The Mike Wallace Interview: Miyoshi Umeki (1959)

so this is mike wallace with another television portrait in our gallery of colorful people once upon a time in the north country of japan there was a little japanese girl who memorized american songs from phonograph records in time she won an oscar for her first movie sayonara and she became the star of a rogers and hammerstein musical flower drum song she is miyoshi yumeki whose art is best described by time magazine thus when miyoshi yumeki glides on stage to star in her first broadway show her first four words capture the house ten thousand benedictions sir in a moment we'll talk with miyoshi yumeki about the realities of her fairytale career and now to our story a recent time magazine cover story pinpoints the emancipation of the japanese woman in these phrases amid the ruins of burned and bombed out cities a new generation of young men and women groped for something to believe in because the americans had won the war everything american was accepted uncritically from pinball machines and burlesque shows to air conditioning and free thought the post-war generation traded in their kimonos for blue denims flared jackets skin-tight toreador pants one of the pacesetters of this social revolution is our guest miyoshi yumeki miyoshi yes probably the greatest victory in the emancipation of the japanese woman is the recent royal marriage of crown prince akihito to michiko shoda who was the first commoner to marry an heir to the japanese throne in some 2600 years but according to time magazine michiko shoda quote is a symbol of the hated modern world to japanese traditionalists to ladies of the royal court she is that little upstart who will always be regarded as the girl from outside what do you think of the marriage when i first heard it uh just shocked to me no it's really to to all girls like a cinderella story a happy shark or a sand shark bose and a happy shark but it's not the real set it's something we look at the prince prince uh as emperor's son which i've never seen emperor i only seen a picture yeah hit son which i never seen either except now it's in a magazine a newspaper and like somebody uh uh we we can't even touch touch him yes i see and well did you do you feel that the prince lowered himself much too much in marrying michoud no i think higher than himself uh-huh he made himself higher yes how why to understand this is uh this is a big big things to them to decide to marry oh a tokyo newspaper said this about the marriage it said michikosan may be a commoner but it is the crown prince who is getting the best of the bargain do you agree that's their problem all right i'm happy because i'm not magical know i don't you're happy because you're not michigan no i'm i'm happy for them i see yes i'm happy for prince very much back in the first of january in 1946 your emperor hirohito publicly announced that he was not a god and that he should no longer be considered as a god he said it in these words the bonds between us meaning himself and our countrymen have been tied together from first to last by mutual trust and affection they do not originate in mere myth and legend they do not have their basis in the fictitious idea that the emperor is manifest god and the japanese people are raised superior to other races and therefore destined to rule the world do you remember his saying that i didn't i didn't remember any word he said why because uh i i i heard it that there when he made a speech but how would i think it was emperor what do you mean well i'm it never never never had been done yeah you'd never heard his voice before no nobody in japan and suddenly uh i heard his voice so he has emperor hirohito said no it can be so the words the words he used which that very high and very difficult for us to understand i see i see and i was i was young did it make you sad to have this legend destroyed for a long time i believe it wasn't him that it wasn't actually he who had spoken yes and that somebody else was saying it before yes but the proof that that was emperor hirohito and i heard voice in news much much later and with same voice miyoshi do you think of yourself as an old-fashioned old-fashioned japanese girl bound by ancient customs or are you the new modern japanese woman who runs her career and runs her own life i was raised in old fashioned family modern way my parents are very old-fashioned but children with nine eight sisters and brothers eight of you and their modern modern outside i want to go to school you got to see the friends and come home it's parents way so we have a half and a half it must be very difficult for japanese children who are modernized outside the home and yet they have to yes but that become a natural way just get up early in the morning and pray the god with whole family yeah and serve breakfast before us and see that many i take a custom from my mother yes let me let me ask you this you were 13 years old when world war ii began the war between japan and the united states what did you do during the war years i was making a rice you mean in fields yes you actually worked in the field oh yes for a long time first i i was just beginning to take english lessons and the sixth month and they finished teaching english and you mean they stopped it completely yes during the war did you did you understand what was going on did you did you hate america no i didn't hate i didn't i just hate war because i i was fighting with hungary