Maryknoll the popular name for the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America.
Miya-jima an island twelve miles south of the city of Hiroshima.
The Native Sons of the Golden West a San Francisco-based men's fraternal order founded in 1875 and dedicated to preserving western history and landmarks.
Nereid in Greek mythology, a sea nymph.
Niigata a coastal city on the island of Honshu about 100 miles north of Tokyo.
Nippon Japanese for "Japan."
novena a nine-day Catholic devotional requiring intense prayer.
obsidian volcanic glass which holds a lethal edge and was prized by prehistoric weapon makers for arrowheads.
Okie an insulting nickname applied to midwestern farmers who were ruined in the 1930s by the Dust Bowl. These rural down-and-outers from Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and surrounding areas packed their families and goods on tenuous antique vehicles and journeyed west to California to search out a better life for their dispossessed families. John Steinbeck immortalized the Joads, a fictional family of Okies bound for California, in The Grapes of Wrath, the source of a 1940 motion picture by the same name, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad and Jane Darwell as Ma.
