<Begin Segment 18>

TI: After a while your mother moved to another ranch, on the main highway?

MK: Yeah. We stayed, the guy that, he was part of the Commission and he wanted our family to work at his father's farm, so he finagled and got us out of the sugar beet ranch. And the last, last year we got to move right on the highway, and we worked there. And they had another family, whom we knew, they were from the village, our village, and so we all worked. It was truck farming, so they would grow lettuce -- and this was kind of like what we were used to, growing lettuce and green onions and stuff like that -- and so we worked there, but in the winter, same, snows in. So we would take the Greyhound from the highway and go into town, and we worked, I worked every day. So it gets like twenty, thirty below zero and it's the most godforsaken place you would ever want to live. I mean, we called it the frozen tundra.

TI: So it was at this place when there was, I guess, a family tragedy. It was your brother that...

MK: Yes.

TI: So tell me what happened.

MK: Well, just before, just before that, we were living in this, we rented this house and it was, but they had no water and no well, so they had to go to the school, and they have a pump there. So my little brother, the nine year old brother, he and this neighbor kid, they would have a little red wagon and they'd put two buckets in and they would go to the school and pump the water in and bring it home. My mother used that water for everything. Well, one day she heard a big bang, and she ran outside, the two kids got hit, but Kenny was the one that was on the most outside and he got thrown about sixty feet or something. And he cracked his head open, and so he, he didn't die there, but they, the ambulance came and then, well, it was the RCMP's wife who was drunk that hit... but it was, I mean... and then the ambulance they sent broke down every time, every so many miles it broke down. But my mother says he was dying anyhow, so -- of course, that's how she would think -- so anyhow, by the time they got him to the hospital, by the time I got there from my sewing job, it was that death rattle that you can, you can tell. So I knew he was, he was going.

TI: How tragic. Did anything ever happen to the RCMP's wife?

MK: No. In fact, the write up was "a little Jap boy" or something like that. It was just, we, you couldn't read it, or you couldn't... you know. It just, it was really... and there was no investigation, no nothing. And we kept saying... but Mother says, "No, it was his time," as Buddhists will say. So we just... Mother's wish that we don't make a thing out of it.

TI: But then it was, I guess this event that had your father come back.

MK: That's right.

TI: Or come, 'cause he was in the ghost town and he then joined the family.

MK: Yes. And we sent him a wire and said that Kenny had died, and so he came. Then he stayed with us. And then shortly thereafter he, he was asked by the Canadian government to go on an agricultural thing, so my father's going back and forth across Canada, even in the, even in the confined zone. I was surprised 'cause he'd go all the way to Vancouver and then we were, we were not allowed to go there. [Laughs]

TI: So what did the government have him do, agriculture?

MK: And he was doing an agriculture study with the bunch of aggie farm people. And he was very knowledgeable, my father, very knowledgeable about different -- and he'd, he crossed so many fruit trees and got different kinds. We even, he even invented an Enta berry, which is the strawberry that my father, my father crossed. So I mean, he was, I don't know where he got all that knowledge or education, but he was a very, very learned person.

TI: Interesting. Now, during this time did he ever give you advice on what you should do with your life?

MK: Oh yes, oh yes. He was very, very... if you knew the Japanese Issei, the minute that you go out with somebody, you're supposed to, he would check up on your, on that person's background. And my poor sister, my older sister, she married the first person that they, they, miai with, my older sister, and she married, she's lucky he's such a nice guy. So my next sister, she's going around, boy, she's like a little butterfly. And boy, she had so many boyfriends running around, my father searched their background. He knew, next day already. "Nope, you can't go out with that guy no more." And we'd say, "Well, what's, what is, isn't he Japanese?" And he'd say, "No. Can't go out with that." He knew all their background, family background, everything.

TI: And what would the things he'd be looking for in a background -- so these are Japanese boys?

MK: Japanese. Especially like, I don't know if you know the bakuren?

TI: Yeah.

MK: And I'd say, "Well, we're dirt farmers. What are we talking about?" "Better to be a dirt farmer than..."

TI: So there were certain classes or certain...

MK: Very class system, yeah. So my father was very, very... so when my husband and I, when he asked me to get married, my husband, and my father said, "Well, we got to search his family." They're from United States. My mother said, "Oh my goodness, it's wartime and what the heck," all that she was saying. So when we announced that we were getting married, his side of the family is inquiring about us, and my father blew his stack, blew his stack, and he wrote the whole family history and sent it off. My sister-in-law said to me, she said, "Boy, your father was mad." [Laughs]

TI: But yet, he was probably comforted that that were looking too, don't you think?

MK: Well he, you give the bride away, see? If they, they should've looked you up before you asked. We should look and see that, where you're going. It's a tradition. I had to, I couldn't hardly believe it.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.