fighting with hunger oh yes yes and i was just wishing when the when the war will end today or tomorrow but did you have any brothers who were in the japanese army or navy yes uh was red clothes red cross red clothes uh doctor no he was a nurse oh an order so a medical corpsman yes two of them two of them yes but as far as you were concerned you felt no real participation and a sense of japan was going to lick the world and we have to beat the americans can't can't no we know we knew it and when it started we knew it was impossible and even i was young and i i thought uh what will ended in a week i think some of us felt that way too do you remember seeing your first american yes when how uh about six o'clock at five o'clock in the morning uh when uh many ships came into my hometown after the war after the war yes and first impressions just beautiful because i used to live on nathan hill and i don't know how many boats to ship but all beautiful light green blue and red you know and suddenly i had a speaker english the first real loud english i heard with the music some jazz they're playing a wrecker i think a speaker and you felt no you felt no no hatred for them i mean after all these were the people who had killed hundreds of thousands of japanese they had dropped the atom bomb you had been told for years that we were your enemies and still no none of that feeling no uh i don't know about soldiers feeling even soldiers they had a family and wives and children and let's see before the war i used to collect the american movie star's picture and bing crosby's and records i had hundreds of them because i think my brother and sister is very modern and my miyoshi tell me this you seem to be i hate them what's that you and you so you couldn't hate i couldn't hate them because i cut this dressier more somebody's beautiful girl and i carry grant or some american stars pictures they're nice people i connected with them you connected cary grant and dorothy lamore with the soldiers and the sailors tell me this you seem to be it's very difficult for me to see a person like yourself who seems so reserved coming here to the united states and getting into one of the businesses that is the most competitive and the toughest business one of the most difficult businesses in the world show business how did you first come here i worked there 10 years not enough rest so i thought i take a vacation two-month vacation come here and rest for a while rest in the united states and see see the old uh nice big studios and the orchestra yes and some for freshmen or high levels and just relaxing american real show business what they're doing and my plan was to go back there in two months and by all american style dress yes a new lesson and come back and absolutely stun everybody with what an americanized person you would be when you went back to japan no we are doing a popular song over there yes tell me this you are right now co-starring with pat suzuki in flower drum song we're going to move now well ahead into what you're doing right now and you know it would seem that in that kind of a situation here are two young attractive girls with equal parts competing for attention you'd think that that would create a real rivalry between the two of you but the production supervisor of your show is quoted in time magazine as saying this i dread to think of another show with two principles running nip and tuck like this one but here you see no rivalry they have a genuine friendship for each other i don't see why we have to fight because we have two different parts she doesn't want my part i don't want her part and i didn't write the story and we just doing what they give us yes and we come in time and she always ask me i wish i i'd like to see japan are you very good friends with her or do you feel as that that that she is more american than japanese oh she she's uh american yes and she wants to know the japan now and i think we are very good friend doesn't mean we talk all day long that problem we have no problem because we don't give each other a problem you don't exchange you don't gossip about your problems no only we talk about uh i wish we should have a little more money that's a universal problem yes miyashi in a moment i'm going to ask you i know that you have married an american and i'm going to ask you to talk with me a little bit about that i have been talking i know about about marrying an american i mean you see according to an ancient japanese custom every woman is supposed to tread the path of the three obediences to her father before marriage to her husband when she's wed to her son if she becomes a widow the japanese wife according to this saying the japanese wife needs no religion her husband is her sole heaven and in a moment i want to find out if you feel this way toward your american husband and i'll be and i'll be back for miyoshi yumeki's answer in just a minute and now back to our story miyoshi yumeki as i say an old japanese saying says the japanese wife needs no religion her husband is her sole heaven do you feel that way about your american husband american or japanese if the wife is not like me i'm i'm working every night and all the fashion in japan just get married about 16 years old yes and nothing but husband and raising children yes and i don't i don't which do you like better would you rather be old-fashioned and have just husband and raising children or do you like sometimes all the fashion is good and