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MN: Tell us the story of when he took you to the mountains to see the snow. How often was this and where did you go? Did you go to Mount Wilson?

AM: Yes, it was Mount Wilson. In fact, when he said that in a few weeks he's gonna take us to Mount Wilson because there was quite a bit of snow up there, so I remember I, in fact, when I was only about ten years old, I didn't have any sled or anything, so I decided maybe I'll try to make one, so I did make a sled, although it wasn't that good of a sled. [Laughs] But I did that, yes. And there's also a picture that he took of me playing in the snow with the sled. He took movies of it. So he did quite a bit for us.

MN: Your father also loved music and he was also in a band.

AM: Yes.

MN: Can you share with us what was the band called and what instrument he played?

AM: He used to play saxophone, as I recall. In fact, when we went back to Japan he took that saxophone with him and he used to play that every now and then even in Japan, just for himself, not for the band or orchestra or anything, but just for the hobby of it he used to play, blow on his saxophone. But I used to like to hear him play the saxophone because there were a lot of songs that I liked that he played. And he really had interest in music.

MN: Do you know how he learned to play saxophone?

AM: I really don't know.

MN: And the band, was that called Mikado?

AM: Oh, yeah. That's right, there was a Mikado band that he played with. It was a pretty popular group that, people used to hire this band to play music for them for occasions, and so whenever the, those days, whenever Japanese community had some kind of activity they would invite this band, Mikado band, to play in their program, so they were pretty busy doing that, as entertainment.

MN: Your father was really busy. I'm gonna, I want to ask a little bit about you now. Which grammar school did you attend?

AM: I went, when I was living in Boyle Heights, that's where most of the Japanese people lived because there was, Little Tokyo was getting too filled up with people and so the only place to live, closest place was Boyle Heights, so we lived in Boyle Heights for quite a few years, which was, the house that we lived in was near the First Street School. We lived on Evergreen Avenue and I used to walk to school from there, which was only about three, four blocks away.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.