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TI: Okay, so today's January 27, 2011. We're in San Jose at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. Helping on the interview is Tom Izu, on camera is Dana Hoshide, and I'm Tom Ikeda. And we're here with Roy Hirabayashi, so Roy, I'm just gonna just start at the beginning for you. Can you just tell me where and when you were born?

RH: I was born January 1, 1951. I was born in Berkeley, California, grew up in Oakland, though, but Berkeley was, I guess our family doctor, that's the main hospital he was affiliated with.

TI: Okay, and what was the name given to you at birth?

RH: It was Roy Mitsuru Hirabayashi.

TI: You were born on January 1st, so was that, was there anything special about that, I mean, the fact that you were born on January 1st in terms of the family or your birth? Any stories about that?

RH: You know, everyone always asks me, were you the first one? But no, I was born in the morning, but not really early, so I don't recall, I don't know any really significant story from my mother that she said, other than the fact that they were preparing for New Year's, the traditional New Year's dinner, and then she had to leave to give birth instead, so it kind of ruined the dinner for the family on that particular day, unfortunately. But no other significant stories that I know of.

TI: How about growing up, in terms of your birthday, having your birthday on January 1st, any, was that a good thing, a bad thing? What was that like to have your birthday on January 1st?

RH: I guess people always say if you're on a major holiday like Christmas or New Year's, well for New Year's, for our family New Year's was always a special day where the family, most of our family would always come together to celebrate or to have the New Year's dinner and, and food. And so, and for my mother and father, that was also kind of important for us to be doing that, so it was, my birthday always seemed to be kind of lost because it was more significant that we were doing New Year's dinner and there was a lot of preparation of food and different, you had to eat your ozoni, had to eat your osoba the night before, all the kind of traditional foods that you, you made sure that we wanted, that we were supposed to eat and have. And so for me, my birthday was not special in that I always got to have a party because, it wasn't just for me, but it was more of a New Year's gathering and the family was always there. It wasn't, I never really had a birthday party, like other kids may say where, you know, invited a lot of neighborhood kids over, because that never really happened for, for me because there was always enough people just within the family itself. Our family, with all the nieces and nephews and everything, grew to maybe over sixty, seventy people would come together at one particular house for New Year's and it was always very special for us.

TI: And, and yeah, because in the same way, our family, New Year's Day is a bigger celebration than, say, a Christmas or even a Thanksgiving in terms of all the family, almost extended family coming together, so in the same way, we had fifty, sixty, seventy people, and it's all around New Year's.

RH: Right.

TI: So I was thinking about that, so yeah, it's almost like your birthday got lost every year, and so how did you feel about that? Was that something you, you always kind of thought about, "Hmm, people really aren't celebrating my birthday like other people," or did it bother you?

RH: It, no, it didn't bother me because, I guess, especially my mother really emphasized that New Year's was important and that there were certain things we had to do, and like I mentioned, preparation of the different foods, and she was always very particular that we ate the different things or knew what that was, why we had to do, even though we may not really enjoyed it, especially when we were younger. But it was, made it a special point that we would participate in doing that. And then as we were growing up, since was a major activity, all the preparation of everything, we all got involved in helping her doing that, and so I enjoyed just learning how to do some of the basic, even cooking, in a way what it took to kind of put some things together. And not that I'm a really great Japanese cook or anything, but at least I have a basic understanding of what the preparation and what, what's required and how much time it takes and how tedious some of that work really is, as far as even just cutting the vegetables a certain way and, and preparing all the foods and events and how long it took her really to do the different things when people just, mainly just sit down and just eat and you're not thinking about what it took to go into just making that one particular dish, whether it's the mame beans or the fish or whatever it is. So I came to enjoy or appreciate the fact that all of these traditions or customs were really part of what our family was about and it was all important for us to understand that and try to carry that tradition forward, basically.

TI: And so to this day, is that still how you celebrate New Year's Day?

RH: Our family always tried to do that. My mom, she just, her birthday is right after mine, it's on January 6th, and so she just turned eighty-nine and so, and she's always, like I mentioned, always been really adamant about having the family come together, but she was always very adamant about wanting to cook all the food and everything, but as she grew a little bit older and, although she wanted to do all these things, it was really hard for her, so we decided just for her sake that we would scale back, basically. And what we tried doing for quite a while, a number of years, is that among our cousins and my siblings, we would kind of rotate where the dinner would happen every year, so it was kind of nice. We were doing that, but as the family started getting larger and larger, my cousins had kids and they started having kids and they were all leaving and going off different areas, so it was getting harder and harder to get the family together, so past couple of years, unfortunately, we've really kind of downsized with that. We've had to just keep it a little bit more contained.

TI: A little bit more contained, but still trying to do all the traditional foods, or maybe scale down a little bit, but still traditional?

RH: Still trying to be a little bit traditional, but it's much more smaller. It's just more the immediate family that's coming together now.

TI: And so for your family, this is kind of interesting, where do you see it going in the future? So as the, the Nisei generation disappears, what do you, what do you think will happen to your, this family tradition?

RH: It's hard to say. I mean, that's one thing we were really trying to make sure it got passed on, and that's one reason why we started to rotate our New Year's dinner. It's not only that we all took responsibility for that and my mom and aunts and uncles who were also involved in helping to put this thing together, that they didn't have to take the burden of doing that every year, and also the cooking factor, and so it became more of a potluck rather than one family having to do all the major cooking. Everyone was assigned different things to learn how to do or bring to dinner. And so we were trying to encourage everyone to really understand and learn more about that, but it was different for the younger generation, I feel. Basically, my nieces, or even younger, they would be wanting or able to do that, be involved, and so, and as I mentioned, as they were starting to move away, too, it was even more difficult to bring the family back together and have them be part of that process of cooking and doing everything like that. Just getting them here, because now they're living Hawaii, New York, Midwest, or wherever now, it's not just the Bay Area, as we were growing up. In my family I have two older brothers and two younger sisters, so, and one sister is in Honolulu right now and the rest of my brothers and sisters, other sister, they're in the Bay Area, so we're still kind of close in that way, but even just getting my sister from Honolulu to get out here is kind of a difficult task to coordinate schedules for everybody.

TI: I'm curious, in terms of other times of the year, will the extended family get together on a regular basis? Is there another, like, function like New Year's when the whole family gets together?

RH: The holiday, the Christmas, New Year's period has been probably the most dominant time that we always try to come together, unless unfortunately there's like a funeral or a death in the family that, or a wedding, which is a happy event, that brings everyone together. So it's, it's more difficult to get everyone together now, otherwise. There's, whenever, because all the other siblings are mostly in the Bay area, whenever my sister in Honolulu is able to come out this way for another reason that, something else may happen during the year.

TI: It's interesting because, yeah, in our family it seems New Year's is the one time of year where we plan on getting together, so I was just curious for other Japanese American Sanseis how that plays out. So that's probably something I'm interested as we go on, just in terms of how certain traditions will unfold as the generations go on.

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