<Begin Segment 10>

TI: So tell me about the training, so you're here a little bit earlier, describe some the training that you received.

MK: Well, all the... the first thing in the morning would be go wash up and then go into the altar and do our chant, would take us an hour. After that I would have to go out in the yard and rake the lawn, make sure that all the gravel were lined with the rake marks straight. And if it wasn't straight I'd have to redo it again. And my grandfather says it's got to be straight, sometimes be out there 'til ten, almost noon just to get it straight. He said, "It wasn't so good this time, but tomorrow you'll do better." And after that it was like, you have to keep the church clean, so that was on your hands and knees and mop the... and he said this was all part of the, it wasn't supposed to be education, but it was religious training to become a minister. It was traditional. Then, afternoon, after I get some relaxation, then I would be out in the niwa, in the, where they had all the veranda going around the -- and I'd be over there he'd have newspaper all lined up for me, and he'd get the sumi and the fude, and he start teaching me how to write calligraphy. And that, about... and then learn the chants. To this day I still... I never learned the chants outside, but with him I learned the chants, and to this day I remember those chants. And so I go, even though I'm not a minister, I do remember a lot of them.

TI: So it sounds like he spent a lot of time with you, this kind of special time between you and your grandfather.

MK: Yes. My grandfather, yes, so I liked him very much, because he was so gentle to me. My father was opposite. My father was terroristic, but my grandfather was very gentle, to extremes.

TI: Earlier you talked about how the church would belong to the family, so this is on your mother's side, the Tashiro. Can you describe the church, and was this a big church, a small church? Was land associated with it?

MK: Yes.

TI: What was it like?

MK: The Tashiro... I don't know anything about the Kitajima church, but that, that demolished. The only thing -- I'll go over the Kitajima side first because it's easier. The Kitajima side, the only thing that was left was my grandfather's grave. And at that time, because he was a minister, the church, people donated enough money that he had a big gravestone. I remember that, at that church that he was at, they had a large grave, grave for him. The monument gravestone. And I asked my dad, I said, "How come" -- later on, I asked my dad -- "How come Ojiichan has a big grave marker and he lost all the money?" He said, "Well, the marker is there because his ancestors are still there, and being the last, they have to have something there for him, in memory of the Kitajima." That's all I remember. I never even saw that church. I don't know where the church was or anything like that. But my grandfather on the Tashiro side, their church was big, very big. I would, I don't know, I don't know how big the land holding was, but... there were farmers renting land from the church, from Tashiro land, and they used to farm on the land, raise rice. And I remember in October all these farmers used, brought the rice over to the church as payment for the land that they used, the church's. And the rice merchant came and gathered all their rice and took it to town, and when he brought some paperwork, my grandfather, my grandfather showed it to me, says, "This is the money that's gonna keep the church going for the whole next year." So he had, that gives some kind of idea how much property they had.

TI: Wow, so the rice harvest sustained the church.

MK: The church, yes.

TI: And that's how, I guess, the people...

MK: That's how the churches used to survive. That's how my, Kitajima side was also, because that's the way that the shogun had established it. That's why they gave the Joudo Shuu church all this land so that they could subsist on their own. And to this day... they've lost all the farmland, but they still have the proper, the land proper for the church itself. And to this day they have quite a bit of holding in the church, and they don't have to worry about losing it in inheritance like other people, because the fact that it's a church granted to them before, different from the royalties who keep losing it in inheritance. But in a sense it's good, but then they don't have the income, so, like my cousin, they have to go to work. He's a schoolteacher. Teaches school, teaches school.

TI: During this, when you were a young boy with your grandfather, did he ever talk about that one day you would come back and maybe be the minister at that church? Did he ever talk about --

MK: No, we never talked about where I would go or where we'd live. He, my grandmother asked me, my grandmother asked me, "Would you like to come back to Japan to live?" And I told her, "No, I don't like to come back to Japan to live," and she said, "Why?" I said, "Because it's getting too cold." And this was in October, I believe, and was right after typhoon had come across. I says, "I don't like this kind of weather." The kawara fall off the roof and all this, then we got to worry about the house breaking down, so, "I don't like this. I want to go back to Hawaii." I remember saying that to her.

TI: But I can imagine that they saw you and they probably wanted you to stay.

MK: [Laughs] Yes.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.