touch with them recently, but they might have been happy to see me go. I don't know. But actually, no, I stayed, and they actually did ask one apprentice, who was not very good but who was a beautiful girl, who the teacher thought would be a great addition, and they sent her home at New Year's, and that was very sad because we all came back from our Christmas, New Year's break, and we said, "Where's Kudo-san?" They go, "Oh, you have to pack up her things. We've asked her not to come back." So, I don't know, that's just a small drama, but it was deep immersion into Japanese culture, and I'm very fortunate to have seen that. And the temple also has historic meaning, because a very famous 01:45:00woodblock artist named Munakata Shikō fled there from Tokyo after his house was firebombed in the war, and he ended up as a young artist painting all over the temple, which later became the reason people went to visit it. So you're living in an art museum in the middle of a rice paddy, and -- anyway, sorry, this is nothing to do with [laughs] the other things that happened. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, it's everything to do with -- no, it's your life experience. UKAI: Well, in the sense that I became pretty fluent in Japanese, and I got a real strong sense of Japanese culture and art and aesthetics, that really helped me ten, twenty years down the road when I started to do research on immigrant art and artifacts, especially in the camps, because otherwise you would just be an American sansei who are looking at these things and don't really know how to make sense of it, but because I'd lived in Japan and had this experience seeing, working with, studying, 01:46:00and looking at art that was traditional, when I started to study the arts of the U.S. concentration camps it's like things clicked. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. I'm so curious about how you are immersed in this Buddhist temple, and then leave from that experience to Tokyo and choose to stay, and just where your own sense of self was at this time. And about being an outsider but an insider at the same time. I'm picturing you being away from your home country, but in a culture that you could blend into if you wanted to. And learning the language and this deeper history of where, perhaps, your grandparents' experiences were. I'm wondering how all of that cultural immersion is shaping your sense of identity growing as this young woman in her twenties? UKAI: Yeah, I wouldn't say that I had a -- I definitely don't think I had a 01:47:00plan. I just would follow my interests, and I knew that after being in the temple I wanted to get out of rural Japan, where there were so many restrictions on my movement. And at that time you could be an English teacher and get paid quite well per hour, like, I don't know, four or five thousand yen, which would be forty or fifty dollars an hour, just for speaking English, and more if you worked for a corporation. But I wanted to increase my Japanese knowledge, and also I've always been interested in writing and talking to people, so it made sense to try and get a job as a journalist. So I actually got an offer from the Associated Press, and they said, "If this is your first job, you might want to work for a real newspaper." And I also had an offer from the Asahi Evening News, which is an afternoon paper published by the Asahi Shimbun, one of the three large papers in Japan -- the Asahi, the Yomiuri, and the Mainichi. And so 01:48:00I took that job, and it was funny because at the time it's so different. This is 1977, 1978, and I got job interviews at the New York Times and the Washington Post. There were bureaus. And now everything is so much more a game of credentials and knowing people, but at the time Japan was a big story but you could still go around and meet people. Anyway, I worked at the Asahi Evening News and translated, was a page editor, and did a lot of interviews. I interviewed Dolly Parton, who ended up giving me tickets, and then I invited an American grad student, Jim Russell, who was new to the newspaper, to that. We ended up getting married, and I always end up joking that she was our go-between. [laughs] EARDLEY-PRYOR: That Dolly Parton interview led to you and Jim getting together. UKAI: That would be, I think, our first quote-unquote "date," because I didn't know who she was. 01:49:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was the [Dolly Parton] interview like? UKAI: Pardon? EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was the interview like? UKAI: She's great. She just seems just like you see her on media. She's open. She's friendly. She's warm. She's just a really warm, wonderful, fun interview. And at the end, she gave me two tickets and said, "Come on, y'all, and come watch me." And so Jim had told me what she was famous for, because I really didn't know who she was, actually, coming out of the temple and not being interested in country music. And Jim's got encyclopedic knowledge about everything, and he said, "Well, she used to be more country western, and now she's in crossover, and I think she was -- " [laughs] Anyway, I invited him, and we got married in 1981. Yeah. And then we had two children in Japan, and then returned to the United States in -- gosh -- 1990. Nineteen eighty-seven. 