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VY: Yeah, let's talk about your mom's background a little bit. So let's back up to your mom's grandparents, or your mom's parents, your grandparents. So tell me about your grandparents on your mom's side.

JT: Papa and Nana came, they were married, and they came in 1902, I believe. I dug up their history and have been told about their history, but Mom was an only child and Papa and Nana, they couldn't get jobs, but they worked as, they called it schoolgirl and schoolboy. That name has always intrigued me, because they weren't boys or girls, they were adults, but they worked in homes for those wealthy entrepreneurs who had businesses in San Francisco. And these people lived in beautiful Victorian homes about a mile and a half away from where they, my Nana and Papa lived, and they'd ride their bicycles. We have pictures of them riding bicycles to work, their bicycles.

VY: In San Francisco?

JT: No, Alameda. They landed in Alameda, and immediately settled, I think... well, they moved around a lot and I'm trying to find out why their addresses changed quite often. And I'm not sure why, but they both did domestic work, and Nana did ironing, she was such a great ironer. And she still loved ironing even... she passed away in her nineties, and she still loved to iron, she was still good at it. And I must have inherited, it skipped a generation, because I love to iron. I don't anymore, but I used to love to iron.

VY: Is that something she taught you? Like do you have fond memories of ironing with your grandma? [Laughs]

JT: Yes, actually. And the smell of the clean clothes is what got to me. There was something about that scent that I still love, but I don't iron. I own an iron, but I don't where it is. So they came and settled in this enclave with all kinds of other people from Hiroshima, they came from Hiroshima also.

VY: So your grandparents came together?

JT: Yes.

VY: Were they already married before they came?

JT: They were married.

VY: So how old were they when they came?

JT: Well, Papa was born in 1869, and he came in 2002, so he was about thirty.

VY: 1902?

JT: Uh-huh. And Nana was born in 1878, so she was early twenties, probably twenty-three or twenty-four. But they didn't have Mom until 1914, so she was born ten years later. I've never thought about it that way, but I know that in between, they struggled just to get by and find a place to live. In the meantime, though, all the other, lot of other people were having children. Now I'm thinking out loud because there were, because Mom was the only child and Daddy's relatives were all in Hawaii, we had no uncles or aunties, but real uncles by birth, but we had many by connection, friends from Hiroshima Kenjinkai and close friends who kind of adopted us, because there were six of us by the time we got out of camp. Mom had three in camp, three right after camp, and so we were a handful.

VY: That's so interesting, your mom as an only child had six children.

JT: That's why she wanted a big family, I'm told, because she was so lonely. But she wasn't alone, she had a lot of girlfriends whom we all got to know as we grew. They all became, well, many of them became part of my, I have had a seniors program at church, so they were all our aunties and their kids were not our cousins. We were friends, but we didn't do so much together with her peers' kids. I think in those days it was not easy. We didn't play, have a lot of time to play, we were told to study hard, go to Nihongakko, we went to Japanese school. And the boys played sports, and I was always, my head was always in a book. I'm a bookworm. So I didn't play Kick-the-Can and all those games like the other kids. I was always reading a book and they always said, "Where's Jo Jo?" "Oh, she's in the corner reading a book." And I still do that.

VY: And you still do that.

JT: Yeah, I still love to read. It was hard to read with six kids in the house, though, and we lived in a home with three bedrooms, and there were ten of us, so there was a hard place to find, it was hard to find a place to sit and do anything really.

VY: That's a lot of people in one house.

JT: Yeah.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.