<Begin Segment 17>

TI: So let's talk a little bit about this because so when the war ended your family went back to San Diego. Your father is a community leader, a minister, I'm guessing he was, you mentioned he would travel. But when goes back to San Diego, what does he do? What kind of work does he do? You mentioned earlier he had to be a gardener.

RO: Being a minister was not going to sustain us so he became a gardener and he bought old big huge Oldsmobile that made so much noise when he'd start it up in the morning. And he put all his gardening tools in the back and he would go to the ferry in San Diego and go to Coronado and garden at those wealthy homes. And that brought in a little bit of money but on weekends we would go to the beach -- and this was before all the pollution came along -- but we would go there and dig for clams believe it or not, there were clams there. And we would, all of us would get our buckets and fill it up with clam and we would take it home and my mother would boil it and that would be our meals for a while. And that plus, my father raised chickens, rabbits, so he would kill the... as a kid watching, as a youngster watching him take the chicken and just conk it and then you know... that was our meal, the protein that we had and rabbits, he raised rabbits. That's how we were able to manage that year after the war.

TI: So was that a difficult time for your father or did he enjoy that kind of work? I mean, I'm thinking here he was trained to be a minister and now he had to do more kind of menial type of work. How was that for him?

RO: I never did ask him but he enjoyed working in the garden and he was a good gardener, very good. And I'm sure it was... he was a very accepting, I mean, he didn't fight things other than in his nightmares. I mean, he would do what he had to do. And from the age of sixteen he was independent, had to make his own living, and he was very creative that way he found ways to feed us and would involve the family when we'd go and dig for clams and help with the chicken and the rabbits. When we moved after that one year in 1947 in San Diego, then we moved up to San Lorenzo and there again my father planted fruit trees, we had chickens, we had again relying, being very self-reliant. And I remember going to the chicken coop and getting the fresh eggs that would come rolling down this thing that my father built. And that's again, that's how my father fed us as well as we had church members who would, once in a while we'd hear the doorbell ring and I'd go running out there, there would be nobody there but there would be either a hot meal or some groceries. People were very generous. My dad was only making something like 168 dollars a month to feed a family of six. Although back in the '40s, late '40s that's probably good money but wasn't quite enough to feed us. So my brother Joe who's two years younger than me, he and I went out to work. I did housework and he did gardening. Maybe my older brother went... I just remember my... Joe and I did things together. And then we both worked at the nurseries. I worked at this, one of the church members had a nursery, carnations. So every break during high school in order to buy clothes for myself for school, my father couldn't afford it so all of us went out to work. I worked at this one church member's carnation nursery and would make enough money so I could buy something for school. And anyway, you know, it was tough after the war. A lot of the... I found out years later a lot of the sisters of families went out to work, house cleaning, typing if they could find that kind of work in order for the sons to be able to go to college. At first I was furious that I had to do this and for years later I thought, "Why did I get this gender bias here?" Then I found out in the readings that all the women, the Nisei, I mean, the older Nisei women a lot of them had to do that in order for their brothers to be able to go to school.

TI: Yeah, so that gender bias was always there.

RO: It was always there. It was just imported from Japan. But then at that time gender bias was all over the world, it wasn't just the Japanese community, it was America too.

TI: How did your parents change if at all from before and after the war? I mean you talked a little bit about your father's nightmares but it sounds like sort of day to day you didn't see that much difference.

RO: Day to day he just did his work, you know, he had to feed the family he had to make sure we were all okay. But it was only in his nightmares and it came years later after he's retired, I mean, in his sixties.

TI: So how about your mother? I mean, you mother went through a very difficult time raising your younger brother Dan, but how was she changed by the war years?

RO: She was an amazing woman in that she never expressed her anger or if she was angry or if she was depressed or she was upset or anything. She just carried on being a mother and a teacher. And it maybe it was her Buddhist background that... and the Japanese philosophy of shigata ga nai is something that started here. Japanese people in Japan don't know the word, so it wasn't shigata ga nai that was what was keeping my mother afloat. She just was a very strong woman and did her best to try to stay positive. But it was eating away at her inside. I mean, that experience of going to camp and delivering a child in a horse stable was, must have been horrific for her.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.