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TI: So let's, let's talk a little bit more about your mother first. So tell me your mother's name.

RM: Her given name was Shibuya, Ishiko Shibuya. And she was born in Chiba, in an area that's called Boshu. Now, I've asked, like I told you, I worked for the airlines and I was on the airplane a lot, working especially first class, and I'd run into some very interesting people, so I'd ask Japanese that I met there whether they'd ever heard of Boshu and nobody ever did, but there's a certain area in Chiba, at the bottom end of Chiba across from Yokohama, I mean, it would be the entrance to the harbor, and there would be one side, I think, of the entrance where you could see the ocean and then on the other side of the harbor you could see Fujiyama.

TI: Wow, it sounds like a really beautiful place then.

RM: She, from what she told me, it was one of the most beautiful places in the world. But even after traveling, this itinerate airline job took me there, but I never did go to Boshu.

TI: And what kind of work did your mother's family do?

RM: My mother grew up in a family that, her father, in other words, was a doctor. Her mother, she didn't mention too much except that, what she did say was that she was a, not very well. Back in those days it was probably tuberculosis. And she always remembered as being a person that was off in a side room and people had to take care of her. By the time she was, I think, thirteen years old she was an orphan. Her father died. And so her family, typical of Japanese, the way socially the families are set up, they wanted her to marry a doctor, and so they, at the age of thirteen they, they engaged her to a fifty, at the time, fifty-some odd year man. And she was the kind of person that said, "No. If you want a doctor that badly in the family I will become a doctor." So she was born before her time. She did grow up a little more and then proceeded on to Tokyo's women's college and did become a doctor. Of course, by the time she graduated there wasn't any place she could work. Nobody in Japan wanted a woman doctor, especially a man, and so the only two places where she could get a job was, I think, China, I think -- China was occupied at the time by Japanese -- and Hawaii. And so she chose Hawaii, and that's how she came, came to Hawaii.

TI: So she sounds like a very strong, independent woman.

RM: For me, that was the biggest difficulty I had with her, yes. Very headstrong.

TI: And so when she got to Hawaii where did she work?

RM: Kuakini Hospital. It was called the Japanese Hospital at the time, and specifically, so that was the area where she could easily find a job at, 'cause my father and my grandfather had pretty much been the primary doctors there for many years. And I think she, she told me at one point that, well, she was working where she, working at Kuakini, she realized that about one-third of the patients were Mori patients. So that, that was quite an impact on her, I think. But the meeting, of course, must've been electric for my father because he had been widowed, became a widower some, some years before, two or three years before, and all of a sudden there was this vision of a, you know, perfect Japanese woman. So he -- this is my mother's story, not my story -- but he would bring his Packard Roadster down, with his Roadster cap and riding breeches and everything, and with my oldest brother, Arthur, in the rumble seat as chaperone, and then he'd put her in the front seat with him and then they'd roar off to Pearl Harbor where Igamori had a sanitarium, and I think, from what my mother was telling me, I think her point was that she was thereupon seduced at the Pearl City Sanitarium, but I guess I can't go beyond that, as far as stories go. She never told me more, but I had my own suspicions and my own conclusion.

TI: So your father really courted her heavily during this, this time period?

RM: He must've really put the show on, yeah. I think he, to get my brother involved and everything else, but I, it was an anecdote that I never forgot after she told me. It always sat there in my mind.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.