01:50:00RUSSELL: No, no, no. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Okay. What was Jim doing in Japan at that time? UKAI: He was a student, finishing his Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics at the University of Chicago, and he switched gears into Japanese because he had to study, I guess, a non-European language. And we met in the newsroom, where he was translating the Pravda editorial from Russian into English; he was translating the Japanese editorial in the Asahi Shimbun into English. He was a linguist, and much more. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's awesome. Then you and Jim, as you said, got married in the early 1980s, and have two children in the eighties, as well. What was it that you were doing during your time in Japan? Did you stay working at the Asahi Evening News? UKAI: I worked at the Asahi, which was sort of a 6:00 in the morning job to noon, when the paper came out, and then in the afternoon I had time to go out and do my own thing. So I was doing 01:51:00reporting. I also worked for a fashion designer named Hanae Mori. And it was just a really fun period when you could travel anywhere and come up with your own stories, and I just loved it so much, and I guess that's why I stayed. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of stories were you drawn to? UKAI: Well, I later worked for Newsweek, and my first story was actually about the new Tokyo Disneyland that was going to open. So economic stories and trade stories were always important, but I was always interested in textiles and in art, and so anything to do with textiles, which was kind of an outgrowth of my work weaving at the temple. So I, for example, interviewed Emi Wada, who was a costume designer who won an Academy Award for her work on a Kurosawa film called Ran, 01:52:00and I was interested in Japanese women. I don't know, I was a bit of a -- what would you call it -- I feel like a bird that was flying around and picking up fun things at the time. And I was also interested, though, in education, so I guess I was like a generalist, and that was very fortunate for me because in Tokyo it meant that you could interview these fashion designers, but you could also be interviewing somebody on the price of gold, which I didn't know anything about, but you're always able to learn, and then my Japanese was also able to improve, and you're getting paid to do it. So it was a great job. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's amazing. When your children are born -- when was that, and what are their names? UKAI: So my son, Dmitri -- and it's spelled D-M-I-T-R-I -- he was born in 1984, and my daughter Saya, our daughter Saya, was born in 1987, 01:53:00and they were both born in Tokyo, another [laughs] great cultural experience, to be in a Japanese hospital. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Why? UKAI: Because Japanese mothers -- I'm kind of generalizing now because this is thirty-five years ago, but the mothers who were in this particular hospital, which was a kind of hospital for women who maybe would have had a more Western orientation anyway, but in Japan still at that time women were expected to basically raise their children, and the employment opportunities were scarce for married women, and women with children were not expected to work. And, in fact, I remember a Japanese woman who said if you didn't hang your futon -- the cotton mattress -- out, people would talk, like, where are you? Why are you not able to do that? It's that level 01:54:00of granular observation that everybody's making about everybody. So I noticed that these Japanese mothers would want what they call separate nursing, so they would want their babies kept in the nursing, and at that time you were in the hospital for five days. Perfectly normal birth, and then you're in there, and those mothers would almost all have their babies in the nursery, whereas the American and European mothers would want bonding immediately. They wanted to be nursing right from the get go, so the baby would be next to them. And so I thought, oh, that's interesting. These Japanese women, I was told, they know that, boy, once they go home, they are with their kid until the kid leaves home, and so they viewed this period in the hospital as a break, and the rest of us were like, oh, we want to be with this infant immediately, because women who are not in Japan just have more autonomy. And so that was an interesting place 01:55:00to raise a child, too. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You'd mentioned the significance of naming in your name and your siblings' names. What's the significance of your children's names? UKAI: Well, my husband had a really strong interest in a Slavic name, and particularly in Czech names, so he was putting forth names like Zdeněk and Vladislav, and I love Russian names, and the name Dmitri was just one that I liked. It didn't have a particular family meaning. And so that's how we kind of compromised. He also had some very interesting Japanese names in mind, which I thought would be really a little bit too much, because they were like historic names, which even for modern Japanese would be a little confusing. And our daughter Saya was born three years later, and her name, the characters mean early spring. She was born in March, actually. And so that's how that came about. 