<Begin Segment 7>

TI: And so where in Japan did you land?

PF: Yokohama.

TI: And who... was there anyone there to greet you?

PF: My grandmother, my mother's mother.

TI: Okay. But then you went with your uncle, your father's brother.

PF: Brother, yeah. He's the second one.

TI: Now were the two families close? Did they know each other?

PF: Yeah, they don't know each other, no, because we were one station, two station away from them, yeah. They met.

TI: But then it was arranged that you would stay with your grandmother.

PF: Grandmother, yeah.

TI: So you and your sister would go to your grandmother?

PF: Yeah. When we went there, oh, how many miles we had to walk to go to her house, country. And I said... then my grandmother bought me a bicycle, so we go town with bicycle. But my sister can't ride on it, so I have to give her a ride. Oh, that was something. You know, Japan don't have a road, it's kind of like a hill, tall like this house, and it's around this wide. You have to walk there quite a bit.

TI: And were you able to ride your bicycle?

PF: Yeah, yeah.

TI: So you had to be very careful.

PF: Yeah, uh-huh. You have to ride on that. Then Japan no doctor had the little car, a small car, just one person kind, he was going like that. And then they have jinrikusha, you know, that thing that you ride on the chair and they lift you? Yeah, that's what they had.

TI: Now how was it when you first got to Japan? What did you think now that you're in Japan? Was it what you expected?

PF: No, no. Everything's different. Living in the house, the hotel, we got, you have to change your shoe to that geta, you know, they got that thing to war to go to the bathroom. And then so the lady said, "No, no, no." So instead of taking my shoe off, I put that geta and I walked, and the owner said, "No, no, no." And then I said, gee, what a thing you have to do. Well, we came so we can't help it.

TI: So were you a little bit homesick or sad?

PF: No, no, nothing. It didn't make me cry, nothing. And my grandmother doesn't understand my broken Japanese, but my sister talked better Japanese. So she always used to call and talk to my sister. And my sister know more Japanese than me. So, wow. And then I said to my sister, "Gee, we got to live with her?" My grandmother looked so old, she was only sixty-five. But she looked... I was sixty-five, and gonna look like that, I thought. My auntie, too, was seventy, but gee, they looked old.

TI: So you thought that maybe their lives were hard life to make them look so old?

PF: I don't know. But Japan people look older than Americans. My grandmother was, she didn't look like that, yeah, my father's mother. "Gee, when we get old, we're gonna look like that?" I thought. And here I am, I'll be eighty-four. [Laughs]

TI: Well, you look really good. So when you, now, at your grandmother's place, did you have, like, chores to do, that you had to do every day? Kind of like at the farm you had to work pretty hard to help your father.

PF: Yeah, yeah. But she had a little farm, just like a lawn, big lawn like that, and vegetable planted, so we'd fertilizer, you had to use a bucket to fertilize. Yeah, you'd carry it like this, two of these, they're hanging on you, and then you have to go out. Yeah, human fertilizer.

TI: So it's pretty smelly.

PF: Yeah, are you kidding? Boy oh boy. And then the way you have to walk, because you splash yourself, you have to walk good, you know. Oh, all the thing I learned.

TI: So it was really very different for you when you got there.

PF: Yeah, oh, yeah. Everything. America and Japan, that's what I always say. Wow.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.