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TI: So any... let's, let's move on because we could stay in Bellingham probably for an hour, but let's, so what happened after Bellingham?

MT: Well, he got a notice from, he was, it's another story, but anyway, he was working as a helper of a paralyzed man in, I believe it was Spokane he was, went to, and anyway, he was there when he got a letter from home saying that his father was dying. His father wasn't a Tonai, but was, married his mother who was a Tonai -- no, his mother wasn't even a Tonai. She was adopted. She was a niece of the Tonai family. And so she, well, she was a Tonai, but she was married into another -- no, I'm sorry, she, her mother was a Tonai and then she was adopted by her aunt, and then she married another man from Mukai family to become a Tonai. And he was dying, so my father got on a ship and, of course, it took a long time. He finally got to Japan, back to Japan when he was, had passed away already, and then what happened is he went to the funeral and everything was done. When he got out, the long arm of the law said, "You draft dodger you," and put him in the Japanese army and for three and a half years he was in the Japanese army, and he went to Taiwan to pacify the headhunters there. They were, head of the Taiwanese populace was happy to have Japanese soldiers as compared to the Chinese soldiers. They said the Japanese soldiers were better behaved and they were nicer to them than the Chinese soldiers. That's what he said to me. And then, but the aborigines that were up in the mountains were headhunters, and taking heads gave them -- excuse me [clears throat] -- taking heads gave them moral strength, so that's what they were doing, and so they were trying to pacify them. He was in artillery and that's how his hearing, bad hearing accelerated because somebody pulled a lanyard and set off a gun and he didn't know it and blew his ears.

TI: So let me, let me summarize this to make sure I got all this. So when your father returned to see his dying father, but he had passed away, so went to the memorial service. And during that time he was conscripted into the Japanese army?

MT: Yes.

TI: Then sent to Taiwan to, I guess, go after the headhunters, you said? To actually...

MT: Yeah, they were going, they were trying to, and the headhunters would, would operate at night, always at night. They had muzzle loaders. They did not have regular guns; they had muzzle loaders. And they had, they used to be, shoot bow and arrows and they used to use nerve poison on tips of the arrow, so instead they would take the little ball that they would ram down the guns and dip that in poison, so if you got shot you'd die. And so they were trying to pacify those people, 'cause it wasn't only the Japanese soldiers they were after, they were after anybody, Chinese, their Taiwanese, didn't matter to them 'cause that's what they...

TI: They just wanted a head, or to, to...

MT: To get a head. And, and the people were encroaching their territory, like any other people, indigenous people, when other people come in and try to take over their land.

TI: So your father served in the Japanese army for three and a half years?

MT: Three and a half years.

TI: And then what happened?

MT: Then he came back home, stayed there, and he got married. They, then he came back to America again with his wife, and his wife died in childbirth in Bellingham. And the child died, too. They both died, so they were taken and buried back in Esunokawa, to the family grave. which, because of a lack of land in that area, was very mountainous -- the mountains come right up to the ocean and very few plots there -- their cemetery is on a hillside and was buried there. And I discovered that when I was a GI, didn't know until then. And then, then my father came back to America again and he, meanwhile, when he was working in America he would keep sending money, and my uncle, meanwhile, whose family had a, had fishing boats and was, as I understand it, the two family, the Oka family, my uncle's family, and the Tonai family were the two who settled that Esunokawa area the, at the very beginning, so they were very close families. When he heard that at Terminal Island that they were financing fishing boats he then sold his cafe and moved to Terminal Island in California.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.