01:56:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's great. How did motherhood change you? UKAI: Gee. Just so grateful to be in a family where we could have healthy children, and also be in Japan, where children are really treasured. And also I wasn't working at that time. I was able to work part-time, so we could really dedicate my life to observing the changes and the miracles of babyhood, right? And then there were a lot of other Japanese and expatriate mothers, who we would meet once a week and just kind of have a baby group. And I'm actually still in touch with them. It's been more than thirty years, and they're all over the world, actually, because at that time people were there for working on business or whatever. So just 01:57:00-- gosh, I don't even know that I have the words for it. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. How was Tokyo changing at this time? I mean, you were there from the late seventies, living there full-time all the way through 1990, and that seems a pretty dynamic time in Japan, especially in its role on the global economic stage. But your experience of life in Tokyo -- I'm wondering about the city and how you saw it change over time. UKAI: Tokyo is always changing, so buildings are being demolished, new corporate buildings are going up. I can't even imagine going now. I haven't been there in about ten years. So that was just alarming, to see old temples and wooden homes being destroyed, because the land is too expensive. And at that time there were cases when people would sell their land, Japanese, and then disappear, 01:58:00and not tell their neighbors, but the money was too good, but they didn't want to harm these generations-old relationships they had with neighbors by asking permission or trying to negotiate, right? So they might sell to a corporation. Those were the stories at that time, and that's where the property and the money was just beginning to really become apparent in daily life. So you would be walking down the street, and there's a tiny little modern building next to an old one-story merchant building, and it would be famous for not giving up, but eventually the money would be too alluring, although inheritance taxes are also very high, so there were things which didn't affect me, because I'm not Japanese, but to watch Tokyo go from the point where -- who wrote the book called Japan Is Never One? RUSSELL: Ezra Vogel. UKAI: Ezra Vogel, where Japanese were buying up real estate 01:59:00in the U.S. like crazy, and so to be in Japan at that period was really interesting. It was this property bubble. And then I had a lot of expatriate friends, because my husband Jim, although he came over as a graduate student in linguistics, he dropped his Ph.D. studies and began to work in finance, because being fluent in Japanese he could do research and translation and analysis, so he was looking at company analysis for these international firms, like a bank. And anyway, so I was kind of thrust into this world of international expatriates, which is nothing I'd ever known before, and generally pretty politically conservative, and just a whole class level of assumptions that I'd never experienced before. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What do you mean? 02:00:00UKAI: People who've gone to very prestigious schools, and to all the Ivy League schools, and then gone to business school, and gotten their degrees, and then went to a Wall Street firm, and then the firm sends you over on the full expatriate package, and people bringing over their wine collections, and going to these resorts for their vacations. And so it's just this very new corporate world, which my father was a grocery store owner, my mother's designing jewelry, and my friends were not in that world at all. So, in faction time when Jim got hired by this firm, and moved us into this expatriate apartment, we were literally in a two-bedroom tatami apartment, where we didn't have really furniture, even, because we were sleeping on futon, so you roll them up and put them in the closet 02:01:00in the morning, and we had a kotatsu, which is a low-level table that you use in the winter, which has a heating element, and then you put a blanket on it and sit under it and watch TV and eat tangerines in the wintertime. I think we had a very small kitchen table, maybe two chairs, two gas rings, and then we were moved to this two-bedroom apartment in kind of a fancy part of Tokyo. Everything we owned fit in one little corner, and the movers were like, "What happened to you?" [laughs] Because we just went by this small moving company, and they couldn't believe it. It was like, "Did you guys win the lottery? What happened here?" And Jim had joined this company where they just moved us in there, and gave us a budget so we could buy things like a sofa, and just kind of things that you need in a regular Western-style apartment. So that was that culture change. 