<Begin Segment 24>

TI: So the, I want to now bring you back to Hawaii, and to talk a little bit about the, you talked about how your father, after the war, wasn't really healthy, that healthy.

RM: No.

TI: And eventually died. Can you talk about that in terms of the death of your father and then handling his estate?

RM: I was already workin' for United Airlines by then and I was working swing shift, so he was home. My mother was working at the camp site, oddly enough, I mean ironically, and doing statistical data on the diets of immigrant families, especially Japanese, and especially after they came to Hawaii and whether, they were trying to determine whether that had anything to do with the prevalence of, say, stomach cancer or that kind of thing, use of tobacco, that type of thing, and so she was quite busy and she was gone most of the day. And when I left for work, which usually started at about, like three o'clock in the afternoon, swing shift, my father was sitting on his bed and I could hear him saying, "Iya da, iya da." And that sticks in my mind. It really, really imprinted in my mind. And when I stopped by his room to say I was going he pretended like nothing was wrong, that everything was okay, and he said goodbye to me, nothing special. And I went to work. And by the time I got home from work my mother was there to greet me and she said that he had passed on, and so being a doctor, I think he knew symptomatically what was happening to him and that's the reason why he was saying, "Iya da." And again, "I don't want to," as best as I can translate it. "I don't want to." That was my last memory. And that was another funeral there. Every Japanese family that we knew in, in Honolulu was there.

TI: And when you say that, how large would that funeral be, the service? How many people would be there?

RM: Oh, I'd say about, about four or five hundred people.

TI: Now, this was during a time when your brothers were not in Honolulu, so they asked you --

RM: Yeah. My brother Victor was in school, and my sister Margaret was raising a family from, in Minnesota. And of course my sister died.

TI: And Arthur was in Japan, I think?

RM: Arthur was, had a thriving practice in Japan, yeah.

TI: So that left pretty much you to handle the estate. Is that...

RM: I was the administrator.

TI: Administrator. Or executor, or administrator?

RM: Administrator.

TI: Okay.

RM: That means that my father had no will. He had not written a will. Intestate, I think they call it.

TI: And so what's the role of the administrator? What, what are your functions?

RM: The same as, as the, as the, what was it?

TI: Executor?

RM: Executor, yeah. It's the same thing. You're working under the court's direction and, and the lawyer involved was a guy named Ted Tsukiyama who is very prominent amongst, and very vocal about... you know?

TI: I think we all know Ted. [Laughs]

KN: We all know Ted.

RM: Yeah, I mean, he stays pretty quiet and all of a sudden he'll jump up and say something nasty. So like in terms of the story I wrote, he said, "Tell them they need to know." [Laughs] I put that in there, as a matter of fact.

TI: I saw that.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.