Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Nancy K. Araki Interview I
Narrator: Nancy K. Araki
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: September 3, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-anancy-01-0006

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So I kind of want to move on now, so we've talked your, your father now has this pea farm, one crop. How does he meet your mother?

NA: From what I gather, he, I think... well my mom, my grandmother had somehow got, gotten to know through mutual friends one of the brothers. This would be, which one? Terao. And my mom would visit her mom, I guess, or however this was going on and it's through Terao that introduced my mom and dad together.

TI: And talk about the courtship. I mean, how, so your father is farming and where is your mom?

NA: She's in San Francisco.

TI: Okay, so let's, let's first talk about your mother first. So why don't you tell me her name and where she was born?

NA: Okay. Her name is Masa Sugiura, and she was born in Oakland.

TI: Okay, so she was Nisei. And do you know about when she was born?

NA: '11, I think.

TI: Okay. And tell me a little bit about her family.

NA: Okay, in order to do that I got to talk about my grandmother, because Grandmother becomes very critical in my life, anyway. My grandmother was born Sata Asakura and she comes from a very notable family, I mean long history and all. That family right now has, is in its twenty-fifth generation of being physicians. They have their own hospital clinic area in Ibaragi area. They were originally, real long time ago, ancestors, ancestor home was in Fukui. They're right now digging up that site as an archaeological site, and so if you ever get to Fukui you could go to the, what is it, Ichinodani area, and it's been a site that they start digging in '53, I think. But so they're doing, replicating the town of that castle town, and the castle is now coming up and the gardens got to be a cultural asset and all that kind of stuff, so it's real, this is the myth of our family that we had to discover after our dad died and all of the sibs went and we said, "Well, while we're here let's go check out all the 'myths' that we grew up with," because we knew that there was this archaeological dig. We knew my, enough about the family history on my grandmother's side. We know enough about Dad's side and all that, so we did this grand tour and like, wow, okay. And then all of a sudden some things came together, some of the inside family jokes between my father and mother, 'cause it, as it turns out -- and we knew this -- that my father, his place he grew up is near where Miyamoto Musashi birth home and where this ancestral area of the Asakura is where, what do you call, who's the guy that got defeated?

TI: Okay, but they were on opposing sides?

NA: Sasaki. Yeah. Yeah, the big battle that eventually happened. But anyways, so then, then one side is somen, because my great grandfather had brought in somen as an industry, and that's a big industry in the area right now, and then this side, Fukui, is soba. So all of us, oh, you begin to say, these are the kind of stuff that you didn't quite understand until you start digging up history.

TI: Because your mother and father would kind of banter or, or they'd have these little things about soba and somen and these great warriors?

NA: Yeah. And my, yeah, my mom, my dad would be very amakuchi, sweet tooth, and my grandmother, mother would be much more on the savory side, and that's Kanto. That's the, you know... and he's the Kansai, and so it's really, it's kind of, I'm sure other families must do that, but in our family it was like, okay, what's going on? But it was just part of the family.

TI: But not as much sometimes, 'cause a lot of people we interview, their, their grandparents tend to come from almost the same village or there, there isn't as much of that. They're almost from the same clan and things like that, so this is, this is interesting.

NA: Yeah. This, this was, yeah well, it was our discovery after everyone's gone, or our realization. My grandmother came over, she had a real kind of interesting story, she, coming, her family for generations after their defeat ended up becoming physicians and her father and grandfather became very well known burn specialists. And kaji, or the fire, is one of the feared thing in Japan, and partly they were well known, so they had the opportunity to go down, especially the great, great grandfather had, great great grandfather, I guess, had opportunity to do down, travel down to meet with the Dutch or Nagasaki area, and so in the family, if you go to their home now in Ibaragi you find plants that were unusual because they would get it from the Dutch. There're trees, an archway by a maple, not maple but pine tree that's over four hundred years old that they make as an entryway to their hospital area, another one for the family resident area. So she grew up in kind of a different family. Here's a whole different story, but she came over wanting to come over to study medicine, because she wasn't allowed to in Japan. The closest she got was to go study what would be equivalent of pharmacy, kusuri, and the family was enough so that they could go to the imperial, what would be imperial university at that time, when, very early. And her, and she couldn't get into medicine and so she eventually goes to, she's by the way engaged to an up and coming physician, but before they could get married he dies, so she goes off to Tokyo and Aoyama Byouin and start to think in terms of nursing, but that's a real, those days, it was a very low class occupation, but she really didn't know any other way, but started to learn English and all. And this is where she starts to learn that there was a person named Maria Braun in the United States that became the first woman to graduate from medical school and there was hope, and she found out about UC Berkeley, maybe and all, and along the way -- I'm cuttin' this real short -- but she learns that there's a distant relative or, I don't how she, how this came about, but there was this young man wanting to, looking for a bride to go, to live together in California, UC Berkeley, that area. So she says, and she happened to overhear her younger sister asking her father if she could marry, overheard the father says, "Until Sata gets married you can't get married," so that kind of said, well, and here's a way to fulfill her dream. So she marries Sugiura. They come -- I mean, then he's, I think he is already in the United States. She comes over and it ain't the way it is, as one dreams it's gonna be. [Laughs] And he wanted to become an import export trade; he wanted to go into that. And he's from Nagoya area.

TI: So it sounds like the, the relationship wasn't that, that strong then, or it didn't work out that well?

NA: Well, it did, I guess. It's kind of like one of those things. I mean, I grew up from under her influence with the ideas of, like, yamato nadeshiko, that's the female version of yamato damashii, right? So there's a lot of that kind of stories that come in, so I could only imagine, and they had, ultimately they had five children. The oldest, Taruo, and then they had four girls. My mother was the third girl and there's a younger sister. Turns out two, the older two daughters die, one from the typhoid epidemic that went through, the other one falling off of a trolley car or something in San Francisco. The father struggles, and he apparently was a real good natured guy, so part of his problem is any wealth that he would amass he would also help out his fellow immigrant, and so it was part of a struggle that way, but apparently a very kind and generous, sometimes all too generous kind of a person. So I never heard anything that it wasn't a good match.

TI: Oh, and maybe I misunderstood when you say it didn't work out the way she thought, so she didn't pursue a medical degree? Was that what you were saying?

NA: Yes. Yeah, that's, her dream. And his dream, too, because he ultimately ended up opening a laundry service and, which tended to be successful enough that they provided for the family and all, but he ends up becoming very ill and she suspected it was appendicitis, knowing enough, but the physician who came said, no, just put hot compress. And for her, hot compress and appendix is disaster, but, but I guess the husband also encouraged that. "Follow doctors." And of course he died of a burst appendix, so she's widowed now with three kids and leaving Japan, being the class she was, and her sisters had married into the head of Bank of Tokyo, married into the Kikkoman family, who was doing shoyu and manufacturing in the imperial grounds, stuff like that. And, and the other sister became a bohemian, but that's a whole different story. So, and it was really, some of the parting was really difficult because she was really going out of the norm of her class, so she herself felt, well, she can't go back, so somehow she's gonna have to strike out and do something. And so a friend of the family, a man who ends up, we end up calling Ojichan, who really was a good friend to both Sata and her husband and who traveled back and forth to Japan periodically. He said he will take the three kids to Japan and put them into the family household to be raised. So my mom goes and is placed with the Asakura side, my mom and her sister, and then my, the, her older brother goes to the Sugiura in Nagoya area. Yeah, so my mom ends up being a Kibei ultimately.

TI: Yeah, so she goes to Japan, right. And about how old?

NA: She's five years old.

TI: She's five.

NA: Her sister's four years old, Taruo is twelve years old.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.