02:02:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: How did you bridge this gap of your American-ness and this Western culture and Western world that, it seemed, your work world revolved around -- both Jim's and yours -- with this Japanese experience, of living in Japan and speaking Japanese in Tokyo? How did you bridge this gap of being an outsider and an insider? UKAI: Well, I think all foreigners in Japan are outsiders. That's why they're called gaijin: "gai" is outside and "jin" is person. You're an outside person. And even though I was racially Japanese, I was still considered a gaijin, but a gaijin with conditions; that is, my ancestors were Japanese, so the assumption would be I had certain qualities that no white or Black or other person could ever have, which is racially-based, because it has this kind of genetic assumption, right? But I think when you're in the Tokyo 02:03:00world with all of these other workers and visitors and people, students, scholars, you're just all excited about being there. And part of the diversity is part of the fun of it, and I think when I first arrived I was just heady with being able to fit in and not be picked out as different, as I was in California even though it wasn't like, I'm sure, being an African American, or being an indigenous person where your land's been stolen and you're stuck on a reservation. It wasn't like that for me, but I still didn't feel like I belonged. In Japan, you racially belong even though culturally you don't. And so I think part of my interest in studying the language more and learning about the art, which I was just interested in anyway, was just really a thirst that I was quenching. And so I just feel so fortunate because 02:04:00I was there at a time when I could do that, and it's really helped me and framed my way of looking at things, especially Japanese American history. On the other hand, I've also realized that living in Japan for so long has inhibited me in speaking my mind, because I lived for so long in a culture where silence is the preferred mode [laughs] of communication, in the sense that you're always watching, observing, reading other people, their reflections, and then making your judgment on what to say. And that has actually been a way that I now filter what I say, and has actually been detrimental to speaking out. EARDLEY-PRYOR: All right, well, as we talk more I'm sure we'll get into more of the ways that you are finding your voice again on what you believe needs to be said. Let me ask about the late 1980s. 02:05:00Back in the United States, the Redress legislation, from the movement that had been brewing for more than a decade, is passed in 1988. President Reagan, surprisingly, signs this. What are your memories, if you have any, of what your family was going through with Redress? What was your connection back to what was happening in the United States while you were living in the eighties in Tokyo? UKAI: You know, I really missed all of that because I was in Japan from 1976 to 1990, and so I missed that period of American history, of Japanese American history. What I do remember is that when the Commission came to San Francisco and had testimony, my mother was not one of the official persons to speak, but they did have this overflow period when people could speak, I think at a church, and the Commissioners were there, and a friend of mine who was active said, "Oh, I remember your mother." And what my mother did was she wrote out 02:06:00her statement for posterity, and I'd love to share that with you, but she sent it to me in Japan and said, "Would you read this? I want your feedback." And she typed it, because that's how we did things then; there weren't computers. And I remember being struck that she was so serious, and the mother I always thought of someone who she wasn't superficial but she was always one to see the humor in things, and the tone of this was so serious. But she talked about this incarceration period in a way that I never had heard her speak before, and she talked about the Platt family, but it was incidental to the harm that was done to Japanese Americans and her family. So that was my predominant kind of connection, I would say, familial connection to redress. And now that I'm back here, and meeting people who were active in the trenches, in lawsuits and 02:07:00organizations, movements, advocacy, it's really so impressive. And I wasn't there, but I'm really honored now to be able to read and benefit from the fruits of that. Interestingly, I remember my parents used the checks they got to redo their patio at their home in Berkeley, and I just remember some people saying, "Oh, I'm going to donate it," or, "I'm going to -- " And I thought, why do people feel this need to reject this money? I mean, they lost so much. We lost so much. You can't really put a dollar amount on it, but certainly twenty-thousand per person is a symbolic payment. And yet there is this sense that I think people have of -- not that it's dirty money, but "it's just something I can't accept." But my family wasn't like that. It was like, "Oh, good! [laughs] We need to fix some things." 