<Begin Segment 5>

TI: So I'm thinking about your father, who would run all these hotels, and then in your family you had eight children. So I'm guessing that your father really focused on the business side, and your mom focused more on the family and the raising of the children?

MH: Right, right. My dad, my mother had nothing to do with his business.

TI: So that's what I was going to ask. I mean, oftentimes when people run a business like a hotel, the family really helps out. Did you and your siblings and your mother help out at all with the hotels?

MH: Not at all, not at all. We never lived in his hotels, never. He always had a separate residence for us, because he was prosperous at one time. He had a car that someone else drove, and Mother could go anywhere, just let the chauffeur know. So we were, but we were dirt-poor, we weren't poverty-stricken when the crash came. He lost his hotels one after another, then we lost our home, which, which was a rather nice home in those days. Eighteenth and King was a fairly decent place for Asians to live. So, yeah, my dad was a man who never got angry with us, but he laid down the law, but in a gentle way.

TI: Well, let's talk about, sort of that Depression area, or era. So the stock market crash was 1929, and how soon after that did it really start impacting your dad's business? So how, when you said he started losing the hotels, was that, like, early '30s, then? Probably around 1931, '32? You would have been about --

MH: I think it was earlier. I think he started to lose his hotels before the crash, I think so.

TI: So you were, like, twelve, thirteen years old, about then, when all this was happening? 'Cause you were born in 1916, so 1930, you would have been fourteen years old.

MH: I must have been.

TI: So how, so how did your father react? I imagine that was so difficult for him.

MH: It was very hard for him, but I don't think we as children really felt it. I didn't. It was still Papa, and he'd come home with little presents for us. In those days, if he brought home the pink grapefruits, he would, we would all be in bed and, "Papa got grapefruit," come scurrying down the stairs just to eat the pink grapefruits, you know, the red grapefruits. And he would once in a while stop at a very fancy bakery down on, it's down towards Pioneer Square now, but it was one of the best bakeries in town. He'd pick up some goodies for us, and we'd come scurrying down, even if we're in bed, to eat these things. So he was a very, he was a businessman, but he had a feeling for his family. I just loved my dad.

TI: What about his role in the community? Sounds like by being prosperous, he was probably pretty involved with the Japanese Association?

MH: No, he didn't, he is a man that never liked to be in the limelight, and he would contribute money, and he would do all that, but he never became a member of the Japanese council or anything like that. No, he played a very low-profile, kept a low profile. And my husband is just the same way, so is my son. He just didn't like all that, Nihonjinkai, you know.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.