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BH: And you grew up during the Depression, so how did your family handle the financial situation?

KH: I wasn't aware of the family having difficulties during the Depression. Because back in 1933, my mother took six of us to Japan from March to June, and we visited the grandparents in Kagoshima, and then we also, six children was I think a bit too much for Grandma and Grandpa, so my mother decided that she better find a place to stay. And so a farmer and his wife took us in in Ibusuki, and that's where we went sunamoshi, which is like a hot spring, but then it's, the beach sands are very hot. And we would just go down there and play in the water, and then come in and there would be an old man with a shovel, and we'd just go up to him and say we want to get in the sand. And he would dig a little trench, and we just crawled in the trench, and he covered us up to our neck. And that's how we, how we played when we were in Ibusuki. And then the farmer would take a day off from his work, and he would take us hiking. And I, when I think back on it now, I think we were really bad. [Laughs] We were so tired on that hike, we weren't used to something like that. We just complained the whole way through, and the farmer would cut little staves and said, "Use this, and this will help you walk." I remember that. Then another thing I remember about the farmer is the Japanese used, used to fertilize their vegetables with the increments from the latrines. And he would do that once a month, and while we were eating our dinner, we would smell that awful waft, there he is again. [Laughs]

BH: So you must have been there for some time.

KH: Well, we were there, well, in Japan three months.

BH: For three months?

KH: Uh-huh.

BH: And you were ten years old?

KH: Uh-huh. I do remember we made side trips. We did go to Nara, and the, the couple who was the go-between for my mother and father, they took us out to dinner at this Nara hotel, and it was very fancy. We were dressed in our best clothes, and I remember looking at Bako. We had, I think, a waiter for each two person, and they came around with this tureen of something real fluffy and white. And I thought it was mashed potatoes and took a, had a big scoop served, and I noticed Bako did the same thing. The first bite, it was creamed turnips; it was not mashed potatoes. So we left that on our plates.

BH: And you had mentioned that, I believe it was at customs, your mother had lemons and cantaloupes, cigars.

KH: Oh, this is when we arrived in Japan. It's not a... it was going through customs, and I remember they first checked us out for the fruits that we were, that my mother was bringing into the country. She had a crate of cantaloupes and a crate of melons, and I know she had some lemons. And when the customs fellow came through, she said, "Help yourself," and he took about five lemons out of the box, opened the box and took five lemons. He didn't take any of the cantaloupes or melons, but something happened to the cantaloupes, they never reached Kagoshima. It was shipped from, we landed in Kobe, it was supposed to have been shipped, but it was lost en route.

BH: And you'd also mentioned something about a box of cigars that your mother had.

KH: Oh, my mother had a box of Havana cigars, and they didn't want, customs didn't want to let that go into the country. And my mother said, "Well, it's for myself." She was told to come into a lounge upstairs, and she said, "It's for me," and she took a cigar and she just sat there and clipped it and smoked it, I think, and then she said took puffs out of it saying, "I can smoke cigar." So they said, "Okay, you can bring it into the country."

BH: Originally, though, she hadn't planned on smoking them herself?

KH: No, oh, no.

BH: They were a gift, then?

KH: They were going to confiscate it, I guess.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.