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GY: And then, of course, there was the sabbatical leave program at schools. Most schools have it -- had it at that time. Not anymore. One-year sabbatical leave to do whatever to improve one's teaching facility, so forth. And I, I talked to the principal, and he said, oh, gosh, yeah. Maybe, get leave, and why don't you apply for it? And he encouraged me. And Mr. Oe said, "Come on. Come to Japan." So the approval was given to me to go to Japan for a whole year. They would give me 75 percent of my salary. And I could take my family. It was usually 50 percent, but I proposed that, I requested I take my family, so they raised the percentage to 75 percent. And salary back then was -- let's see. Fifteen hundred first year, 17 and 2,500 -- well, I made 5,000 by then, a year. That was pretty good, right? Compared to the beginning salary. And so we packed up. I didn't know what to take. I had no idea what to expect and the lack of space in Japan. We couldn't find a place. No apartments were available, as housing is very scarce in Japan. But my cousin, actually my mother's cousin, had a tiny house in the outskirts of Tokyo, and he, she built a tiny room -- it was a tiny room -- for his, for their, I should say, their eldest son to move in with his new wife. And a tiny kitchen. Well, the son didn't move in, so here was this tiny bedroom. And she invited me, come on over, and you could stay with us. Oh, hey, how great. And that was because she -- her name's Jun, Junko. Jun-chan, we call her, Nishimura -- is the cousin of my mother, who came from Japan in 1921 with her. And she's the one who went to the school in Western -- Eastern Washington. And her major was music and piano. So she was very much Westernized, very open. She'd laugh, and just great, great person.

So we were living with her and her husband, who was a very quiet but very nice man, very artistic, tall, tall man. And they lived in Manchuria for a while. I think we may have talked about that. They had just come back -- not just come -- some time ago, but they had some terrible times. Their life was a matter of trying to find enough to -- you know, enough to buy food, whatever. But they slowly recovered. So I stayed with them and there were two daughters living there. They were both out of school by then. And then the two sons were out of school. They lived out somewhere. And it was a very modest house; small room, small kitchen. We had our own small kitchen. One burner, propane gas. In the spout of the wall, cold water. There was a well outside. And so Mr. Nishimura built a tiny table for us. We sat around the table, six of us, and had dinner and that. And for the bedroom, in the tatami room, instead of using the tatami on the floor -- we had four kids, so he made two double-deckers close to each other, man. And just close together. And I guess the size of one tatami, I think seemed to fit. And so we had, four kids were in there. And then we slept in the, sort of a, their living room. We had a mattress on the floor every night, and roll it up.

So they were very nice people. And it was kind of neat to meet their kids, to recognize... and we even had Christmas there, Christmas tree because she knew about Christmas and what to do. Of course, they were Christians, too. And she was -- she would bake a small cake for us or whatever. And their kids were very friendly with us and our kids, too. Our two sons were fourth -- third and fourth grade, I guess, or somewhere around there, went to the U.S. Army's dependents' school. So they had to take a bus, streetcar. They learned to make their way by themselves to go to school every day. Our two younger girls were not old enough to go to the local Japanese school, so they hung out in the neighborhood and played with neighborhood kids who spoke only Nihongo, Japanese. So in hearing, and being -- this is a full, total immersion, learning a foreign language, they learned rather quickly to speak Japanese. At first we could hear them mumbling. What are they doing? They're pretending to speak Japanese to each other. Then moved into words slowly and to sentences. And by the end of the year, they could converse in Japanese and go to the store, and they asked for a candy, candy chodai, or something like that. That was neat. And they played with the kids.

And near our field was a rice paddy and other vegetables growing there. So essentially farmland. The dirt was very rich, which means very black. And our kids were wearing little pants and the T-shirt, and we didn't worry about what they wore because they're going to get dirty anyway. So they wore just very simple clothing. They were dirty and we were not very much concerned. And Japanese folks are very much concerned about their, how their neighbors think about who they are. And when, any time kids would go out, they'd have to be neat, clean, but our kids were dirty. And it was kind of interesting because our cousin, Junko-san, said, "You know, some of the neighbors are really concerned about your kids. They think you're very poor, and they are thinking about donating clothes to the kids," she said. And it was a great laugh and sort of reverse Marshall Plan of some sort. But that was that. And --

<End Segment 43> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.