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LH: And you had mentioned that your mother actually grew up in Manchuria. Can we go back a little bit and actually just talk about how did her family come to live in Manchuria? I mean, although they were ethnically Japanese, they were in Manchuria. How did that come about?

FG: My grandfather worked for the railroad and then so then in, at that time which was, would be about in the early 1900s, Manchuria was Manchukoku, right, it was protectorate of Japan. And so the Japanese had a railroad system in Manchuria, and it went from Dairon to... I can't think of the, but it went up the country. And then so that's what my grandfather did. He worked for the Japanese Manchurian railway and so he took his whole family. My mother was three years old at that time, and my mother was born in Hiroshima. And then they moved to Manchuria and they lived in Dairon, and she lived there until she was, let's see, fifteen years old.

LH: Did your mother ever tell you any stories about what it was like growing up in Manchuria?

FG: Well, it was quite different. A couple of things that always stands out in my mind was how cold it was. And I used to get this story about how she used to walk ten miles to school in the snow. I imagine when I think about it, probably was five miles one way and five miles, but round trip ten miles. I don't know, but my mother used to say juu ri, ten ri, which was a little more than mile. One mile is, I mean one ri is a little more than a mile. But the other thing that she told me about was they lived in these, I guess, right now you'd call them condos, kind of like apartments, and they had central heating that went from the first floor to the third floor, or fourth or whatever it was. But they were thick brick walls, and inside in-between the walls they built fire and so that was the heating system, and my mother called it petchka. And so you have to be careful not to touch the wall 'cause it's hot, but the wall was, the heat was within the wall.

LH: So that's how the heat radiated out was actually through the... that's interesting.

FG: And that was something that I didn't, I couldn't quite imagine until I was quite a bit older. And the other thing that she told me is that the education level was much higher in Manchuria than it was in Japan because it's like any, when you have, when children go to a foreign country then you have the standards are a little bit higher because you have the class of people whose children are going to school and so...

LH: So rather than, say something like where you have immigrants going to a place that they send the lower-class citizens, the people who went to Manchuria were of a higher economic class generally so that they had higher standards for education and stuff like that.

FG: Yeah, and probably they were educated because they were technicians. And it's kind of like army post and that sort of thing. I think there were army people there, too, but it's not, they're all kind of government employee type of thing.

LH: And when did your mother's family actually return to Japan from Manchuria?

FG: Let's see, when she was fifteen so that must have been about 1920, '21, something like that.

LH: And that's right around the same time that actually Manchuria was...

FG: It was just before, I believe it's just before the Manchurian incident, if I'm not mistaken. I can't, I don't remember my history, but...

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.