<Begin Segment 16>

[Translated from Japanese]

TY: Could you talk about your mother? Like what kind of person she was...

AT: My mother. Well, say, on the one hand, she was very kind. On the other hand, she was very strict. She was very good mother, but when she was strict, she was a strange mother. [Laughs] I used to think that she scolded me a lot. [Laughs] But, that was... as I grew older, she was saying it for my sake, so she was not a bad mom at all. She was a good mom. But, when I said something that she wouldn't like, she said, "No! I don't know!" it was like that. I flew at my mother. Then mother was, I came to understand later that she had tears welled up in her eyes in the back. I stopped doing that since I heard about it. I think, in that way, she didn't scold me too much and she reproved me. And then... now little by little, I came not to be resistant to my mother. About anything. Since my father died early, almost anything I asked my mother that I wanted her to do this and do that, she didn't say "no" most of the time. Most of the time it was all right. I had a friend whose name was Miss Oki. At her home, both parents were there, and they engaged in farming. She said, "Miss Nagao's mother is very nice. She always agrees to whatever you say. At home, my father and mother both oppose me for everything," so she said. I really didn't feel it in my head back then. When I started going to girls' school after graduating from grade school, I started remembering, "Oh, after all, girl... because I didn't have a father, she allowed me and tried to let my opinions go through anything, and maybe that's why she said 'all right, all right' to everything." I didn't understand it when I was younger. It was like that. I used to say good things about others, too. I said, "How lucky, Miss Oki has both father and mother. Nice, isn't it?" Then my mother would face the other way, with tears welled up in her eyes. At that time, I didn't understand it. I said it two, three times. My mother... I thought, "Oh, mother, she must have thought what I had said was sorrowful." Later on, two to three years later, I said, "Mother, when I went so and so, this way, mother, you handled it in this way." "Oh, I was feeling so bad. I didn't want you to see my tears. So I looked away this way clearly and I did so," she said. At that time, I thought, "How gracious parental love is." It happened two years before that. I came to feel this way two years later. So, "Oh, parents are parents after all. We grow up selfish, so we don't understand the parental love." I even didn't understand the love of my grandparents, but I came to understand as I gained years in my life.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.