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Title: Setsu Tsuboi Tanemura Interview
Narrator: Setsu Tsuboi Tanemura
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: November 12, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-tsetsu-01-0002

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TI: Well, so we mentioned your father. Can you tell me your father's name?

ST: It was Kumajiro Tsuboi, and he was the second son. So that meant that he could get out of Japan. His father, his family were fairly large landowners, they were farmers. And he got along very well with his dad. His dad and he used to drink, he said that he didn't like it, but his dad would ask him to talk with him after dinner, just the two of them would talk, and he enjoyed talking with him. And they'd always share, have a glass of -- I said, "Sake?" And he said, "No, it was something else." I don't know, some kind of a brandy or something like that, that was his, that would be his father's favorite. And they would sit and sip this and discuss life. And so when my dad was probably around... he would have been about twenty-four, twenty-five, he decided he wanted to leave Japan and go to the United States and be, have an adventure. And his father did not want him to leave. And he said, "I can't, the land has to go to your oldest brother, because that, you can't split up the land." He said, "But," he said, "I'm going to deed over to you a portion of land." He said, "It's not enough to really make a big living, but," he said, "it's enough to sustain you. And it'll be here for you always, so you can always come back, and it will be there for you so you'll have a place." And he hoped that he would go have his adventure and then return to Japan, but my dad did not. And so it was in his name all the time. But when the occupation came, and the government said there could be no absentee ownership of land, so the relatives wrote and said, "Instead of putting it up and letting somebody, a stranger buy it, we're selling it to one of the family members who liked this piece." And so they did that, and then they took the money and put it in an account for my father. However, they could not send money from Japan to United States at that time. So they said, "We'll have it in the account, and you let us know what you want to spend from it." So he spent from that account to pay for things like what would be koden over here, and gifts that he might want to give to some of the people graduating or something like that. And the interesting thing about... the last part of the account was spent when first my sister got married, and he was a very traditionalist because, of course, he was fifty-three years old when I was born. So he was like a grandparent, one generation removed, you made an investigation of the groom's family. So he sent... so it would be two of our aunts, traveled to, it would be my sister's fiance's family to investigate the family and send the report to my father. And the same thing happened when I was married in 1960.

TI: Oh, so he had an investigation of your husband's family in Japan.

ST: Yes, yes. And everybody was... well, see, at the time I married Kaz, both his parents had died. And then, of course, you see, they were both out-of-towners, so he had no, my father had no one to ask anything about the family because he didn't know any of them, because they're both Seattle, Washington, people. And so he sent them, and the comment was, after we were married," Boy, if our dad had known that, he would have hit the ceiling." And I says, "Well, my father's reply would have been, 'You're welcome to do the same thing.'"

TI: Interesting. What an interesting legacy, from that land that your grandfather deeded to your father.

ST: Yes.

TI: It sounded like such a special relationship between your father and your grandfather.

ST: I think it was. I think there was a better relationship between my father and his father than there was with the oldest son, who was not as, probably as, maybe as outgoing. It was just different. But then chonan is chonan.

TI: So you mentioned they were landowners. Can you tell me what part of Japan...

ST: It was a prefecture of Okayama, and it was a very small village. In fact, my mother and father both came from the same area. It was near the, what is now the city of Kurashiki, which is a beautiful town. They call it the "museum town," there are some very fine museums there. Which makes another interesting statement, that one of the people who was born there made big money. And so he wanted to do something for his village, for Kurashiki, which was still a very small town at that time. So he donated, and this would be back in probably '50s or so, he donated five million dollars for -- this is what I heard -- for a museum. And there are some very nice artworks, I can't remember the artists now, but some well-known and reputable European artists, mostly modern art.

TI: Did your father ever return back?

ST: No, he did not. And I think there are several things involved here. One is that when people came to the United States, they did not always come as themselves. Some people came in as cousins and nephews who had no relationship, and this was after, when you had to start having proof of who you were, I think before you just came in. You didn't have to have anything. But when he came, the last time he came with my mother, he had a passport from Japan, and it was stamped. And he had, it was, the date was on there, it was a date in March. Well, when he entered into United States and it was stamped by the U.S. officials, it was one of those rubber stamp kind of things where you move the month and date. Someone made an error, and so when they stamped it, it looked like he arrived in the United States before he had left Japan on the boat. Well, it's obvious when you look at it that it was a mistake, but my father was, you know, very worried about this. He never mentioned this to us, but this was, I think, one of his worries, because he was always afraid that depending upon the official you ran into, were they going to say, "Oh, well, it's just a mistake," or were they going to use this for an excuse to exclude him and say, refuse entry? So I think that was kind of governing part, that was kind of in the back of his mind, because he told us, when we said to him, "Why don't you go back and visit now that" -- this was after I graduated college, and I said, "We both have jobs now, and we can send you, pay for the tickets and everything, and you could take the omiyage and go and visit." And he said, "No," and he said he was worried, and he said he knew people in Portland who would not dare to go back because they had no proof of who they were, and they would not be able to reenter. And he was just... and we said, "Well, you have proof, you came through legally." And he says, "Yeah, but you never can tell," and he says, "I would never last in Japan." He says, "I don't want to live there."

TI: Interesting.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.