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TI: So let's go to December 7, 1941, and this is the date that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Can you describe that day and what you were doing?

MK: Well, that day, it was the custom for most of the Japanese families, when the daughter -- she had to be like sixteen or she couldn't go out on dates or anything like that -- so they had this big meeting at the next farm, next co-op community, and it was the same thing as JACL except it's JCCA, it's the Japanese Canadian Association, so my father took us there, my sister and I, took us to this meeting. And it was at like nine o'clock, and so when it got to lunch break time, some guy comes running in and he says, "They bombed Pearl Harbor, they bombed Pearl Harbor." All the people, the older boys that were running the meeting, said, "Wow. We better disperse." So the people that had cars and stuff like that, they all went home. But I had to wait for my father, so I was sitting on the sidewalk --

TI: Well, before you tell, so where was your sister? You went there with --

MK: My sister went home with somebody, or somebody took her. And I could understand; she was a beautiful, beautiful girl, and she was five years older than me.

TI: So she was twenty-one.

MK: Yeah. And so, so...

TI: She just left her kid sister there.

MK: Yeah, she left me there, and so I'm sitting on the (stairs) all by myself. So I'm sitting there, and pretty soon this guy comes out of the co-op house and says, "You got to go home." I said, "Well, it's pretty far to walk, so I'm waiting for my father and he's coming at four o'clock." Well, this is now two o'clock. So he says, "Oh, well wait. I'll, as soon as I finish the books I'll take you home." I said okay, I said, "Well, I live in Strawberry Hill." He says, "Oh, that's okay." So anyhow, when he finished it was around 2:30 or so, he took me home to my house. And I went running inside and telling my father, and my father said, "I knew they were gonna do that. I told you when I was leaving Japan, when I was leaving Japan they were building already," ships and stuff like that that he could see. So that was the beginning of the whole...

TI: I want to go back to the boy who took you home. Was this Tetsuo?

MK: He was, yeah, Tets Aoki, and he was going to UBC, the University of British Columbia, and working nights at the bookkeeper for that co-op, which was the next co-op from us, and he was a bookkeeper. So he came and my mother and father invited him to stay for dinner 'cause he brought me home. And then, I don't know, a couple days later he came over and wanted to know if I'd go for a show or whatever, and so we started to go out.

TI: So this was a date.

MK: This was a date, and we started to go out.

TI: And so how much older was Tets than you? He was...

MK: He was only like, he must've been eighteen or nineteen, and I was sixteen.

TI: Okay, so two or three years older.

MK: Yeah.

TI: But he was a college boy, so that was --

MK: That's right. And I think he was either first or second year of college. But he was the son of a, in Vancouver Island there was a Cumberland, Cumberland District, and his father and mother were Japanese school teachers.

TI: You mentioned that he stayed for dinner, and I understand that your mother was pretty famous for her chicken dinners.

MK: Yeah, well she... well, that's all we could do. Every time people come from the city she, we had a long driveway to the house because we were on a farm. We could see and my mother, "Oh, Auntie So-and-So's coming." So she'd make us run to the chicken house and catch a chicken, and we'd have it dressed and in the oven and she'd be entertaining the relatives. Yeah, we would cut the chicken head off and get it all...

TI: So would you do that too? Could you...

MK: Yeah, that was, that's how they entertained. My mother'd be, it was kind of like, we had a chicken, it's kind of like a, not a nursery but like a ward, and all the chickens that, a chicken, when they jump or get, or fight or do something like that, their egg breaks inside their, the womb and it starts leaking, and all the other chickens peck at it. And the chicken is good, but it will eventually die, so we separate them and then those are the ones we kill.

TI: To eat later.

MK: To eat, yes, because they're very, very... so we would separate them kind of like a hospital ward or something like that, but we, that's where we would go. And then we were so used to it we'd cut two or three heads at, and put hot water and skin 'em. Oh yeah, so all of us knew to do that.

TI: Now, what made your mother's chicken dinners so special?

MK: Well, she roasted, she roasted the chicken and with lots of salt and pepper and oil, so that it would be so juicy.

TI: And crispy on the outside.

MK: Yeah, right. But she was, we'd, I mean, she would bake seventeen loaves of bread every week, even though bread was only five cents a loaf or something. I guess it must've been cheaper making 'em or something. I could never understand. She made anpan, she did, I mean, coming here at fifteen and she... I just wondered how she ever, ever learned, but I guess when you have to you would.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.