sometimes it's not fair not fair to even sometimes if they don't even own japanese my own country my uh husband and wife many times don't get along well but they just stay together forever yeah doesn't mean once they never fight of course and uh what qualities let me ask you this have you found quality i think i made the sense well let's see if we can if we can what qualities have you found in your american husband that you might not have found in a japanese husband is that a sensible question let's put it another way let's start off from a different other problem are there any problems in your marriage that arise because you are from a different background from your husband i think the most it's not the real problem because this you could learn uh i speak uh more english than before yeah especially after i got married and i want to sometimes i want to explain something yeah even my husband wants to explain to me something sometimes i take wrong and like you you have to explain to me that about 10 times and when you married american person we have some important things to talk about and i don't really get idea surely the idiom is a little bit different and it's a little bit difficult i'm sure from time to time my american husband wouldn't get really i don't know what i'm talking about i can't express everything when you go home to japan for a visit do you expect to find that your friends or relatives will resent the fact that you married outside your race no not at all no your mother was quite happy oh yes and she's happy as i am yes you haven't been back now since you made sayonara when do you plan to go back after this show is over i wonder because you told me just before you went on the air i understand that you don't want to go back until you have a baby to show to your mother well i'd like to go back before if my mother wants to say it maybe i don't know when it's been the custom i'm told in traditional japanese marriages for the husband to enjoy almost total freedom he is the master he can come and go without explanation he can spend his evenings without his wife yes no i used to work in a night night club singing with a band as a band singer yes and mostly the customer in a club is a married man with that wife and i was beginning to wonder every time i sing to them i wonder if i could be happy like that do you but not everyone though not every japanese husband does that because this wife must wife just wait but if he goes too much why they fight like everybody else do you permit your husband that same kind of freedom now it's not freedom i don't call it freedom what do you call it to husband go out it's not free i think some uh like i'm not good or is that i uh i understand what you're saying no it's not a question of freedom it's that you simply are not sufficiently it's just between us i don't know you you're a man you know it well now wait uh well i i was going to say that it's not freedom that it's evidently if if a husband doesn't want to spend that much time with his wife then it's then it's not really a very happy situation is that what you what you meant i think especially in japan like like one of the customers over there it's simply one of the customs yes go out and enjoy but after the war they're beginning to bring wives at the dinner and i think it's wonderful i understand that you're going to become an american citizen yes why why because i want to why you will have to renounce your japanese citizenship i i think in the three years i could become american citizen three or five years i think three years i have to take an examination and whoever i'm married and i'm i'm belong to him you belong to him and therefore you want to take the same citizenship yes that he takes again i find it so difficult to see that this reserved person who has done so well in show business which is as i said earlier so competitive who helped you miyoshi certainly you didn't do it all by yourself no i think people helped me who the people who are watching tv when i work in some place and the people come to see the show and i i know it's not me and people and i believe in a god too you believe in a god too my i are you my own god your own god are you a buddha or a christian i was raised in buddha and because i was so young at six years old and every sunday my grandparents take me to buddha's temple and i listened the priest's speech and i thought it was most beautiful and when i was so young and so strong to in my mind that's something i could never forget do you still practice buddhism no there's no practice when i i don't pray every day and things when i'm happy i thank them and when i'm sad i need them help and i think they watch me all the time i think most of us probably treat our separate gods that way miyoshi i surely thank you for coming and telling us a little bit about yourself thank you very much continued good luck to you thank you i'll be back in a moment with a footnote to the miyoshi yumeki story in modern japan six million women not unlike miyoshi yumeki are now wage earners there are 26 women in the national legislature 360 women in local assemblies and one woman mayor a major social revolution sounds to me as though japanese women are beating american women at their own game hopefully they are still as essentially feminine as miss umeki we thank miyoshi yumeki for adding her portrait to our gallery one of the people other people are interested in mike wallace that's it for now [Music] you