<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So I want to, so we're back to the point when your, your father and George started this.

HS: The restaurant.

TI: And this was around 1915.

HS: '15, they started around 1915.

TI: So at some point, your father went back to Japan to marry --

HS: He went back to Japan --

TI: -- to marry his first wife.

HS: -- after they got well-established. I think it was about 1915, went back to Japan about, be about '16, '17 that he went back to Japan, and he married his first wife, and they had a child.

TI: Now, was the plan for him to stay in Japan, or to come back?

HS: No, no, he had to come back, of course. He just went there, and I guess the idea was that he was going to bring her, he was going to bring her to Canada, but she stayed in Japan while he came back, and during that period, so his, so my brother Andy was born about 1918, and she died soon after childbirth with, with the epidemic that went around the world at that time, Spanish flu. So he was left with the, the grandparents took over his rearing, and of course, he stayed there and went to school there and everything else. He was brought up in Japan until, oh, until, like you say, 1936, '37. So that would be almost when he was, he'd be what, seventeen then or something like that. Eighteen when he came to, came to Prince Rupert.

TI: So after your father's first wife died, how did he meet your, your mother?

HS: Well, he came, he then, of course, he was back in Canada by the time, they were working on the restaurant and enlarging it and becoming bigger, and in, well, 1923, he went back to Japan. At that time, he met my, it was an arranged marriage, he met my mother and he married my mother. And then they, she came back with him. He was there for a while, because he, they probably didn't get back here 'til about, get back to Prince Rupert 'til about 1925 or so.

TI: Now it sounds like, based on your description of the business, that your father was, it sounds like, a fairly prominent businessperson in Prince Rupert.

HS: Oh, yeah. He became quite a prominent businessman in the Japanese sense. He took part in the Japanese Association that they had, and he was a part of that group of Japanese businessmen that you might say were the, the doers of the, of that, of the Japanese population in Prince Rupert. Because most of the other people were fishermen, he was doing the restaurant and hotel business. And his friend the Yamanakas did the groceries, and there was about... and then there was a few others that their whole associations were made of people who were in the business of one type or another. They were, they were people who were tailors and had tailor shops, they were people who had laundry shops, things of this nature.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.