Densho Digital Repository - Mas Takano Interview (Densho ID: ddr-ajah-1-5-16)

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MT: But anyway, you wanted to know something about my mother? Did we talk about my mother?

BN: Not much, other than she had these health problems.

MT: Yeah. My mother, I don't think she came from a very wealthy family, but she came from a well-to-do family. Did I tell you this? Seems like I told you.

BN: No.

MT: So she came over and her sister, brother was in, family had a big hardware store, brother was in politics, he was an assemblyman or something like that. And so she got out of school, and her sister, older sister and her husband had a... I told you, didn't I? Had a dry cleaning store? Dry cleaning in San Francisco. So my mother wanted to come over and learn, come to school and learn English. So she stayed with her sister and they were a couple, three years apart. And it was very profitable.

BN: Yeah, you did earlier, about the business.

MT: Yeah, about the business. And then my mother got to know a lot of people there and she was one of two... like in kendo and judo, you were brown belt, green belt, black belt. She was one of two ikebana, who could teach ikebana flower arrangement in the United States. She was educated that way. And so she was teaching that for a little bit. Later, after she got married and was living here, the Fairmont Hotel and Mark Hopkins, they would call her and ask her to make flower arrangements for them in the lobby, you know. Not all the time, but during a big celebration or something, she would go up and put in an arrangement. And then she was teaching ikebana. But she played the biwa, and most people don't know what the biwa was at the time. I think it came from China and it was either the Ming Dynasty or the Qin Dynasty, that only the royal court could hear that music, and there were only a select few people who could play it. So that was restricted, but I guess the Japanese got in, got out. My mother took up biwa, and she was the only one that ever played that. Everybody was saying koto or shamisen or something, but she was playing the biwa. I watched the Korean Shen Yun symphony, they have an instrument just like the biwa, looks like my mother's biwa. But anyway, it's an interesting instrument. So she was educated and knew how to cook, boy, she was a good cook. Then she got, at age thirty-seven she got arthritis. And it wasn't too bad at the time, but kept getting worse. By the time she was, the war started, her hands were kind of gnarled and she couldn't walk too good. Boy, she was so young yet. She died at seventy-eight, I guess, so for forty years she was... and at the end there, she was in a wheelchair. Still cooking every day for my father. We had to redo the kitchen, you know, you had the cutting board? You have the cutting board on top, and then we had to redo that so that the cutting board is in the middle. So she was in a wheelchair, and she had the best tools on top, the knives were on the first shelf, first drawer, and she could cook. But she was a fine lady, my mother. Boy, never raised her voice, never. My father did. [Laughs] But my mother didn't.

BN: How long did your father continue with his gardening?

MT: Well, he died in 1984, he was ninety-three years old, I think. And he quit when he was eighty-seven. Every day he was gardening, six days a week.

BN: Was your mother similar in age?

MT: He was eight years younger, eight or nine years younger. She died in 1978.

BN: So he outlived her by a few years.

MT: Yeah, about five or six years, yeah. I asked my mother one day, I said, because she was a pretty lady and I said, "You must have had a lot of suitors, right?" She said, "Yeah, I had a few." "How come you picked Dad and coming to a country, getting out of Japan?" "He's the only one that told me, 'I will take care of you 'til the day I die.' The only one that told me that." He said, "Yeah, I'll give you everything, I'll give you a big house and children, but your father's the only one that told me that." And he did. Yeah, she was a good lady.