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AI: Well, did your mother tell you much about the circumstances, the arrangement of her marriage to your father and her? Did she say much about whether she knew that therefore she would be going to the United States fairly permanently?

EH: Yes. I, I think she knew (when) fairly young, and it didn't seem to bother her. One of my nephews interviewed her for a paper, and Sanseis know nothing about, at that point, of what life was like. And John said to my mother, "So how did you meet Grandpa? Were you dating?" And my mother said, "Dating? No. No dating," she said. And he said, "Well, how come you married him?" And her reply was, "Well, everybody has to get married." Nothing more than that. But because she was the oldest and from a good family, she didn't have any problem.

My father, on the other hand, I don't think he ever expected to come back to Japan. So my mother knew him. In fact, at one point my mother... and my mother didn't like to cook. And at one point -- I must have been a young teenager -- she said, "(Yes), I came to America to get away from all them. I didn't like cooking." And she never was a good cook. My sisters and I had to learn all our Japanese cooking by cookbooks. And once in a while when, when you are eating or dining or invited somewhere, then you find out how to make this. I, I struggled with that in junior high school, because when my father became ill we had to run the house. And my mother also (said in) northern Japanese in her days never believed in (using sugar). At least my mother always said, "Sugar makes you weak." And she never used sugar in anything. Lots of shoyu, I mean, everything she cooked was terribly salty. (...) My grandmother, apparently, was very famous for loving to cook, and she had eight children, so they... I don't think they had much in the way of household help because my mother said she used to grumble that -- to her mother -- that, "You're using me like a maid." And the reply was, "Yes, because we're saving money for your higher education." And so she had to accept it from, from then on.

AI: And so when your mother and father got married, would that have been maybe about 1920 or '21?

EH: (Yes). '20-...

AI: Or...

EH: '22. And he had gone back to get married. I think, I've forgot, and one of those trips, I think his father dies. One of his parent dies, so it was kind of a double-duty trip. But she, she came in '22 and I was born in '23. In fact, when my mother came, my father had made arrangements with a friend in San Francisco, so that she could learn American housekeeping. She worked as a household help, and my mother recollected often that Mrs. Laundry was so pleased when my mother said one morning, "Good morning, Mrs. Laundry," and Mrs. Laundry was just overjoyed and clapping, because she finally learned how to speak English. But she said things like telephones just really impressed her, that Mrs. Laundry was always on the telephone. And of course in Japan, nobody ever saw a telephone at that time. But she, she liked learning American things and Western things, and even after she came to Sacramento, she always went to cooking classes. But that, that was kind of organized, somebody organized five or six or seven, ten Japanese women and they, they found somebody who was, who liked to teach cooking and, and it was done in a park department, small park building. But when we were in Chico there was no Japanese church.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.