<Begin Segment 9>

TI: So you had this situation, you were somewhat taken by this Japanese woman, so what do you do next? What happens next?

MF: Tried to get her to out for a date. She said no, no, no, then finally she said okay. We went down to Fukuoka, I met her at the bus station in Kasugabaru, and went down to the densha, I guess they called it densha. I went down to Fukuoka, because everybody went to Fukuoka, there wasn't much around the base. Mainly around the base was just bars and shops and stuff. Downtown Fukuoka you had some nice department stores and buildings and stuff.

TI: And your first date, from the memoir, I think you were planning to take her to a movie, but instead you went to a puppet show.

MF: Oh, I remember that.

TI: It was such a good story, can you tell that?

MF: Yeah, it's kind of... oh gosh, I even forgot about that. They had this thing where these was a stage and there was the puppets behind it, the hand puppets and stuff like that, and things, and of course, it was all in Japanese and I didn't understand any of it. [Laughs] But I can remember they were doing these things and they had, there were sticks for the hands and things like that.

TI: And so was it, like, narrated? Did they have one narrator, or did the actors, the puppeteers talk?

MF: They talked, if I remember. I don't remember too much. In fact, I had forgotten about that 'til you said it.

TI: And describe the scene. How many people were watching, were they mostly children, were they adults, I'm curious.

MF: Thinking back, it was later in the evening when we did... gosh, I've got to think. It was a lot of adults, I just, I can't say there wasn't any children there and I can't say there was. It just didn't make an impression on me. Thinking back, I remember that we were sitting on the ground, on kind of a blanket, and then we were just watching it and stuff. Oh, gosh, used to be...

TI: Well, let me ask you this question. So why do you think Tsuchino brought you there? Because I'm assuming she's the one who chose that.

MF: Oh, yeah. I don't know, you'll have to ask her.

TI: I'm curious why she decided to do that rather than just go see a movie which would maybe be the expected thing to do, she took you to a Japanese puppet show, I thought that was interesting.

MF: I'd really forgotten about that. That's surprising, just, gosh. [Laughs]

TI: So at this point you started dating Tsuchino. What was the reaction of others around you when you started doing this?

MF: You mean others? I just... there wasn't any reaction about the people I worked with and stuff like that. Her family, from what I understand later, just kind of... she's so strongheaded, they just kind of... I'm not sure she told her family early on or not. It was really, found out later it was really, we'd meet in Kasugabaru, and when we'd come down off the hill, it was quite a ride, we'd be in these, what they called six-byes, which were the big army trucks, and we'd be in the back, just standing up, they had benches along the side. And we'd go down through... and the streets were narrow enough that when the six-bye went down, it took the whole road. In other words, it was no two-way traffic and stuff like this. And we went through this little town. Well, it turns out this road through this little town was where she lived. So I was kind of wondering, sometimes she may have been in a taxi behind me, because a lot of times I would be there when she'd come already.

TI: And so it sounds like once Tsuchino's family heard, they were, you said she was stubborn, so they said, "Well, we'll just kind of let her do what she's going to do"? Is that kind of the reaction?

MF: Yeah, she pretty well got her own way. She's the type of person that... well, she was class president of her class and stuff like that, and I remember seeing a picture of a whole bunch of family members, there must have been fifty people there, and they were all in gray, you know how they all owned gray stuff like that. Except Tsuchino, she had on a red thing. [Laughs]

TI: So even in that, you could see that she was...

MF: Yeah, she was the only one that had any color on.

TI: You mentioned something about her life, and I can't remember exactly, but how... she was obviously very intelligent, but because of something her older brother did, that all of a sudden, because of that decision, made it clear that she wouldn't go to college.

MF: Oh, oh, yeah.

TI: I'm trying to remember what that was.

MF: Her father had died during the war, not from service, but what had happened, during the war, there was a lot of shortages, and Japanese men used to get together and they'd drink sake and stuff. Well, somebody had gone ahead and sold him poison sake and he died from that. And I guess, I assume other people got sick, but he died. And because of that, her brother -- there was only one brother -- had to take over the house. And because he took over the house, he couldn't go any further in school than when he was out, I think he just went through high school. Well, Tsuchino wanted to go to college, and at that time, her mother, of course, being a very old fashioned traditional Japanese woman, said no, she couldn't go any further than the boy had gone. So they wouldn't let her go.

TI: Okay. Although teachers and others really thought that she...

MF: Oh, yeah, they wanted... in fact, I understand, from what I understand, some of her teachers went and tried to talk to her, but her mother wasn't having anything to do with it. She couldn't go any further in school than her brother because he was the man of the house.

TI: So from the little you've talked about her so far, it feels like, in some ways, the society that she was in was really constraining for her. That she... obviously the story about what she wore, the red versus the gray, the fact that she wanted to go to college but was prevented, there were some things that were constraining.

MF: Yeah, I tell people that if she hadn't married me, she'd most likely be in the Diet now. [Laughs] The Japanese Diet.

TI: But, I mean, would that be true if she didn't go to college, though?

MF: Well...

TI: But she would have found a way to...

MF: If they hadn't restricted her. Because I think if they'd let her go to college, she'd never have married me.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.