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TI: Besides Japanese language school, any other Japanese activities like picnics and things that you remember from Portland?

ST: Well, the Japanese language school had an undoukai, they called it, every year at the end of summer, I mean, in the summertime. And we would all gather, we would bring picnic lunches and there would be competition, the running with the egg and the three-legged races and tossing the raw eggs and that kind of stuff. It was lots of fun, and that's when I think both schools got together for this, north and south. And so it was a big community event. It was probably the big social community event. We went to other things. There was lots of, what do they call those? Oh, they'd have kind of like talent shows. There was one hall on the east side that had a stage, it was a very nice Japanese hall, and there would be programs there. My sister was taking shamisen at that time, the family had sent her a small-scale shamisen, and so she took lessons for that. The teacher was actually my, had been midwife when I was born, and so she was sort of our godmother, you might say. She wanted to be sure we were raised properly. And so she would, we would go visit her quite often, and I took, I started taking koto lessons. My sister had been taking the shamisen lessons for quite a while, so she was quite good. She would play in these events. The relatives from Japan, in Japan would send us, send my sister beautiful kimono and obi and all the gear so that she would be properly dressed for these. And, but I started the koto. It was kind of a failure because as you know, I didn't know what I was singing. And it was very hard in the knees, because you had to kneel. And I would use all these cushions, and my girlfriend decided she was, her family decided she was gonna have lessons, too, so we would both go to the lessons. And all we would think of was, "When can we stand up?" And she was, she was a very nice teacher, but she had been raised very properly. And the funny thing was she had the hotel, and downstairs was a restaurant. And we had lessons on Saturday, which was when this, my girlfriend would come in from the country, her father had a place out in the country. And we would practice, we would go through the lesson. And one day she said to us, "You know, you two have got to get these lessons down better and advance," she says. "It's so embarrassing. I was talking to the owner of the restaurant downstairs and he says, 'Seems like those two have been on that same piece for an awful long time.'" [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] Oh, that's good.

ST: Well, it was because we couldn't memorize any of that. [Laughs]

TI: That's funny. What's interesting to me is how other community members kind of pitched in to help raise you with things like this.

ST: Yes. Well, there was that... well, and then we had some other family friends. One was a, she was a, they had a cleaning shop, laundry or cleaning shop where she was, of course, a good seamstress because that kind of goes along with it. So I remember her sewing dresses for us. We had two beautiful dresses that she designed, and they were alike, my sister and I, and we were given that one year for a present. So there were people that were looking out for us.

TI: Going back to the home life, like who would do the daily cooking and things like that?

ST: Well, my sister cooked, kind of. My father really did... I have to say, my father believed that he should do everything, that the children shouldn't do anything. This is the way we were raised. And we actually lived behind the store, so it was a small living quarters, we had an upstairs and downstairs. But he did all the laundry and ironing. Even, but my sister did, started doing the cooking. I think by the time I went home, she was starting to do the cooking. Oh, that's right, she did the cooking because she had to have the rice done by dinnertime. And so that sort of thing, and we, my father would teach her how to cook. He would tell her what to do because we had no one to... and of course there were no such things as recipe books then. And so that was pretty much it. I knew how to, by the time we went to camp, I knew how to make one dish, and that was shoyu wieners. [Laughs]

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.