02:08:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: Nineteen ninety, you said, is when you returned back to the United States, when you and Jim moved back to the U.S. Why then? UKAI: Our children were about to enter school, and I'd been in Japan for fourteen years, and Jim had been there I think for twelve or so, and he was offered a position in Texas. So we ended up going to live in a place called Highland Park in Texas, which is an enclave within Dallas, and we were there for three years. And that was another eye-opening experience because it's the South, and people would say, "Oh, you just came from Japan. That must be an amazing contrast in experiences." And frankly, the real contrast was Berkeley and Dallas, not Japan and Dallas, because Dallas is so conservative, and evangelical religion, and the religiosity, the football, the Dallas Cowboys, the kind of emphasis on being blonde, on your body, especially for women. They had 02:09:00bust, waist, and hip measurements for the junior high school girls when we arrived there to see if they could join the drill team, so there was massive anorexia. I mean, it was just a very different world from Berkeley, and we were there for three years, and then ended up moving to New Jersey. And partly I think Jim was realizing that I was having a hard time there, and a lot of racism, which I had never experienced, that was extremely blatant and open. I remember gardening in our house, being out on the lawn in Highland Park one day, and there was an African American radio host for NPR named Bob Ray Sanders, and I remember somebody came on and said, "Caller from Highland Park, Texas." And they say, "Hey, Bob Ray, just go back where you came from," and I thought, oh my gosh, that could be one of my neighbors. And I remember I was once in a car with a friend, and she saw a Black man 02:10:00walking on the street -- and this is a small enclave, right -- and she called the police, and she just said, "Officer, I'd like to just mention that there's an African American gentleman walking on something-something street." And they go, "Thank you very much," and it was just like, oh my goodness. I didn't like that part of Dallas. There were also very nice people who I met, just so warm and hospitable, but that kind of severe racism and threat of violence was just something I'd never experienced in that way before. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. I'm picturing the culture shock of being in that environment, particularly after coming from Japan. I mean, it is such a culture shock certainly from California or elsewhere, but in the wake of the past fourteen years you had it would feel, I would think, even more of a shock, being back in the United States in the South. Where was the -- UKAI: And the guns. The guns. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh? UKAI: Yeah. And then just the whole emphasis on real 02:11:00estate and materialism was surprising. So then, luckily, Jim was offered a job. So I was doing research still, and writing freelance. I did work on something called the Kumon system of tutoring, which was a great article, and I actually got it accepted into the Journal of Japanese Studies, which is a good journal. So anyway, I was still continuing that, but then when we moved to Princeton, we moved there in 1993, and ended up staying there until 2006, so that's where our kids grew up. And I was pretty removed from the Japanese American community then, but not entirely. I began to work for a nonprofit board, which gave scholarships to mostly Vietnamese and South Asian students, and it got its start in the seventies when a group of Nisei in Boston and New England noticed -- you couldn't help but notice 02:12:00that there were these refugees, what they called boat people in those days, arriving from Vietnam after the war ended, who had no support system. And these people, these Nisei, Japanese Americans in New England, said, "When we were getting out of camp the Quakers really helped us, and nobody else would help us, and we need to be a hand of support for these people arriving who don't have family." So anyway, they started a scholarship fund called the Nisei Student Relocation Commemorative Fund, and I joined the board of that, and my Uncle Tets, who I mentioned earlier, and Aunt May were in Boston then. They were founding members of that group, which now has been in -- oh gosh -- operation for well over thirty, probably forty years now, and it has a nice endowment, and continues to give out scholarships. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. What was the experience of culture like, moving from Highland Park, Texas to then 02:13:00being in Princeton, New Jersey? UKAI: Princeton was a very wonderful place. It's obviously an Ivy League town, very safe and kind of small-town, pretty urban state. New Jersey's not that big, but has a lot of cities, but Princeton is a much smaller community, and the politics were much more in line with what I'd been used to in Berkeley. And also, that's a lot of immigrants there, and those ended up for some reason being people I most became friends with, and I noticed that at some point, like, oh, my friends, really they're from Europe, they're from India, and I guess I just felt more comfortable. Maybe that's part of feeling like you're an outsider, or at least feeling more comfortable with people who don't necessarily identify as much with this kind of middle-class, upper-middle-class 02:14:00striving to join this Ivy League kind of society. