Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Frank Muramatsu Interview
Narrator: Frank Muramatsu
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: June 10, 2015
Densho ID: denshovh-mfrank_2-01-0004

<Begin Segment 4>

TI: And going back to your parents, do you know why they got married? Was it like an arranged marriage, was it a marriage of love?

FM: In Japan?

TI: In Japan, yeah. Because most of the marriages I've talked about with Isseis, they were more arranged because the man was in the United States, and then it was sort of arranged and then they would either get married by proxy or there was, like, a picture bride. But here, your parents were actually, met and married...

FM: Yeah, they were in Japan, and they were in this town. I don't know whether it was an arranged, but it's not the way it... almost all marriages were arranged, I think. (...) I didn't talk to them about a lot of things, and I do wish I had. Because that part of my life, my history, is lacking, Tom. I wish I had done quite a bit more talking.

TI: But this is going to be so precious for your grandchildren, because this gives a, maybe not the full picture, but a glimpse of these people and the connections.

FM: Well, I'll tell you a little bit more later, but you know, my life was... evacuation had a lot to do with my not knowing too much about them.

TI: Well, we'll get into that, because everything was sort of taken away. Yeah, we'll get into that.

FM: But that was the reason. I just didn't know my parents very well at all, because I didn't live with them.

TI: But let's... we're kind of teasing out what you do remember. And starting with your mother, how would you describe her? What was she like?

FM: Well, she was a good mother. I remember her putting my clothes on when I was getting ready to go to school and things like that. So she took care of us very well. In addition to that, of course, she was a farmer's wife, and she would go out in the field with us. She didn't stay at home, in the house, and just be a housewife. She was a working member of that family, even when I was pretty small, she was out there helping the father.

TI: Well, that's amazing, because she was raising, like, lots of children, too.

FM: Yeah, she had a lot of kids. And even yet, she would go out into the field when she was able to. The whole thing was that my family was pretty poor throughout the time. We just never, ever had any abundance of money, and so we were never, being on a farm, we were never hungry, but we never had a whole lot of things. I think about our (...), the house that we lived in all time, up to the time we had to leave, was the same house that we were born in. I was probably born in the south part of town, because that house was moved from south Portland to our farm in North Portland.

TI: So they just put it on, kind of, wheels or something and carted it over?

FM: Yeah, they just moved it. It was quite a distance, maybe eight, ten miles I would imagine, maybe even more.

TI: Yeah, if you're south of Portland going to north of Portland, that's... so describe the house then. How big was it?

FM: Oh, the house was a very small two-bedroom house, and I remember it's very vivid, because that was the house that we lived in until we left the place. But it was two bedrooms, a parlor, and a kitchen. Very, very primitive type house.

TI: And so there were seven children at the, right before the war.

FM: And then Grandpa.

[Interruption]

FM: Yeah, there was a lot of people.

TI: So where did you sleep? Who did you... what room, were the bedrooms...

FM: I think initially I slept with (...) my grandfather. But when I was older, got to be probably fourteen maybe, something like that, George and I, we were fourteen and sixteen, or maybe twelve and fourteen, (...) we moved ourselves to a bunkhouse, which was adjacent to our house. And that's where we, for a fairly long time, because I can remember studying there. That bunkhouse did not have (...) electricity in the place, talking about primitive, our house had when they first put it together, I know that we had water and we had gas, pipe gas. And why my father didn't put a gas lantern into the bedrooms I don't know, but we didn't have light in the bedrooms. We had light in the kitchen, we had one of these mantle lights overhead, and we had a light in the parlor, and that was all. We just didn't have lights like that. What do you need? Another twenty feet of black pipe would have gotten a light there in the bedroom, but I guess he didn't have the money to do that, Tom. So we used lanterns, kerosene lanterns. That was one of my, when I was younger, (...) constant job to fill the lamps and to clean the, what do you call that, the glass part.

TI: And this was all the way up until the war started?

FM: Yeah. Well, yeah. As a matter of fact, just before the war, probably about '39, a couple of years before the war started, we finally got power, electrical power. And I guess it took that long... well, it really wasn't that long, it was about from 1930 to '38 or '39 when we finally got power there.

TI: And the area you are, it's actually, people will probably know where it is because it's right where the airport is right now.

FM: Yes, yes. That's another story. In about 1935, the airport was being built. And so our initial parcel of land was condemned and we had to move. And so, by then, George and I, especially, we were there in our school district, and I was probably just about to begin high school or something like that. So maybe I was in junior high. Anyhow, we kind of talked to Dad and wondered if he wouldn't be able to buy land real close by so that we could stay in the school district, which he did. Turns out that he bought some land adjacent to the airport, the east side of the airport.

TI: So just maybe a mile away?

FM: Well, no. It was really right adjacent. (...) (Our water bags) was in canvas bags. Good thing about that was the water would seep out through the canvas and it would evaporate and it would be a kind of a cooler. So we would hang that on the cyclone fence of the airport, so we were right there, right next door. (...) Our house was there, maybe or ten or fifteen yards away was the cyclone fence to the airport.

TI: And going back to those burlap or canvas water bags, is that your drinking water?

FM: Yeah, the drinking water.

TI: So you get it from wells, or where would the water come from?

FM: Of course, we did have city water or, you know, piped water. We had piped water, and we had, I told you earlier that we had not only piped water, but piped gas, too.

TI: Then why would you need to put water in the bags if you had running water?

FM: We'd carry it out to the...

TI: To the fields?

FM: Yeah, to the fields.

TI: And that would be your drinking water out there.

FM: Yeah, drinking water.

TI: I see, okay.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.