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TI: So I'm gonna now jump to, there's a time period when your father decided to return to Japan, so can you talk about that? Why did he go back to Japan?

MK: Well, he's the only son. He fell heir to the property, and my father went back to Japan. Well, he decided that, I don't know how much the fortune was gonna be, but he thought he's gonna live his life out in Japan with that fortune.

TI: Wasn't that a little unusual for him to leave his family? So his wife and all his kids and he would just go to Japan?

MK: Well, I don't, I think my mother and him were not very, very compatible. My mother had the kids and she figured... and my father was very selfish 'cause he's the only son, and he just, he, everything was for him, he was first. I don't know if you were ever raised that way, but even like my mother, doesn't matter if there's only so much sashimi, Dad would get it, nobody else would. That would be the way they, they took care of the men. So we really, so my father... and then I think how it was was that if he didn't go that year, or go then, something was gonna happen to the property, and so my father decided on going.

TI: But he was thinking at that point of just staying in Japan?

MK: That's right. So he went back to Japan, and I don't know whether he was there a year or half a year or what, but then all of a sudden he... in fact, when he went back he went back first class. In those days everybody, all the immigrants went on the hull of the boat or something like that.

TI: So third class.

MK: That's right. So he, and so big shot Dad, you know. I was, by that time I was like fifteen or so, and so it wasn't too tragic and I wasn't in on the loop about him not coming back or like that. But anyhow, he went back and sold the land, and this, this sister that had that boy, that, now he's a grown man, and all he did was left them the house and sold everything around 'em.

TI: So they probably weren't very happy with your father.

MK: They were very, very mad. And so, and my father was having a great old time. We heard from people in Japan, "That [inaudible], he's spending his money like it was never gonna go out of shape." And when I went back to Japan, relatives, they all tell me, "Boy, he was a fun guy." Well sure, it's his money and it's, but my mother's sister was very, very upset, very angry. She didn't like my mother's side of the family didn't like my father's side of the family anyhow, so it didn't matter. But, so when we got a wire saying, "Send money to come home," Mother was upset. She was saying, "What?"

TI: "You had all this money. What happened to it?"

MK: "What happened to it?" and all that. And on top of that, the sister's writing to my mother and telling her what a rotten brother he is and so forth, so this is the reason why. So my mother sent him third class fare. Well, it happens to be the same captain is on the same ship, and my father was about ready to throw us off, off the gangplank, I think.

TI: He was so upset about having to --

MK: He was, yeah. But Mother said she didn't care. She was saying...

TI: But then he had to come back because he ran out of money? Or what, why did he have to come back?

MK: Well, he was either gonna get jailed or he's gonna get thrown out, because when they started coming to the house and take all the iron and steel and all that stuff from his house, he said, "What?" And then they said it was for the war effort. So he starts saying, "Don't be so ridiculous. You're gonna fight against the United States? It's like when you build ships out of tin cans," and stuff like that. And they told him, they said, "Either you go or you're gonna get..." so that's why he took that, he took the last boat.

TI: So this is like in 1941, when Japan's ready to, almost go, to go to war?

MK: Ready, yes. It was in the summer of '41.

TI: Summer of '41. And your father's being critical of the Japanese government.

MK: Of the Japanese government.

TI: And so they essentially kicked him out.

MK: Yeah. Otherwise they were gonna jail him or something. And so, and I'm sure he was running out of money because of the fact that, I mean... we tried to figure out how much, how much he could get, but then for us, it was the first year that strawberries were selling like two dollars a crate and eggs went up to twenty-five cents a dozen or something, and we remodeled the house and we did all, we did all these things because, gee, we never had it so good. So when my father comes home and he saw the house, he was more mad because... [Laughs]

TI: He had to come home third class. [Laughs] 'Cause he said, because he could see that you were doing okay with the money.

MK: Yeah, well naturally. But we were doing, the first time the farm was doing so good, and we were... and that's another thing that upset us, because the war broke out and we were, when curfew came on and all that, and then when we heard about the evacuation, my father said, "We're not doing a stitch of work. We're not gonna, we're not going to..."

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.