<Begin Segment 16>

TI: So let's talk about your father's poems. So when he was in the camps, he wrote two poems, I think?

KT: Yeah, two, three, I think. I have that with me. And because he had it, written the date and all that, the one was one, I think it was 1944, April, April when they flew to Santa Fe. That Santa Fe is New Mexico?

Off camera voice: They cannot fly then.

TI: They took a train.

KT: They went, I thought they fly. [Laughs] But he says, "sora."

TI: So Mrs. Hagiwara, can we get the poems, and I want to have her show 'em. So these were, I want you just to show the camera these, the poems.

KT: [Holding up poems] This is the one. This is the one, Santa Fe one.

TI: So, yeah, just hold it right there. Yeah, hold it like it's right there.

KT: This is for the Santa Fe one, and...

TI: So these are the original poems.

KT: This is the original, original, that's his writing.

TI: And can you, can you read that for us?

KT: Oh, I will read the back. The first word is, "Atatakaya shaba no ka u se shi te wo nigiru." So it means, "Warm but the prison feeling is gone. I shall pray." That's why, then they flew over.

TI: So this is when he went from --

KT: When he went to Santa Fe.

TI: To Santa Fe.

KT: Yeah. That's what is written here. "Atatakaya shaba no ka u se shi te wo (nigiru)." Haiku you read twice. Once you read, second time you read, then the feeling come in. In that short 5-7-5 word, the meaning is right there.

TI: And when was the first time you read these poems?

KT: When I first read this poem, I thought, "Oh, they must have had a rough time." Because when he says shaba, it's "prison," the word. It's not a place. And that one, the feeling, everything, gone. "We're going over, away from there." That's what it meant. So they must have had a hard time. When I read that, I thought, "Oh, he must have had..." well, we couldn't correspond with him anyway. So this is one poem that I really like.

TI: And when did you first see the poem? Was this after the war that you saw these?

KT: Oh, yeah. Way later I found this kind of stuff. I didn't know he wrote. I thought he didn't write. Because I know he didn't write anything down there. Ozaki-sensei did, Ozaki Otokichi, the Hawaii Times reporter, too. But he was our teacher in dokuritsu. I got contact with him, he wrote lot of poem there, but not him [referring to father]. This was the only poem, two, I think, that he wrote.

TI: And then the second one, you said he wrote two poems.

KT: "Tsuki ni naku tori ari kora no touki kana." He's being, follow where the children are, his family, his father's family. So he was thinking about us.

TI: Thank you for sharing that. So those were the two that he wrote.

KT: Yeah. The other one that... he had one that when he came back from intern, that's the one he wrote, that was, "Shima wa kea sa shi no wo sumu tokoro." That one I remember because I liked that poem so much because it said, "Where I live, Mauna Kea, that's where my family, my wife and children are." That's when he came back. That's what he wrote. That poem, it's in me. I liked it very much. I know his feeling. His feeling is there.

TI: Thank you, that was beautiful.

KT: I was going to give you folks this, but my daughter said --

TI: Oh, no, you should keep them. [Laughs]

KT: "No. If you're going to give, you should make a copy of it."

TI: You should probably frame them or something.

KT: So haiku is in the short time, you put all your feeling in. That's why Japanese haiku is real good, and I cannot do it. [Laughs]

TI: When your father came back, what was that like for you when you saw your father?

KT: Well, at least I knew he was safely home. And I could see that he was so happy to see the children, so that's why, that's the first photo they took of him, carrying her.

TI: 'Cause this was the first time he had seen them.

KT: Yeah. And he didn't show that he was unhappy or anything, he showed us he was very happy to see us. Right away, he changed up. [Laughs] Right away, he resigned from Nippu Jiji, Hawaii Times at that time, and opened his own shop. That was his dream.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.