<Begin Segment 11>
MN: I'm going to change the subject on you now, and I want to ask about your schooling in Imperial Valley. Do you remember where you attended kindergarten?
MT: Yeah, I should know the place there, but I cannot remember why we were living there, I had to go to kindergarten there. Because usually we were around Brawley way to El Centro, and that place that I went to kindergarten is... oh, let's say it's about a mile and a half from the Mexican border. It's Mt Signal is the school, and I can't understand why I went to the Mt Signal kindergarten, and then we moved away and then came back and lived around there. But I guess my father, because I had a sister, and she drowned in the canal when she was three and I was six. Now, why did we go back and live on the same farm again? I still remember that. It's something that stays in your mind, I guess. There's no canal there now, they just have like a ditch that's all cemented, that carried the water. Before, there just used to be mud. A dirt road, dirt made the banks, and the water used to come down there. That's why my little sister drowned there because... we shouldn't have taken her across. We used to tell her, "When you're going to cross this bridge" -- it was just a plank of wood, it's a twelve by two inch wood, and it went across the canal. And when we walked there, one of us always walked our sister across. And one day, she nagged my mother and nagged my mother saying that we're going to come home, so she wanted to come home. And my mother thought, oh, it's almost time for the school to let out, so okay, she let her go. And that was a bad mistake. That's the way they used to live, though.
MN: So your little sister, she went over that plank and she...
MT: She must have, 'cause it was a windy day, and she probably got blown off that little plank there.
MN: And how did you know that she had fell into the water?
MT: My father found her body about ten miles down. It was coming toward Salton Sea, and he found this one arm sticking out at the gate. Well, they used to have gate every so often because they had to shut it, slow up the water so that the farmers can get water. And he saw that one arm, pulled it up, and that was her body.
MN: Where did you have your sister's funeral?
MT: The funeral was in El Centro, but then the cremation was in Los Angeles. I remember coming here, but I don't know where the crematory was, but I remember the body going up into this little cart and then they just ran down, roll it down into the incinerator, then the door just closed and you can't see it burn up.
MN: What did your family do with her ashes?
MT: She kept it until we went back after the war, and we took it to Japan.
<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.