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MA: So you said you were born in 1919, and what was your father's job at that time?

SE: He always dealt in real estate, and so he had an office as a real estate, and helped people find places for business and homes.

MA: Was this mostly with Japanese Americans?

SE: Well, yeah, Japanese, and he had an office down in Prefontaine Place in Seattle? You know of that?

MA: What was that?

SE: Prefontaine Place? Near Smith Tower. And I don't know, just years, a few years back, when we went to Seattle, we saw his business sign. He called his business Sankosha, and he had this, his logo and all.

MA: I see. So he was kind of a real estate...

SE: Uh-huh. He would find places for people to have businesses or to buy homes.

MA: Was he pretty successful during that time, financially?

SE: I think so, yes. He, well, there were eight of us. So an awful lot of kids to clothe and feed. I suppose we had some hard times and things, but, because the trouble was, he dealt so much with his Japanese friends, and so he would never bill them. You know, like you were supposed to bill them so many percent of what you do, so at Christmastime, we'd have our house, we don't know where to put 'em, sacks of rice and tubs of miso, and we had rice and miso, and he, I don't know where he learned how to make tofu. And he would start tofu-ya and teach people how to make it, but he never really liked the manual labor of doing it, I guess, so he would teach people how to make tofu and age, and he would start them in business. So he was mainly doing things that way instead of going out and working and earning regular money.

MA: Did your mother work as well?

SE: Busy having kids, she didn't have time. [Laughs] And then, let's see, when I was in, I think I must have been in kindergarten, we lived that house in King Street, there used to be a lower porch and an upstairs porch which had a railing around it. But it was about two feet from the edge of the house, the porch did not extend to the end of the house. And when I was about five years old, I was in school, why, my younger brother, the two younger brothers were playing outside, and Mother -- oh, I guess the youngest brother was still a baby. And Mother was going to put him for a nap, and she was in the upstairs, and she couldn't find the children, the other brother, and she was calling out to him and leaned over the banister and it broke, and she plunged to the ground below. Her head hit right between a brick walk -- no, her ankle, her feet, hit the brick walk, and her feet landed right down, I forgot how it was, but anyway, she crushed both ankles, she broke her hip and her leg, and the neighbor, my brother went and called the neighbor ladies and they, you know, in those days, they didn't know any better, they carried her into the house and onto the davenport, and then my brother called Dad at his office. Upstairs in Dad's office was a doctor, and so he and the doctor took a cab and went to the house. But in Japanese, when they say "wrist," they say tekubi. So my brother ran to the neighbor's house and told Dad that I had broken my neck. So the doctor didn't trust himself driving, he had a cab, they took a cab. And when I went upstairs to take a nap, to lie down, because it was in pain, and when they came, they came home, when I came out and stood at the top of the stairs, there were about thirteen steps, and I was walking down the steps, and the doctor gave a sigh of relief that I hadn't broken my neck. [Laughs]

MA: Was your mother able to recover from that fall?

SE: She was a cripple always. They didn't set the bone right, and so I know there was a couple that did needle, where they heat the needle and give you acupressure...

MA: Acupuncture?

SE: Acupress-, points for acupuncture where they use the needle to... so that's how they did for her.

MA: Wow.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.