<Begin Segment 16>

AI: Well, now also, what you're holding there is a copy of a letter that you found later.

MY: Yeah, I was reading it. It was a letter written in Japanese to a very close friend of his from Seattle. His name was Mr. Sekiguchi and I'm still a friend of his son's, a son who lives in Los Angeles now. But I think that we got this letter from Tad Sekiguchi, it was a letter, his father had died and I think he has his dad's papers. It is a letter and the address on it is addressed in Cincinnati, so it was soon after my dad... let me see, there's a date on here, it was in 19-, yeah, it was November 1944, and so it was actually only a few months after my dad was released from Lordsburg, New Mexico, that they came to Cincinnati and my dad couldn't work, couldn't get a job so he got a job as a gardener. And it was a struggle because he was very, didn't know very much about it, and this first family that they worked for, the woman was a little bit strange. She recognized that my dad didn't know very much about gardening, and she would play these little tricks on him, you know, she would hide tools or something and accuse him of losing it, and then my father, because he was just so totally disoriented by what he was doing and so forth, and he was becoming very absentminded about things because he had just not gotten adjusted. And so she would move things like from one place to another, and then tell him, oh, "Where is it?" and so forth. And it just made him very insecure about himself.

And so then they changed to another home. They went back to the hostel because they, to visit their friends, and the Friends, the American Friends, the Quaker couple who was running the group -- and I guess they must have told them the hard times they were having with this family and so they said, well -- Mrs. Brinsfield, I think her name was -- said, "Well, you don't have to work for people like that. We can have, we have some other families," so they were placed in another home and they just loved it. The couple just appreciated them a lot, in spite of my dad's inexperience and so forth. And so they were there and they must not have, it must not have been very long after they went to the Coles' place, he wrote a letter to his friend who was still in Lordsburg, New Mexico, in the Justice Department camp. And it's kind of... and then there's a stamp of "Detained Alien Enemy Mail Examined," and there's a little stamp on there. And it's written in Japanese so they had people reading in Japanese. And we were, I was reading this to my brothers last night, as I said, with a great deal of difficulty, and it doesn't really say very much except it is very uncharacteristically sentimental. You know, Isseis didn't write this way. You know, very personal about, "Well, we are, I'm sorry I didn't respond to your letter, but I am working from morning until night and I have been reduced to this station, being a gardener." [Cries] And it's really touching. And then he's saying that, he's talking about you know, "My son Seiichi is now at Boston University and my daughter is in" -- so he's talking about us, but also he's saying that, "I don't really know what future there is for us," that, that, "I might have to be doing this kind of work for the rest of my life." Yeah, we were really very touched reading this last night. And he said, "Of course, muron, saki wa, you know, of course there's no way of knowing what's going, what holds, what there is in the future." Of course in 1944, he had no -- and the reason why we came into possession of this letter was that Tad Sekiguchi, we're still in touch with his son in Los Angeles. And we're not quite sure, I think, my brother thinks that Tad saw this letter and it was written by my dad in his handwriting, and so he said, and his dad died and he was going through his dad's things and he found this letter from my father, and so he returned it to us. And we were really, it really kind of surprised us because we don't see -- my father has written a lot of senryu which is very personal, but they're not, they don't really talk about... you know, senryu is talking about the condition of the Isseis and their adjustments, but they're kind of a bantering, you know, he had a sense of humor and he was always kind of laughing at himself or laughing at my mother, you know, kind of a bantering, jovial, jocular attitude towards life, which comes, you know, some of it bawdy, about the life of the Issei in Seattle. And so this voice is really quite unusual.

AI: That must have been such a painful realization for him that, here had come as a teenager to the United States and struggled and had worked as a domestic houseboy, putting himself through school --

MY: Yeah, that's right. My mother was saying that this is what he started to do, and this is what he -- then he started work for, in a domestic, and so she was kind of, you know, and the thing is that his personality was such that... it could have been that he was hiding, that he was quite sensitive, [coughs] excuse me, but he, it kind of reveals his deep-seated, [coughs] kind of vulnerabilities that he had never permitted anybody to see before, you know. Anyway, that was that letter that we kind of cried over last night.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.