Interviews

1. Little contact with Asians growing up on the east coast

2. Spending summers in Los Angeles

3. Japanese Americans brought up to deny their roots

4. Being multicultural before it was “in”

5. Moving to and living in Japan

6. The reason to stay in Japan after his third year

7. Being a Japanese American in Japan

8. Never being Japanese

9. Japan as my home

10. Different tension between East Coast and Los Angeles

11. A stereotype of Japanese Americans

12. Main differences between Japanese and Japanese Americans

Ota,Vince

Japanese American Creative designer living in Japan

Little contact with Asians growing up on the east coast

By the time I was about 9 or 10, I would go out every summer to Los Angeles, and I would spend the summer with my cousin out there and my aunt. That was actually the only time I had contact with any Japanese. There was one Japanese American. There’s actually a side story to this. Later on, I’ll go into it. But there’s one Japanese food store on Connecticut Ave. called Miyako. There was the restaurant next to it, and that was the only Japanese restaurant in D.C. at the time I was growing up. So we would get Japanese food here and there. My mom would cook rice of course. But, principally, I grew up pretty white American, I would say. But, yeah, no contact. So that’s why—earlier I was telling you about there’s a big difference between east coast Japanese Americans and west coast Japanese Americans. When I grew up in D.C. there was only one other Asian Chinese girl, and I only met her when I was in 6th grade. So not a lot of contact. I would hang out with my cousin, but he’s about 5 years older than me, so we didn’t hang out that much. I usually hung out with the grandparents or the aunt and the uncle.

East Coast (U.S.) Finding Home (film) food identity United States Washington, D.C.

Date: September 12, 2003

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Interviewer: Art Nomura

Contributed by: Art Nomura, Finding Home.

Interviewee Bio

Vince Ota, (Sansei on his mother’s side, Yonsei on his father’s), was born in New Hampshire. From there, he and his family lived in several cities throughout the United States and also lived in London before finally settling in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Growing up in a small town in Maryland, Vince did not have much contact with other Asian Americans, except during the summers he spent in Los Angeles with relatives. He describes his upbringing as “pretty White American.” Vince eventually moved to southern California where he attended community college and the California Institute of the Arts. He worked as a creative designer and lived in Los Angeles for seven years until moving to Japan. Vince has lived in Japan since 1996 and plans to stay. At the time of the interview, he was working as a creative designer. (September 12, 2003)