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You lived there for a long time, your children were raised there, and also a point where you returned to school yourself. UKAI: Yeah, so I really didn't know what was I going to do: raising children, but I kind of lacked intellectual development. And I had just published this article on Kumon in the Journal of Japanese Studies, and I thought, well, maybe doing something in education would be a good way for me to segue back into some kind of full-time work after the kids are older. So I enrolled in Rutgers, in their master's degree program, on -- what was it called -- Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education, so educational theory, but really a great program, excellent program. I highly recommend if you have the opportunity, anybody in their older ages, to go back to school, because 02:15:00anthropology changes. People's ideas of what are norms change. So it was just really fantastic to be with students. So I got my MA, and I thought about getting a Ph.D., but I just noticed that I wasn't able to juggle child raising with the demands of writing. So my kids would knock on the door, and I would get angry at them, and it wasn't their fault, but a Ph.D. would be much more intense. That period coincided with the mayor of the town inviting me to join the Princeton Public Library Board, just this wonderful random thing, which, again, was just life-changing, because I went from being this kind of citizen of Princeton to becoming on the Library Board, and eventually became the President of the Library Board, just at a period when a brand new facility opened after forty or fifty years of the old facility getting demolished, and a brand new, 02:16:00shiny, technologically-advanced center opening up right in the middle of town, so just introduces you to politics, different constituencies. We had this incredible Library Director named Leslie Burger, who went on to become the President of the American Library Association. And then people in public libraries, they're just really great people, so I was very fortunate. It was kind of a golden time. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That sounds like a really rich, dynamic time in your life and your children's lives being there. What was -- UKAI: But being away from Japanese Americans, so that was why it was funny coming back to Berkeley and getting thrown into this pool. And actually there's one couple in Princeton, and I really regret that I didn't get to know them better. They had fled the roundup, I think from California, and they had this poignant story of every time 02:17:00they tried to get a job -- they must have been in their twenties -- they would get hired, but then there would be so much pressure on whoever hired them to fire them that they couldn't ever hold a job. And it was such a famous story that Life magazine did an article on it. And they were living in Princeton, and I met them through doing some research on World War II families. And I really regret that I didn't pursue that more. I looked them up the other day, and I believe the wife might still be alive. But to be in a place like New Jersey and Princeton, there aren't that many Asian Americans -- well, there are: there are immigrants, there are students, but it's nothing like being in California, and I'd wished I'd connected with them more. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Your children are hapa, and I'm wondering, as a mother of these children who are mixed-ancestry, if there was any kind of significance, 02:18:00or anything that you were really conscious of in creating their worlds and being the mother of these children growing up there? UKAI: I think that's such a perceptive question, because on the one hand, as parents, I think you probably think you have more power than you do to direct them. [laughs] On the other hand, certainly where they grow up, what kind of schools they go to, the kinds of social circles they're immersed in, has a lot of influence on their identity and their formation of it. And I also think in gender, girls generally, Asian American girls, have an easier time than Asian American boys. I think Asian American boys -- I'm thinking of my brother and my father, for example -- there's this pressure that's through the media of you're not necessarily the same as a white American, macho, 02:19:00physical, large, tall, whatever -- right? -- model that's put before you. And so I remember, for example, my brother really idolizing Bruce Lee, because this is an Asian American man who was very talented. He was a martial arts master. And so jumping down back to my own children, I'm not sure that I thought about it as consciously as I should have, but the public schools were more integrated, I think, and more kind of freewheeling. Both of them went to private schools, so I'm sure that must have kind of affected their way of growing up and thinking about it. EARDLEY-PRYOR: How did your period of living in Princeton end? Where was the transition next for you and your family? UKAI: So in 2006, by then both of our children had graduated high school 02:20:00and left the home, and my husband Jim was feeling just ready to do something different, and so he retired from the corporate world. And I was in my last years of -- not my last years; I think I'd been President of the Public Library Board, which was my full-time kind of thing I was doing. I'd been doing that for, I think, three or four years