<Begin Segment 14>

TI: And so on that last one when you found out, did you get a sense... was he talking to you or just the whole family?

MK: No, he was talking to my mom, really. Mom, Mom came home and told us after we had seen Dad. The only time was... the last outing we had at Wailua, Mom, Mom said, "Say goodbye to Dad because you don't see him a long time again." So I remember my daughter -- my, not my daughter, my sister -- crying, saying something about cannot, "Where you gonna be?" and this and that. "You got to come home." But says, "Cannot, so you got to gaman," and that's about all I heard him say. And Mom wasn't crying so it didn't really, never affected me until I went home, and then once we got home then Mom explained to me that Dad was gonna leave, he didn't know when. But then that night I heard her crying, so I knew something was really different now. Things had changed all of a sudden.

TI: So how did you feel about that, because, even though you're young, you're the oldest son? Did you feel any, you know, added responsibility?

MK: Yes, I felt that. Like my Dad said to me, says, "Masamizu, you're the oldest. Otousan wa inai kara. Kore kara Otousan nate kure."

TI: So explain to me what...

MK: He said that he is not gonna be here, he's... so we have no father, so I have to take the role of father of the family. And here, eight years old, I don't know what eight years old being the father of the family meant, you know. But I knew something had changed, so I took that to heart, and when I heard Mom crying at night, I kind of... I think that changed my life. I kinda felt my carefree life, living as a child, no longer existed. To this day I feel bad about that, that... I feel like I lost something.

TI: Yeah, it's such a difficult situation, and then to be so young, and in some ways so helpless, but then given so much responsibility.

MK: Can't do anything. And I think it hurt more because I had been in Japan just recently before that. I had, I had missed them so much, that I wasn't with them, and here I came home with them. And right when I came home, then I lost them again.

TI: Yeah, that's hard. Because not only were you probably worried about your mother, but you had your younger siblings, too, your, you mentioned your sister crying.

MK: I wasn't, I guess I was more worried about my mother and never really thought about my brothers and sisters as such, because they were all younger than I was and we all played together. We had nobody else to play with, so we always played together. So I never realized what this would do to us.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.