<Begin Segment 19>

TI: I want to now kind of just back up just a little bit, to the time when your mother and father returned to Hawaii. Can you talk about the, what that was like when your parents came back? And, 'cause at this point, this is four years later, so you're about, what, twelve years old at this point? So what was that like for you with your mom and dad coming back?

RM: Stifling. I was suddenly put under the thumb again, so to speak. [Laughs] I was suddenly under authority again, so it was difficult. I know that they bickered constantly about why my behavior was thus and so and my mother trying to explain things, and of course my mother had, had elicited a promise from my father at the time she agreed to marry him that I would be her child, the first male would be hers, to take back to Japan is what she had in mind. Of course, they didn't consider what I had in mind and I absolutely refused that, but that would've been, my mother's dream is to produce a doctor out of me and take me back to Japan.

TI: Now, when did you first know about this? Was this when you were really young, did she tell you that that was part of the plan?

RM: I don't think she ever stopped telling me that, but I probably got to the point where I refused to listen to it after a while. But when I got into my teenage years and I was driving and taking apart engines and soupin' 'em up and stuff like that, like we'd work, we'd work for, like, a whole week tryin' to get the engines back into the car again and then go off to race on Saturday or something like that, we'd been up for forty-eight hours without any sleep. [Laughs] So she thought we were crazy. She thought we were all crazy. But she'd come outside, see me with my hands all dirty and stuff and she'd say, "You know, those hands could be performing remarkable surgery," and this kind of stuff, and it just totally blew me away every time she did that.

KN: Did your parents, especially your mother, hope to return to Japan or just leave you...

RM: That would've been, that would've been her dream, yeah.

KN: To return to Japan.

RM: Okay, let me explain it this way, that when, at thirteen years old when they tried to make, arrange a marriage between my mother and a fifty-three year old Japanese doctor and she suddenly decided that she was going to become a doctor, and she did that. She did fulfill that. But it wasn't directly to her family because she went and got married to somebody else, and she owed it to her family, really, to maintain a doctor in the family and at this particular point the only way she's gonna be able to do it is to make a doctor out of me and take me back. [Laughs]

TI: So it was a sense of obligation, almost, that it was like --

RM: Well, I didn't have any of that obligation.

TI: But your mother did. Your mother, because she didn't return as a doctor she needed to find somebody else.

RM: After, after all, they permitted her to get away from that fifty-three year old man in order to become a doctor. She had fulfilled that part of it.

TI: So during the war you change a lot. You went from eight to twelve, so you grew up and went through this, what you call this juvenile delinquency phase. How about your mother and father? Did they change? When, when they came back after the war did you notice any changes in them?

RM: I think that by the time they got back from the war, my father started getting sick. He eventually ended up with stomach cancer, I think, but, and it took, I think, a long period of time, but before that period, even after he came back from, from camp, he'd still walk from the Wilder Street residence down to his office, just for exercise, and on occasion, I was old enough, I'd tag along and walk with him. So we're, I guess, a pretty good walking family. In fact, the big Packard, it was being driven, driven, chauffeur, with a chauffeur, would get me to Punahou School, and then of course my mother with a driver would come pick me up and the way home, but one day I decided I was gonna walk home from Punahou School. That meant walking along that road that comes by Roosevelt and then down to Papale and over the hill. And my mother walked with me and the limousine came along behind us. That's, was my character, too. I insisted on doing these things and my mother would humor me sometimes, maybe too much, so, and so she walked me all the way and we got to a place called Halinuuanu, which was the ice cream parlor, big huge ice cream parlor the Derryman's had on Nuuanu. We got as far as Nuuanu and I agreed to have an ice cream soda there, and so they bought me an ice cream soda and then after that I guess I decided I was, already gotten enough walking, so I agreed to get in the limousine and we drove off on the limousine after that and went home. But that's the kind of kid I was and that's kind of way that my mother was raising me, so what can I say? I was still in character.

TI: So you were a very strong and independent spirit also. I mean, we talked about, earlier, your mother --

RM: Just like my mother, yeah.

TI: Strong, independent, yeah.

RM: Everybody shook their head, but -- oh, I was telling you about Wendell Marumoto and recently, because of the story that I wrote, Wendell and I started talkin' to each other again, but he said, almost in an apologetic kind of way, he said, "You know, I never associated with you because when my father and I," Masaji and he, talked about me, "we decided that you were crazy." I said, "I can understand that." [Laughs] "It's okay, Wendell." And then once I wrote something, why, of course, he thought he had a better hold on me, I guess, but now I'm talkin' about him wanderin' around looking his, for his car in the parking lot, so I don't know. Maybe I didn't deserve that. [Laughs]

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.