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TI: And so let's, let's talk a little bit about your mother. So first tell me her name and how did she meet your father?

MT: Well, her name was Toyone Otsubo and the Otsubo family came from a little village called, called Oroshi in southern Mie-ken, in the mountains. They would call that Minami muro, Minami County, southern county, south county, I guess. And their family were descended from, from a retainer of the Ashikaga clan, and Ashikaga clan were at one time shoguns of... and when they were defeated they, they were supposed to run for Shikoku, the island of Shikoku, but instead her family stayed in the mountains of Kumano, which is up in the, which is Wakayama-ken, Mie-ken and that area, and they hid over there and became farmers. Except my mother said that when they were, their, each Japanese family have a, has a god that they pray to and theirs was god of war, so you knew that they were samurais at one time, and said that when she was a child she would go to the, the storage, the warehouse, family warehouse and they would still have the armor in there. And she said that, and today they only have two things left. One is a wakizashi, a short sword, and they have a spear, but the blade has all rusted away. Now that in the family home, my uncle kept the, my uncle married my aunt, my mother's sister, and he, because he was a kendo teacher, high ranking, he, they gave it to him and he kept it and then he passed away and my nephew now has the... my sister was adopted into the family, so...

TI: Wow, what a family heirloom to have, to have a...

MT: Yeah. It's a, what you call mumei, no name on it, but it's, it is the Muromachi era, the same time, and it's a fighting sword. It's not a, a display sword, so, but it was a very good sword, so my uncle really loved to use it. He would demonstrate with it, cut, put bamboo and straw and then he would cut it, and he would do tricks with it, like cut it and said, "Oh, you didn't cut it," and he'd tap it and fall down. Other times he would cut it and make it flip, things like that. So when I was in Japan years later I had a, had acquaintance take it in and get it straightened out and cleaned up, 'cause my uncle was paralyzed at the time, he couldn't do anything. But it was, it's an heirloom.

TI: So going back to your mother, so how does she meet your father?

MT: My mother, she, her father was a schoolteacher, later became a principal for a small school. Her family is generations of teachers. Her two sisters were teachers and my mother went to teacher's college in Mie-ken, 'cause she, although they lived, father taught in Wakayama-ken, they were, that was in, at the northern border, a place, city called Shingu. Because their home was in Mie-ken, in those days you had to go to, you went to teacher's college, you had to go back to the, your home prefecture and go to the school there, and so it was, they called it Kameyama Joshian, I think it's called, and there was a women's, they had, each prefecture had one man's teacher's college and one women's teacher's college and she went to the women's college there. And she was quite young and very lonely when she got there, said she cried every night. And she was, because she was tall for Japanese, she, and the teachers were small and in gym she had some problems because they would tell her to do things and they were so much smaller than she was. My, my mother was probably about, at that time probably five three and a half or so, which is tall for a woman at that age. And so she was going there and then she graduated, and then she went to, then she started teaching, and I have her bonus... I was, I went to, when I went to the, my father's home one time my cousin was fixing the house because of termites and, and out of tansu, the chest, came all these things of my mother's, including her graduation certificate and all these kind of things and all the bonuses that she got and where she was hired. She was initially hired over in Mie-ken and then later she, because her family's in, in Wakayama-ken, she started teaching in Wakayama-ken and she was getting, and I looked at it and I thought wow, she didn't get very much bonus. And then talking to my sister's husband who was, who was a teacher in Japan, he said, "Oh, she got big bonuses." Didn't seem much, but I guess they didn't get paid much anyway, and so she was, I guess did very well, very well in that.

She then was teaching school when her sister got married, her older sister got married, and they were, there's about a year difference in age -- and she has a younger sister, about three years younger -- and so they wanted her to get married. And meanwhile my father decided that he was, he needed to get married again, the family wanted him to get married, so his sister was living in Shingu and her husband was a friend of my grandfather, so he had a daughter who's marriageable, my, other guy had his brother-in-law who was marriageable. They were thirteen years' difference in age, but you know, that didn't matter in those days. And they met, and my mother's reaction was, my father was already getting a little gray. He was prematurely gray, so he was, and she thought, she said the only reaction she had was, "My, he seems old." [Laughs] But she wasn't going to argue about it. And then later she was telling me that he was sneakin' around looking at her, unbeknownst to her. He was checking her out, physically checking her out, what she looked like and stuff. So then they were married and they lived in Esunokawa at the family home, with the intention of staying there.

My mother was a city girl, town girl. She, father being a schoolteacher, never worked in a rice paddy or anything else like that and when went to live in Esunokawa as a wife of the eldest son, my grandmother, very traditional and known as being a mean woman, treated her pretty poorly. She had to wake up early in the morning to prepare breakfast for everybody and, and that means crew, people that work on the farm, too, had to prepare everything. And then she, then when they left she had to clean up and then she'd clean house, and then she had to prepare for the, prepare the lunch then take the lunch to them and meanwhile then had to work in the, on the farm itself, bring the stuff back, clean up. Then she had to go back out again, and then she prepared supper, came back and prepared supper, came back and fed everybody. Then, then she had to afterwards clean up, then she had to do the sewing, everything that needed to be done, and then at night she had to take care of the silkworms. And so she wasn't getting much sleep, she had never done work like this, my grandmother was a slave driver, and she, she said she cried every night 'cause she was so lonely and had to work so hard that she never had done things like this and she would be criticized for not doing things right, of course 'cause she didn't know. And my father saw that my mother, she was already thin and she was losing weight. He says, "I'm not gonna lose another wife, so I'm gonna go to America." And he took his wife and he went, went to Terminal Island 'cause he had been to Terminal Island with my uncle before, so went back there and started fishing again. And that's, that's how my mother went Terminal Island and then came to Terminal Island, she was much better educated than most of the women and so she was pretty lonely because there was, there wasn't a meeting of minds with a lot of people.

TI: Did you ever ask her what her reaction of Terminal Island was when she first got there, what she thought of it?

MT: Yeah, she, first thing she, my aunt did, my aunt, Oka aunt, was said, "I need fertilizer for my garden, so why don't you go out to the field?" 'Cause in the, there's some grass growing there so people ran cattle on it, so it had manure on it, so she had never done that before and gave her gunnysacks to pick it up, put it in there. Said it was terrible, says, "I guess I got to do that," so she did that. Later on found out my aunt had never done it herself, but she made my mother do it. [Laughs] And so, and so she had this relationship, I mean, she got along with her, but it's only because I think my mother gave in to everything 'cause my aunt was older and my, they called each other neesan, my, it's older sister, because my aunt was older then my mother 'cause she was only about three years younger than my father. And, but my mother was married to her older brother, so it was funny because they both called each other neesan.

TI: Interesting.

MT: But there was a respect kind of thing that went along with... my, my aunt was a little more craftier person.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.