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TI: So I'm going to bring you back now, so tell me a little bit about your mother, what you know.

RW: My mom is Kibei-Nisei, so there's a lot of mystery. Like my aunt, her sister, at ninety-seven just passed away recently. So we tried to do, among family, piece together things. But I can't piece together all of it, but there's little clues. What I do know is my grandfather is also from Yamanashi, I suspect my grandmother was, too. And she's a piece of work, from what I could tell. Like she was probably one... in terms of, like, really tiny, petite, but I think there's aspects of her that are really sort of marginal. They had a boarding house from what I can tell, and I have her shamisen. So she's a bit of an entertainer, and I suspect, courtesan. But the family, my parents, my aunt, that generation wouldn't talk about it, I don't even know where Grandma's buried. So my mother came out of, kind of like, I think a destabilized household, she gets shipped back to Japan early, she's Kibei-Nisei. And she's there during the Kanto earthquake, and then she gets removed even to more distant relatives. So when she comes back to the U.S., my sense of who she was is that she's pretty fragile. She didn't have the kind of home life that my aunt did who stayed here. And I also think that, in many ways, explains that she and my dad, who's like twenty-five years older, hooked up and get married.

TI: Interesting. Because your father was previously married.

RW: He was previously married.

TI: And you said divorced?

RW: Yeah, divorced. But the family relationship, even from my stepbrother and stepsisters -- because he's got five children from that marriage. But I grew up with us all being part of one family, like Shogatsu or everything, she was there.

TI: This is your father's...

RW: Ex-wife.

TI: ...ex-wife.

RW: And I didn't have any sense that there was anything unusual or any tension. I mean, she was as much a part of my life as anyone. And I didn't know that that was unusual, when you just live it, you don't know that it's unusual. And my brothers, my Kibei-Nisei brothers, were -- because they were sent back to Japan, too -- they were in many ways like my father. I mean, they took me to the football games and baseball games and trips, where my dad was older. He took me to the kenjinkai meetings and chanbara movies.

TI: But yeah, your father, about how old was he when he had you?

RW: Fifty-six.

TI: Okay, so he was quite a bit... and your mom, you said, was about twenty-five years younger?

RW: Yeah.

TI: And do you know, I mean, I guess you're touching upon this, but how they actually met?

RW: Yeah. My grandfather had a laundry, dry cleaners, and my dad was the driver that would pick up. So they met that way, and I guess the family was really resistant, because he was older, "You got to watch that guy." Turns out, my dad was like an awfully good guy, he took care of everybody. I mean, he was competent, hardworking, like where my mom was flaky, my dad was the opposite. So the family learned that after a while, like now I think my dad, the family that remembers, is held in really high esteem, like, "That's a remarkable man." And I totally agree, he was. My mom was, like, wonderful. You know, like working a crowd, if we went to anyplace in Little Tokyo, everyone knew my mom, she was gregarious, pretty, worked the crowd, but she was flaky, unreliable, really relied on my father. It's such an interesting family.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.