<Begin Segment 18>

[Translated from Japanese]

NM: I agree your generation played a big role to introduce Japanese culture...

TF: I think we were the first generational group to quickly spread Japanese culture. Soy sauce was not available at a local Safeway when I came over. Maybe it was in Chinatown, but I didn't want to go shopping in Chinatown. Funny thing happened. Mike was always telling his family about sukiyaki ever since he came back. He is bragging about it and telling them this is a Japanese dish the entire family can enjoy together by eating from the same pot. He was asking me to prepare it. I thought we could put it together with onions and meat, but soy sauce was not available. It cannot be done without it. We had to find soy sauce, but we didn't have a car to go shopping in Chinatown. We had never been there. We could not afford to go shopping in the area. We looked around and found Chun King Sauce. We thought it looked like soy sauce. It had the same color. It was sauce after all, and we assumed it would be similar to soy sauce. [Laughs] I didn't cook in Japan because my mother did. We decided to cook with Chun King Sauce. We bought meat and made sukiyaki, but no one ate it. [Laughs] I didn't either. [Laughs]

NM: [Laughs] No one touched it including you and Michael?

TF: [Laughs] Michael was the one who ate least. We ended up throwing everything away in garbage.

NM: He was talking about sukiyaki so much though.

TF: We didn't eat it at all. The family had never had such a meal or even heard about it. They were not really willing to try new things. They are Irish and like eating meat, potatoes, corn and green peas. That's all they have.

NM: Japanese food didn't give them very good first impression. [Laughs]

TF: I have never prepared sukiyaki for the family since then. [Laughs]

NM: They just didn't have a good first experience. [Laughs]

TF: One of the brother's wives was a secretary at Pentax. They often invited visitors from Japan back then and went to well-known Japanese restaurants in New York. She knows sushi and learned a bit more that way. [Laughs]

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.