<Begin Segment 9>

TI: And so your earliest childhood memories are almost more with your grandmother?

NA: No. I have bits and pieces. I think I could remember things like playing in the sandbox with my brother underneath the, the windmill water tank, but I guess the strongest remembrance is Jichan, passing of Jichan. My brother and I were in the cab of the pickup truck out in the field and Gene and I were playing there. Mom was in San Francisco giving birth to our third brother. Ojichan comes walking to the driver's side and says, "Kei-chan, grow up to be a good girl," or "you be a good girl," and Ta-chin is Eugene's baby nickname that, you know, ii ko ni, so it's all in Japanese -- and that's, by the way, my first language -- and then he walks in front and then he falls down. And I don't know, I just, I just know that, I don't know if, how it happened, but honking of the horn and Dad comes and they, they ask us what's happening. And of course I'm just relating this to everybody over and over, so I think that kind of got stuck in my memory, too. But it was also big jolt seeing someone we called Jichan just kind of collapse. And, and I really remember the funeral and the smell of stocks and gardenia, and really, to this day, I think, I don't like the smell of stocks.

TI: Going back to when your, your grandfather collapsed, so was it like a heart attack or just a, a sudden... and when it happened, I'm trying to think of a young child and they see this, what did you think, like did you, yeah, what thoughts went through your mind?

NA: I mean, I can't, I was like three years old.

TI: So just something you just remember.

NA: I just remember that and somehow, I don't know if looking forward, leaning on the horn or whatever, but I called people. Somehow people came. And because he was in front of the truck, so it isn't like so visible necessarily, when you really position this whole thing, but he came and I know I had to get on the, they put me on the phone to tell my mom that Jichan... I mean, I want to talk to my mom, too. She's in the hospital, but just remember relating that to her. And I remember events around that time pretty much also, but that was, that was one really solid... other things, before even that, I remember helping, helping, trying to help with the wash and, or playing around with the neighbor's girl. We're, we're really like three, really young, two and a half, three, but these are just snapshot remembrances or trying to chase the frog into the furoba and the neighbor girl falls into the furo and she's a little bit older than me and "Ah," all this panic and, but just snippets like that. And I remember koinobori that my father had erected up for the Boy's Day, they had only one at that time, so that's Gene, right? So I was, like, two and a half, must be two and a half going on three.

TI: It's amazing that you can remember those things at such a young age.

NA: But, well you know, it's those things because I remember the koinobori and partly, and I could only figure it must've been after Pearl Harbor, because there were kind of, our neighbors who were really nice, to me nice, there were kind of angry voices and my dad saying something about the koinobori, so I couldn't figure out what, and later on was, I guess, they all thought that maybe that was the shortwave antenna, because when you think about it after the war, they laid the telephone communication lines from the United States to Hawaii off of Point Arena. That's where, and then to Asia.

TI: And so potentially people were thinking that if there were sabotage or something someone would cut those lines and...

NA: Well there wasn't any phone lines then. No, no, no.

TI: Okay, no phone lines, but just in terms of, of...

NA: Yeah, but then this tall tree stump and then this flying, the koi and the, the Boy's Day celebration, maybe that's when signals were being sent out or, I mean, at least that was the filtering down assumption that later on was told to us.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.