<Begin Segment 3>
TI: So let's talk a little bit about your mother. How did your father meet your mother?
JH: The elders in Japan, he was in this orchard work making good money -- no way to get to Japantown to gamble, so he's saving money -- the elders in Japan decided, "Hey, we can't leave him as a bachelor that long, so picture bride, huh?" And my dad sent his picture to Japan, and the family sent my mother's picture to my father and, "Yeah, I'll marry." So she came in 1917.
TI: And what's your mother, what was your mother's name?
JH: Her maiden name is, surname is Uchida, U-C-H-I-D-A, and her girl name is Kameno, K-A-M-E-N-O. She's from Fukuoka too.
TI: And was she about the same age as your father, or different?
JH: No. There was about, I'm making a guess, maybe ten years.
TI: So she's ten years younger.
JH: Yeah. And I guess they were compatible. They had a meeting of minds, and I was born in 1918. [Laughs]
TI: Yeah, I was gonna say, you came, you came pretty quickly after that. What was your mother like? How would you describe her?
JH: Beg your pardon?
TI: How would you describe your mother? What was she like?
JH: She was, getting back to this picture bride, as the man with the picture of his bride, and the lady with the picture of the husband comes down the gangplank before they go to Angel Island for quarantine, my father told me this himself, as the ladies came down one guy saw his. "Ah, ugly. I don't want it." He beat it. And the poor lady had to be shipped back to Japan because there was no husband. That's the truth. That's one of the tragedies. And the other is, I was curious, maybe eight, nine years old, there's pictures in the Japanese paper about a lady and I say, "Dad, what's this?" He says, "Oh, this husband is looking for his wife. His wife ran away and so if you see this lady --" Well, nobody's gonna report that kind of thing. But that's the fact of life for the Japanese older generation.
TI: Yeah, no, I heard on the other side too, sometimes the women would come down and the men would sometimes send a different picture or a picture when they were younger, and so they would see them and they would be disappointed that they're marrying this old man or, or something else.
JH: Well, there's a fiction DVD, they call it Picture Bride, and the same situation. He's, he sent a picture of when he was young and she comes and, oh, they had a bad time. She wouldn't sleep with him and all that and this. But eventually they had a meeting of minds because he was patient. Well that, that's got nothing to do with the interview, though. [Laughs] But I agree, some of the ladies were very brokenhearted.
TI: So did you ever ask your mom how she felt when she met your father? Was she, was she...
JH: I think, well, my dad was a pretty good lookin' guy, and naturally, they married in the city and she's from a village, a progressive village, so I think she was happy. Otherwise I wouldn't be born, huh?
TI: Yeah. And so tell me a little bit about her. What was she like? I mean, what was her personality?
JH: I hate to say this, but she was a chatterbox. Tatatata. Nothing comes out. Oh god, drives me crazy. But that's the way she was. And I think I inherited that chatterbox. I think so.
TI: [Laughs] Well, how about your father? What was his personality?
JH: He was a very well-educated man, could read and write Japanese. You know the, not the katakana but the kanji? He, oh man, he was really educated. And naturally, he, being bilingual, after my mother came, the biggest demand was houseboys, washing windows, vacuuming floors. And then the biggest surprise for a male, Japanese male, is to see a naked Caucasian lady run and answer the telephone. Whoa. [Laughs]
TI: So your father would talk about that, or he, he...
JH: Yeah, he told me that. As they come acclimated to the city life, knows his way around, he knows more about the city than I do, what trolley to catch and go to get, all that stuff. And he became a call on butler, and they furnished the clothes. And the big party, and the man, the doorbell would ring and he'd answer and he'd go tell the lady of the house, "Mr. So-and-So's here," so forth and so on. Made good money.
TI: So this was after he got married he was doing this?
JH: Yeah.
TI: Okay. So he didn't work in the South Bay anymore. He was in the city?
JH: In between, actually. Vacuuming and washing windows and stuff like that. There was a tremendous demand for that kind of work, if you were bilingual.
TI: How about your mother? Did she do work also?
JH: Yeah, she did too, with broken English. She knew her way around. The only thing is 1920 there was this flu epidemic, and her doctor said she better go to a sunnier climate because San Francisco is always foggy. So they came to San Jose, and hop, skip and a jump, they wound up in Berryessa neighborhood where an Issei farmer had a big orchard and vegetable and strawberries, so they settled there. I must've been three or four.
TI: Did you have any brothers or sisters?
JH: No. Because of her health they were born, stillborn.
TI: So you're only, an only child?
JH: Yeah, I'm the oldest. There were two youngers, but in name only.
<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.