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TI: Earlier you mentioned the house, and I find your house interesting. You mentioned it's kind of gothic. Can you describe, 'cause I think there were five kids, your parents, and your grandparents, I mean, how you all lived in the house?

RM: No, that's not the right picture. That's the right picture for the three older kids, from the first marriage. After about 1936, I think, mid, mid '30s, I think my father must've been reading about Frank Lloyd Wright and all that kind of stuff because he built a beautiful home after that, very modern with, with a big, big glassed in area for, that was the main dining room, and that had a library on the other end of the main, the main floor, and that's with nice furniture so you could sit down and read. And hundreds of books in there, which, unfortunately, as the house, they used, the architect used a lot of, a lot of plywood, which was very new at the time, and of course, they never treated the wood in those days. It was just plain Pacific, you know, Pacific Northwest fir, and the termites loved it. They went through the house. Even the books, they went right through the books. And you'd find leather bound volumes with a small hole in one side, small hole out the other side when you'd open it up. The termites had eaten the inside of the book. I had, part of my job was, because I was the only child at home by the time the war ended, I'm the one that had to do all throwin' away, so that was, I wouldn't say nightmarish, but one of the less enjoyable things I've done, because there was, like, a connection to everything you touch. Everything you cleaned up, you threw away whether it was, if you found a hair or anything personal, something that somebody'd used and it was worn to some degree, a pencil or something like that, had teeth marks on it or something, you'd know who it came from. And each child had an area that they, they lived in.

TI: So it's just so many memories for every object that you --

RM: Every object, it came along with a memory, too. So throwin' 'em away, it becomes very difficult.

TI: But going back to the house, so were there actually two houses, then?

RM: Yes.

TI: You had the old house and the new house and they're right next to each other?

RM: Well, they're both new houses, actually, as, when he started the project in the '60s, I mean in the '30s, mid '30s, they built the small house in which the family could live in and that was a regular, regular two bedroom house with a huge Japanese room for my grandfather. And that was, that was a very formal Japanese room that Japanese carpenters had actually been imported in to work on. This is for another, another big haole family that they were doing it for, but they came to the Mori residence to get some rice and Japanese cooking and they did a little extra work for building this room. It was a, it was really a gorgeous room, tatami and, and engawa around the outside and tokonoma, you know where you could hang these valuable things. That's the first place I learned about a wood called shitan, and according to my mother it's a red, what they call red cedar, I believe, and according to my mother the logs would be, would be cut down on the imperial grounds and then taken to the imperial moats and dumped in there. The wood was so hard that it would sink down to the bottom, and then of course, they'd leave it down there for about ninety years or a hundred years and then bring it up and form it into tables and furniture. And it's, it's gorgeous stuff. I still got one table left.

TI: It must be really hard and preserved.

RM: Very. You can't just use a normal saw, but these guys that came from Japan knew how to work with it and the tokonoma was made from that, the base of the tokonoma. And I had a piece around that I carried around for a long time because I was really amazed with that. I didn't even know what I was gonna do with it, but I was just gonna keep that piece. But I still do have that table that my, actually my mother ran off with a lot of that and kept to herself. Of course, she had a right to it. And of course, when she died, of course, I ended up with a lot of that material. My brother's didn't. [Laughs]

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.