by then. Anyway, Jim applied to a Ph.D. program, because he had never finished his University of Chicago Ph.D., to the University of London -- well, to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, which is a part of the University of London system -- and that was in 2006. And he was accepted to do a Ph.D. in anthropology, or MA and then a Ph.D. in Japanese anthropology. And that first year, we were together in London, 02:21:00but my parents were ill. My mother had died. My Aunt Eleanor and my father were ill. So I spent a lot of that year just kind of trying to tend to ill relatives, and then in the second year -- And my dad died in 2007, and then in 2008 my aunt died. But in 2008 I did an MA in media anthropology at SOAS, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and that was incredibly stimulating and enriching, and really helped me think about material culture, because I was taking courses in that, and that sort of set the stage for doing the research I'm doing now. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I want to get into that, but I also want to ask about that experience of your mother, your father, your aunts passing away in this relatively short time period, particularly with you in London, coming back to be with them, or at least try to have some sort 02:22:00of role in their passing. What was that experience like for you? UKAI: I would just say that the loss of parents is something that you don't really know what it's like until you actually experience it, and that's just so obvious that almost you shouldn't bother to say it, but it was really true, that you walk through this glass into another world, and you join a lot of other people who've had that kind of pain and loss and suffering. And I think it makes you into a person with more experience and compassion, hopefully, because you understand what it is to lose somebody so important. What it did for my brother and sister was just changed the dynamics of our relationships a lot, so I don't really know that I would tie it into Asian American identity so much as just changing the dynamics, and when my mother 02:23:00died it was really like the person who held everyone together passed away. When my mother died, it was very peaceful, and she didn't want a service, and it was just as peaceful a passing as you could hope for. And in a very spiritual way, her cancer doctor was extremely kind. And he was actually trekking in the Himalayas at the time, and my mother had wanted him to have this crystal from the Himalayas, and she passed it to me, and when I called up the hospital to say that my mom passed they said, "Oh, Dr. Wolf is not here. He's in Nepal." And there were those kinds of spiritual connections, which always happened with her. When my father died, he had Parkinson's disease and he had pneumonia. It was very violent, physically. He was suffering. And then his loss just created this rupture within my siblings, because we all reacted differently, and there were no longer the parents 02:24:00to connect us anymore. So I think we're all still dealing with that, at some level. And I think -- I don't know. I don't know how to compare our family to other Americans families. I mean, you see families where there are dozens -- My father was the last of eleven children, and yet nobody got married and had children, or at least I might have a few cousins but I almost don't know who they -- I don't know who they are. I know them because Jim, my husband, a genealogist, has found them. But all this to say we had a very small nuclear family, and I have a few cousins on my maternal side in Boston, and also in the Bay Area, but I feel like with some Japanese American families there are very large families, with literally dozens of people, and strong traditions, and in our case, my brother and sister aren't married, and don't have children, so my two children -- who are mixed-race, as you mentioned -- are kind of the last 02:25:00of this Ukai line. And so it's made me think about that a little bit. On the other hand, we're not that into genealogy and continuing the line, or at least I'm not, so I don't feel like we're pressuring them in any way, and I'm just glad that my children have memories of their grandparents, on both Jim's side, who were in Connecticut, and my side in Berkeley, because people get married older now, and the generations, they're farther apart. My parents weren't as young, in some cases, but my children, even though we were living overseas or living in Texas or living in New Jersey, got to see them a lot because we came to Berkeley so much, so I'm so grateful for that. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I'm wondering, Nancy, if this would be a time for us to pause this session. We, in the next session, can dive into that degree in London on anthropology, 02:26:00because it sort of sets the tone for a lot of the other work that we're going to talk about later. Does this seem like a reasonable place for us to pause for today? UKAI: Perfect, yeah, and I'm sorry to go over. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Not at all. This has been wonderful. Thank you very much. So we'll pause here, and we'll pick things up in a couple of days. UKAI: Okay. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Thank you.