<Begin Segment 37>

AI: Well, what were some of the other kinds of values that you think were really important to your mother and your father, that they talked to about when you were kids or teenagers, things that they emphasized to you that they wanted to, wanted you to live by?

MY: He, do you remember any lectures?

TY: Well, just little things, like, when eating, when were eating, table manners. "Don't put your elbows on the table." We'd be eating with elbows, and Mother would hit our elbow like that, tell us to get our elbow off the table. Things like that I think probably made an impact, but...

MY: Manners.

TY: Manners, yeah, was an important thing.

MY: Manners, and, so she's talking about values, though.

JY: Yeah, I can't think of any lectures or anything that I ever got.

TY: Yeah, I can't, either.

JY: It just kind of --

TY: Subtle things.

JY: Yeah.

MY: But you know, Dad was also a very honest person. Mom used to say, "He is bakashojiki." That he is "foolishly honest." And, I think that that kind of rubs off, too, because --

TY: I think so. Because, a lot of things, I think it's just very unconscious. In other words, it just rubbed off on us, I think. Because I don't remember Mom or Dad saying anything very specific.

JY: Yeah.

TY: Pointed things to us.

MY: Didn't they ever say, "Don't rob a bank," or anything? [Laughs]

TY: Yeah, right. [Laughs]

JY: [Laughs]

TY: Yeah, we knew that was wrong. [Laughs]

AI: Any kind of religious training, or church life or that type of thing? That influenced you in some way as kids?

MY: Yeah, we went to the Methodist -- were you a member of the Japanese Methodist Church?

TY: Japanese Methodist Church?

JY: I sang a solo there.

MY: Oh, that's right.

TY: That's right.

MY: So we belonged to the choir.

TY: Tell them about that.

JY: Well, I must have been, I had to have been in like the third grade or something. And somehow, they decided I should sing a, had a little kid sing a solo with the choir. So I went over to this --

MY: We were both in the choir.

JY: -- yeah, I guess, I don't remember that, but...

TY: Yeah, we were both, we were both in the choir, yeah.

JY: But so I went to a family friend, in fact --

MY: Well, tell them who it was.

JY: Yeah, it turned out to be Monica Sone. In those days I knew her as Kazuko Itoi.

MY: Itoi.

TY: Itoi, yeah.

JY: And so I -- in fact, I didn't know that she was Monica Sone until a few years ago. But anyway, she was the one who was, for some reason she was my, like my voice teacher. And every day after school I'd go there and rehearse it, and rehearse it, and rehearse it, rehearse it.

TY: They lived two blocks from us, Beacon Hill.

JY: And so finally it got close to the time when I was supposed to do it. And I thought, I'm not, I can't do this. I suddenly, they took me down as sort of a dry run, dress rehearsal kind of thing.

TY: Stage fright.

JY: And all of a sudden I looked out there, and I thought there are going to be thousands of people there, and so I just absolutely said, "No, I can't do this." And they finally put me behind the choir, so that nobody could see me. And I did my thing, and I guess it worked out fine. But that's a specific incident I can remember about going to church. But I don't think that my parents were super religious or anything. It was probably because it was the proper thing to do was to go to church, so we all, we went to church.

MY: Well, Mom was, though. She always talking, talked about kamisama and kamisama this and that.

JY: Yeah, I suppose that's true.

MY: That you had to respect -- and she did, to the end of her life.

JY: Well, she got more that way, as she got older.

MY: As she older? Yeah, but she always was talking about how she prayed every day.

JY: Yeah, absolutely.

MY: And she had a kind of a prayer that she was -- she had to God bless so-and-so and so-and-so. That went on for about twenty minutes every day.

TY: And all the grandkids.

MY: All the grandkids, all of their friends, all of their friends' kids, all of their friends' grandkids. And the minister's children, and da-da-da. And then she named every single person by name. It was almost like a -- do you remember that? It was almost like a memory exercise.

JY: But that was much later on her years.

TY: No, in the later years, too, she --

MY: But she always did that.

TY: -- if she'd get interrupted in the middle of it, she'd have to start from the very beginning, to continue, because she couldn't start from the middle, remember?

JY: I think she had everything compartmentalized. Children, then the children of the children, and then --

MY: Oh, and then she, and then she told us later on in her life, when there got to be grandchildren and the great-grandchildren, she didn't remember their names. So she would say, So-and-so no chonan, the oldest son, "Chonan no chonan," you know, the oldest son of the oldest son. But she started that way back. I remember she was, always in the morning, and she, and then you said that you remember that we had a shrine. A -- what was it? Buddhist? We didn't have a Buddhist shrine because they weren't Buddhists.

TY: Well, it looked like a Buddhist shrine to me but it just, it's just very vague in my mind. It was in the house in Beacon Hill.

MY: No, you know what that was?

TY: What?

MY: That was, she had, she, but she always did that, even in Kawabe House. She had these little cups for rice and things, and that she, but so she, although she was a Christian, she had pictures of her dad and her mom, and then she had a little vase with a kind of a white flag --

TY: And a --

JY: That's probably what you -- yeah, I remember that, and that's probably what you thought --

TY: But in the house in Beacon Hill, where did she have it?

MY: It was on a shelf. On top of a bookshelf, or on top of anywhere that happened to be -- and she had a little kind of a glass -- oh, you remember that silver, like a silver bud vase? It was a very small bud vase that fluted out, and she had one of those --

TY: Like a champagne bottle?

MY: No, no, no. It was just a bud vase. It was just --

TY: Oh, no I don't --

MY: And she had a -- I don't know what that is. Is it a, it looked like a little flag with white, like a white...

JY: I don't remember.

TY: No, I don't remember, either.

MY: It looked like the kind of thing that the Shinto, the Shinto priests kind of wave around.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.