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TI: So you mentioned you had an older sister. And what was your older sister's name?

TO: Akiko.

TI: Okay, and then you came next. And then after you?

TO: Reiko, my sister Reiko. And then my youngest brother Juro.

TI: And what was the age differences between the siblings?

TO: I think it's about two years apart. And my father, for some reason, from his first marriage, every other one was a male and a female. The oldest was a sister, and then a male, then a female, all the way down the line, eight of us. I don't know how this all happened, but that was always amazing. But my younger brother and sisters are gone now.

TI: But your older sister is still alive?

TO: Yeah, and she lives in Connecticut. Very interesting situation with her. She never had any children and she married three times. All of her husbands died of cancer and all three of 'em were smokers. [Laughs] But anyway, she had stepchildren but she wasn't real close to them and so three years ago she moved out to Seattle because all her nieces and nephew and brother and my younger sister were still living then. But she just didn't like it out here. She just didn't fit in. She was with the Caucasian community. You know, our community is very close, but for some reason she didn't feel comfortable at all among the Nisei. And she just couldn't make those kind of friends that she had in Connecticut. So she was here for about two and a half years, and she just pulled up everything, stakes, and moved back to Connecticut, and she's happy as a clam back there.

TI: That's interesting. So at what point, she grew up, you know, with the family, at what point did she leave the community?

TO: Well, from camp, she went to, she went to New York City. She went to St. Louis first to work as a housegirl going to school part-time. Then this family moved to New York City, and he was promoted and was transferred to New York City. She went with the family to New York City and then she met this Chinese guy and she got married. And this Chinese husband, family, had, in the restaurant business, so they were going to open up a restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut. So she, they were asked if they'd go out to manage that Chinese restaurant, which that's how she ended up in Connecticut. And then the problem with a Chinese restaurant in Connecticut, you couldn't get any cooks. No Chinese cooks would want to go to Connecticut because there's no Chinese out there. So I think they finally sold the restaurant and got out of the business. And then her husband got lung cancer, I think he was a young man, about twenty-eight years old. Then she was all alone back there, so we told her to bring her husband out here. So he passed away here in Seattle, living with us.

TI: But it's interesting, I was thinking of all the Niseis who, from the camp, resettled away from the West Coast like your sister. And just in terms of how, how they feel about the community, their difficulty and perhaps coming back to the community. If she were to, if we were to ask her to describe the Japanese community in Seattle, how do you think she would describe the community?

TO: I think... well, I don't know. I think somehow she felt uncomfortable because we were so close and we had so much things in common. But she had the camp experience and evacuation in common. But when we were kids, when we were growing up out in the country, like I told you earlier, there was very few Japanese that we associated with. Because there was very few Japanese going to school. I think there was two other families that went to the same school, so she was never really with the, into the Japanese community like the kids that grew up in this neighborhood here. And so that was a difference with her. And then she was out there after the war, and so she never was associated with Japanese community. She just didn't have that connection or that feeling, although she did have some Nisei friends that she grew up with, that few that she got pretty close to in camp that she visited here. One of 'em was up in Mt. Vernon, Sakumas, one of the Sakumas' brides, brothers, one of the brides was one of her dear friends.

TI: Well, let's, I'll probably come back and ask you a question later because your path is very different. I mean, you are a key leader in the Japanese community in Seattle. So we'll come back to it later, because it's a nice kind of comparison to look at.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.