<Begin Segment 4>

DG: Probably had to do with your upbringing and your family situation. So let's go back. You were born where?

MH: Tono, Iwate-ken.

DG: Okay. That's in what part of Japan?

MH: Iwate-ken is northern part of Japan. Father become Christian after the graduate law school and then he became sick. He thought he was a TB, tuberculosis, and then doctor think so, too. And then he became a Christian so family disowned him because Christian.

DG: Okay. And you said that his family was a samurai family?

MH: Yes, Karo. I didn't know that one Sendai minister came, and then I'm talking to Reverend Wada this way, but if this is a hundred years ago and I can't talk to him. It's quite a different class. That's what he said and then they said the Karo's son and I'm a rice inspector's son. That's what he said. My father was on that platform with closed eyes and didn't say anything. [Laughs] Later he said to him, "Please don't tell like that front of people because some people hurt."

DG: Okay. So tell me a little bit about your father and mother were married, right, and then they, and he became converted to Christianity before that, and then he got married, did he, and became a minister?

MH: My mother is a Morioka and then the father (Sendai). All the samurai family, of course, and then mother's side is doctor, Nanbu-han datta tonosama no doctor and then he went to Nagasaki and studied.

DG: That's a long way away.

MH: Yes.

DG: And why did he go all the way to Nagasaki to study?

MH: Any other medical school, most recent modern technology was in Portuguese or England people. They brought that.

DG: Okay. Now this is your mother's family, okay, that you're taking about.

MH: Yes.

DG: Okay, and your mother's father was a doctor. And that's --

MH: Mother's father was more like a soldier.

DG: Soldier. But the family was a doctor's family.

MH: Yes.

DG: Okay. And so was your father's family pleased that they got married? You said they disowned him.

MH: Because of Christian. My mother was also became Christian because she went to first high school in Morioka, women's high school is Catholic. No high school, so a Catholic nun came from Paris and then started the high school.

DG: Because it's really important that about that time, Christianity was not favored, right, in Japan and so it was very special to embrace Christianity.

MH: Yes. So she went to a Catholic high school graduate. Also three sisters graduate.

DG: So this was probably early 1900, around 1900?

MH: 1900... I think just became 1900, I think.

DG: So previous to that, like maybe twenty-five years before that, thirty years before that, the samurai was kind of the rulers or the high officials of the country, right? And there was a revolution and so the samurai families, did they, they still held prestige?

MH: Yes, that time. Early Meiji. Meiji changed, but I remember when I was a very little, still have some men that's one that cut off the hair, and they have old-fashioned hair. I heard that in America. I came America and then people ask me first, "They still pistol on the head?" Men. I said, "I never seen a pistol on the head." But, you know, hairdo. Look like it was tied in.

DG: With a pistol.

MH: That's what American people said.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.