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TI: Well, personality-wise, how would you describe him? You mentioned him being somewhat of a rebel or a maverick.

ST: Well, my father was a very -- and I think he's passed some of this along -- he was a very stubborn person. And he would ask advice of people, but he kept his own counsel, you might say. He would think things over, and then he would make his own decisions. And once he'd made his own decision, that was it, there was no changing. And he had, he had a fairly good, hot temper, but he never, ever hit us. His idea of discipline, and it was really bad, was he would sit you down and he would talk to you about how disappointed he was in how you had handled yourself, and how it hurt him to feel that he had failed. And you heard this over and over, it would go on for about an hour. Of course, see, my Japanese was very poor. I understood very little, and I had been raised much differently. So by the time I would receive these lectures, I was about eight or nine years old when I went home, and my sister would have to interpret the lecture. And so it didn't, it didn't hit me that hard, but I knew that if I didn't say I was sorry, "I'm sorry," I wasn't going to hear the end of it. So I would apologize and say I was sorry. I don't know if I was always a hundred percent sorry, but you know, I knew I had failed him. And that was his main way of disciplining, that you failed.

TI: Well, and you mentioned that he was stubborn, there was a stubborn streak in him. Can you think of an example that would kind of, sort of describe that or show that?

ST: He, I think when he, when Mother died, here he was, he was fifty-five years old at the time. And that would have been considered quite old at that time. And he received a letter from Japan, from my mother's sister, saying, "Please send her home, send the youngest one, at least, and I can take care of that one because you're, you won't be able to take care of a baby."

TI: To send you, essentially, to Japan.

ST: Yeah, send me. But my sister, being seven and in school, see, she would be taken care of for most of the day. And, but my father wanted to prove that he could be a good father, and he could do it all on his own. He wasn't going to, we asked him, "Why didn't you marry?" And he said, "That's true, there were a lot of widows, lot of widows out there looking for a man." But he said he had seen families where they married, and then the husband died, and even if the husband hadn't died, the second wife was not kind to the stepchildren, and she favored her own children over the other children. And so he said he didn't want to see that, and so he was going to try something different. And so, and about my mother's sister writing, many years later her oldest son also decided, he was chonan, but he also decided he didn't want the property, he was going to go, so he went to Brazil, to land, they had kind of a section where a whole bunch of Okayama farmers went over. And he became quite prosperous down there, and so he came back to visit Japan and then he came to the United States and he stopped by and he stayed with us for a while. And so we were able to ask him many questions about what happened, you know, and he said, yes, he remembers the day that he was a young boy playing, and he was playing underneath the house. They had just an open area under the house, and he said it was underneath the living room section where everybody was gathered. And he said the letter came and his mother was so happy because she thought maybe Dad was going to say that she could have me. And she opened the letter and she immediately started crying because she said, "He says no. He says I won't get her, and he says he won't send her." And she was just heartbroken because to her, of course, that was also a connection with her sister, her older sister, who she hadn't seen for quite a while. And so that, she was really upset about that. And so he remembers that part, so he shared that with us, and that was a nice memory.

TI: Now, do you ever think or imagine what your life would have been if you...

ST: It would have been terrible. Because I discovered, when I was eight years old, that the reason I had been ill quite a bit when I was younger was because I had allergies. And I had what, at that time, they used to call it hay fever. And all summer it was just terrible. And my eyes would be swollen red, and I would be sneezing all the time and coughing, and I would catch colds. It was just miserable. And so you could imagine, if I had to go to live on a farm, I would have been in bad shape. [Laughs]

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.