<Begin Segment 25>

AI: Well, we're continuing now again, after a short break, and --

MY: Where were we?

AI: We're still in the -- well, in --

MY: We're still in Japan?

AI: -- in Japan. Yeah, and during the break you started briefly telling about this incident where you almost drowned. And how did that happen?

MY: Well, my mother left me with her sister's family. Her sister had died the year before, and her brother-in-law had, had remarried. And it was, I think, I remember it was in August, because it was the hatsubon. And they called it hatsubon, the first Bon after the death of his wife.

TY: Is that where we dressed up, is that the occasion?

MY: No, I don't think so. I think that was a festival of some kind.

TY: Oh, okay.

MY: I'm not sure. I'm not sure what we -- because you weren't there.

TY: Oh.

MY: I was in Mushirouchi by myself, and that was when I met my foster parent and...

TY: That was almost a year or year plus from the time you went to Japan, then.

MY: Yeah. Because, that was why Fumiko and I are so close, to this day. Because she, she used to take care of, we were really close. Is when I was a child, as I stayed with her family. And her mother, Mom's sister, had died that year, I think. This was in August, or earlier in the year. And then her father -- Ojisan? The doctor? Had remarried within a half a year or so after Mom's sister died. And she didn't know about -- she, when we went to Fukuoka, when we went to Mushirouchi, she was quite angry. I remember, I don't know what -- I thought maybe I did something wrong. But she left me there with Fumiko's family.

TY: Oh, I see.

MY: 'Cause she didn't want to stay there. And I, I didn't quite understand at that time what the problem was, 'cause I don't know her sister. I mean, I didn't know Obasan at all. And so as far as I was con-, and then Fumiko told me she's not my real mother. She's my -- and so then I found out that the woman who was there was not my, was not --

TY: Stepmother.

MY: Yeah, Mom's sister, but she was stepmother. So anyway, I stayed at that house for I don't know how long. And, until, when the school started, I think I went to Hakata. But then there was some kind of a thing going on at the beach, and the Japanese have all kinds of festivals. And so the two neighborhood kids, one older girl and one younger boy, came over to ask if I wanted to go to the beach with them. And my aunt said, "Well, okay, that's okay." And she let us go -- let me go with those two kids. And we were at the beach and it was very, real low tide at the ocean, and we started walking to go swimming, we had our bathing suit on, and we were walking towards the... and the water just didn't get deeper. It was just sort of straight and it was sort of still on my knee, knee-deep, and we kept walking and walking and walking. And then finally some man came, was going out, and he said, "You kids better get back, go back, because the tide is changing," or something. I don't know what he said, exactly. So we turned around and we start walking back, and the current has, in the meantime, had changed. And we got pushed down or up, or whatever. And the water kept getting deeper and deeper, and all of a sudden we were, we had fallen into some kind of a drop, where it was deeper.

TY: It must have been a hole or something there.

MY: Yeah. So we started screaming and yelling, and screaming, and I swallowed the most water because the two kids -- I kind of knew how to swim. And every time I came up for air, they would grab me, and I kept going down, and we were screaming our heads off. And I remember looking over and seeing a man with a very small child walking along and looking over. Because the water was still up to here for them. And I guess he thought I was, we were just a bunch of kids horsing around, so he didn't pay any attention. And so we -- anyway, you know how that is, when you feel like it's forever, you were there trying to splatter around, and thinking you're going to die. And two young men -- they must have been teen-, they looked like guys, but they were probably very young guys, young --

TY: Young teenagers.

MY: Teenagers, probably. They come over and they just took us, grabbed us, and the water was not too deep. And they rescued us and took us back, and then they kind of disappeared. They just left us on the seashore, and we had to lie there for a while to recover. And so the girl, who was several years older than the little boy and I, said that, "This was my responsibility. Atashi ga sekinin aru..." That she said, "This was my responsibility to take of you two guys, kids and so when we go home, don't say anything. Keep quiet about it." So we said, okay. We got home and I remember my aunt saying, "The beach must have been really," we had dinner, and I was about to go to bed because I tired and she was telling my uncle, "That, oh, she's just exhausted. It must have been a very tiring day." And then the neighborhood woman, who was the mother of one of the teenage boys who rescued us, came over to find out how I was, she said that the boy came home and told her that, "I don't know who the other two kids are, but the Amerika no ojosan ga" -- there was only one Amerika no ojosan in the whole town -- that he told his mother what had happened. So she came over to find out if I was okay. And then my aunt got -- they left and she was really upset. She said, "We should have, we should have gone -- not had them come over here but we should have taken them orei," we had to thank them for this thing and I didn't tell them. And then, so that was the end of that. [Laughs] Didn't go the beach ever after that.

TY: Oh, I don't remember hearing about that. [Laughs]

MY: They didn't let me go anywhere after that. But, yeah, I know. It was just, it was kind of one of those things.

AI: Did you really have that sense that you thought you were going to drown? You really thought you would die?

MY: Yeah, really, it was really terrible. Yeah, we thought, we thought we were drowning. I mean, and I was screaming, they were screaming, "Tasukete," and I was going, "Help, help!" [Laughs]

JY: It's interesting that your aunt was more concerned about saving family face than the fact that you almost drowned. [Laughs]

MY: I know. [Laughs] She said, "Oh, shitsurei na. Oh, what a disgrace."

TY: It's not Japanese style, right?

MY: Yeah, that we should have been the one to go over there, having her come over here, what a...

TY: What a disgrace.

MY: She thought it was totemo shitsurei. It was just --

JY: Shitsurei, huh?

MY: Yeah, shitsurei was, shitsurei na koto.

TY: Yeah, right.

MY: I felt that... yeah, I know. That occurred to me, too. I thought, gee she's not even worried about what happened to me.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.