<Begin Segment 12>

TI: Well, let's go back to Japan. You're five years old, you're there for, I think, about eight months or so. What happened to your older brother and sister in Tokyo?

MT: Well, first of all, they wanted to adopt, they didn't say so, they asked me if I wanted to stay in Japan 'cause my aunt and uncle didn't have any children. My mother's side of the family had no heir and that's very important in Japan, so they asked me if I wanted to stay in Japan. I said, "No. I don't want to stay in Japan. I want to be with my mother. I don't care how fancy it is here. I want to be with my mother and father." And, and so then the, my father's family, the clan got together with my father and said, "You have to educate your son. He's the eldest in the clan, eldest son of yours, and so therefore he's gonna take over the clan. So he has to have Japanese education." And my father agreed with that and decided to leave him there. My mother --

TI: We're talking, we're talking about Ichiro right now?

MT: Ichiro. And my mother, although she had some trepidations about that, she was very, she was a dutiful wife and so she agreed to let him stay but felt that for him to stay by himself would be too lonely, so told my older sister to stay, and she didn't want to stay. My son, my brother didn't care. I mean, he was treated like a god, so he didn't care. He got the best of everything and so forth. And his English wasn't good; my sister could speak English, but he couldn't speak too good. Terminal Island English. And so he was nine years old and he didn't... he accepted it. He knew he was eldest son, he knew all those things. He was old enough to understand what was going on, and so he accepted it. My sister really didn't want to go. He wanted, she wanted to go home 'cause she was a girl and in Japan girls are not treated very nicely, particularly in those days. And so, but my mother acquiesced and had her stay, I mean, my mother, she kind of forced my sister to stay. My mother, afterwards, my mother said that was the worst thing she ever did. She never wanted, she said you never separate a child from their parents because their feelings change. They feel abandoned. And then the other part of it was that when my nephew -- my sister now lives in Japan, got married in Japan, had children -- when her son was of high school age they wanted to send him to America to get educated in America. My mother refused. She didn't refuse; she would not answer them 'cause, again, it was her principle, don't separate the child from the mother.

TI: Even though this was high school, this was, the child was much older. Because when --

MT: She felt guilty about what she did, 'cause of, my mother, my sister, whenever she came to America it was just like she had left when she was still eleven years old, the way, her attitude toward my mother and father were. And then, like when I was a GI, I went to see her, the first time I went to the PX, the army store, I took her along, but they wouldn't let her in because obviously she wasn't my dependent or anything, so what happens is that I asked her, what does she want? She wanted a Babe Ruth, Abba-Zaba, wanted all these candies, all the candies that she used to eat when she was a child. That's what I bought her.

TI: And we're talking about your, your older sister Mary, or, or...

MT: She's married and had a child at the time, but yet her memory of America was that.

TI: This is a little off the timeline, but did your sister ever visit?

MT: Oh, yeah. That's when, whenever she visited... she came because either my father was sick or mother was sick or something happened like that and then she'd come down. It was a good excuse for her to come, so she would come. She had four children of her own, two boys and two girls, so she had to be, she couldn't just come out here, so she would do that. And she would, she would really enjoy it here, but, and her husband once came down here and they were here almost a year, and she wanted him to stay here, but he can't speak the language. He finally decided to go back to Japan, so she had to go back with him.

TI: So let's, let's go back to 1934, and so after about eight months your, your sister and brother --

MT: It was eight months.

TI: Yeah, eight months, they stay in Japan.

MT: And they stayed in Japan and we came back to America.

TI: So your father, your mother, you, your, Rumi, your older sister, and your younger brother, five of you came back. Okay.

MT: And we were aboard the Asama Maru, which was a sister ship of the Tatsuta Maru, same size, about twelve.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.