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AI: And speaking of ages, I, I think I wanted to clarify that your father was born in 1891?

MY: '91, yeah.

AI: And then your --

MY: My mother was born in 1899.

AI: Right.

TY: There was eight years' difference, I think.

AI: And then they were married in 1918. And then it, I believe you mentioned in our earlier conversation that your father called your mother over, and she followed the family's wishes and came to the U.S. the year later, about 1919.

MY: Uh-huh. 1919, yeah. It was something like that, yeah.

AI: And what -- later she must have told you a little bit about her memory of coming to the U.S. and her first arrival here.

MY: Uh-huh.

AI: What kinds of things did she say about her experience?

MY: Well, she said that my dad -- do you remember?

TY: What?

MY: When she was talking about when she first came, they lived in this one room with a --

TY: Oh, well --

MY: My dad was a --

TY: Oh, I think one interesting thing --

MY: -- was a bachelor, you know.

TY: -- interesting aspect was when Mother came -- when my dad asked about my mother to stay, well, she came on the boat, there's a lot of, ladies were...

MY: Picture brides.

TY: Picture brides. And, and when they got to the dock, well, a lot of lady, ladies were just looking at the picture, trying to identify their husbands because they never met them before. And my mother thought, "Oh, gee. How sad. Some of them, they didn't find their husbands there waiting at the dock." So that really impressed me how, well, some of those Issei ladies, it must have been really hard for them, you know.

MY: So my mom was saying that she was the only one who was not the picture bride.

TY: No.

MY: That she knew her husband.

TY: With some pride she was saying that.

MY: You know, "I knew what my husband looked like."

TY: Yeah.

MY: But she said she was still kind of nervous and afraid, but she, she said, she was, she said she couldn't imagine, you know, coming to a country and being with a man who had, never seen before.

TY: Not knowing anyone and --

MY: It was kind of interesting because she actually didn't know my dad very well.

TY: Yeah. [Laughs] But at least she knew what he looked like.

MY: That's right. She knew he was short. [Laughs] So...

TY: But after, well, why don't you tell her -- them about what, after Mother got here, the situation.

MY: Yeah, she said she, he was work-, yeah.

TY: He, she, I think she worked as a --

MY: A clerk.

TY: -- maid or -- no, she did.

MY: Not, not yet. I mean, when she, when they first -- when she first arrived, she found that he was living in this one room, and, and I asked her, "Was it a rooming house or..." And he said -- she said, "No, it was some, in somebody's house. He had rented a room, and he had a small stove in the, in the bathroom for cooking." And so that's what she had to contend with. And she said she didn't know how to cook.

TY: Yeah.

MY: Because she lived in this huge extended house where they had a cook and they had lots of maids. And so she had no idea how to cook, which was kind of unusual for a Japanese woman, I guess. So she said my dad -- you know, he was a bachelor all this time, and he had this little one, small little stove that they, they did their cooking on. And she said that he worked as a clerk in the store during the day, and then he had a second -- you know, he was apparently trying to, to rack up enough money to, for my mother to join him. So he, he had a night job as a janitor in a hotel. And apparently it was rather a seedy -- one of those hotels, I think, in, in, she said it was really kind of grungy and --

TY: Probably a flophouse in the --

MY: Yeah.

TY: -- in the First Avenue someplace, in Seattle.

MY: And she said really kind of dingy. And so she said my dad came home from work and they had dinner, and he said that he had this second job that he had to go to. And he, he wanted -- and she said she wanted to go with him because didn't want to stay home by herself at night. She was scared. She was home all day while he was working. And so she went with him, and then she said, "I sat, I sat down," and then he, he brought a chair out and put it in the corridor and told her, "You sit there and wait." And so then he went to the closet and got all this mop and, and bucket and all the paraphernalia for a janitor to -- and then she said that he, he started to clean the rooms. And then she saw him cleaning the bathroom. And she said that just really made her very sad to see him clean -- she said, "Here's this Japanese, the -- Nihonjin no otoko no hito ga," you know, "They shouldn't do things like, be cleaning." So she said the first night she just sat there and was feeling really very sad about it. And then I think after she, subsequently she decided to help him. So she said, "I decided to clean the toilets because that's, that's the onna no shigoto, that's a job for women." And so she cleaned the bathrooms, and Dad cleaned the rooms. And then, then eventually she said she got a job. I mean, they found out that she was working, too. So they -- I don't know whether it was there or somewhere else.

TY: I, I don't remember the details.

MY: Do you remember that?

TY: No.

MY: But she did eventually work as a chambermaid, either there, she got a paying job herself. So the two of them were working as a, in the evening. But then they moved out, and I really don't have any idea of the timeline of how long they were in this rooming -- in this room, rented room.

TY: No, I don't remember when they bought the house on Remington Court. Do you remember?

MY: No, the first house was in Beacon Hill. Remember we just --

TY: Oh, that's right, that's where Mike, our older brother, was born on, in Beacon Hill. And we tried to...

MY: We... and it was right by the, the golf course.

TY: By Jefferson, Jefferson Park.

MY: Jefferson Park, yeah. That was the first house, but they were not there very long. Apparently that was rented. That was a rented house, and they didn't buy that house. They didn't have the money.

TY: Well, they must have stayed there until --

MY: Mike was born.

TY: -- Mike was, Mike was born there. And then I was born in the Remington Court house, and so there was difference between, two years' difference between us. So they must, they must have stayed in that house about a year. And then they moved to the house on Remington Court, and that's where I was born.

MY: Yeah.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.