In the summer of 1962, on their way to New York, Midori Sato and her new husband, Kazuo, stopped in San Francisco to visit with a friend. For her first weekend in America, they stayed at a hilltop campground overlooking the bay and its famous Golden Gate Bridge. Sato's husband, a PhD graduate from Yale, had just left Osaka University for a job at the United Nations. Sato, then 27 and seven months pregnant with the couple's first child, had no friends or family in their destination city but she had an American dream — to experience the unknown.
Staying at the campsite, opposite their cabin was a family with a small boy of around 4 or 5 years old. "What are you?" the child asked Sato. "I am a human being, what else?" she thought, but guessing his motive, "Japanese," she replied. The boy ran back to his family across the road. "You are our enemy!" he cried.
That was, she says, "my first welcome to the U.S."