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TI: Going back to your grandmother and grandfather on the Shimomura side, any stories about their courtship that you can remember, or anything that, or just in terms of them as a couple getting together?

FS: No, they didn't really ever talk about that, but I'm sure it was more of an arranged marriage than anything else. And the interesting thing is, when I was doing some research, I learned that when the "picture brides" came over, that was one way of kind of circumventing the Gentlemen's Agreement. Because that was one of the exceptions to it. If you were married, and in Japan, you can get married and not even be in Japan as long as your family and everybody consents to it. So a lot of picture brides were coming from Japan, and the Japanese foreign ministry had a rule that said that there couldn't be more than fifteen years between the Issei. Because at some point, I guess they had some problems earlier when it was like twenty. And, because the girls really married young, like sixteen or seventeen, and so if there's twenty years' difference, it would shock the white community to have somebody thirty-six years old marrying, like, a sixteen year old, right? But anyway, the long and short of it is, when I was looking at the birthdays of my, of the two, I found out that the difference was like fifteen years and four months. So they couldn't do the traditional, if it was an arranged marriage, the marriage in Japan, and then she would come, because they couldn't meet the fifteen year rule. But since my grandmother's father was already here, he could bring her here, and then after she was here, he had to let her get two or three more years and so then she was old enough to get married in California.

TI: Oh, I see, okay.

FS: So, I mean, I doubt if there was any romantic courtship, but the traditional Japanese way with a go-between and all that probably happened, that kind of a courtship, which is more a family type of thing than personal.

TI: Well, and you mentioned your father, Ben, how many other children did they have?

FS: Well, this is kind of the sad part of the story, is after the two got married, my grandmother and grandfather, they got married in 1915, they had a baby about eight months later, who died at childbirth, and his name is Shigeru Shimomura. And I know this because they have a nice tombstone in Sacramento in the cemetery there, and there's a lot of writing on the tombstone. So my grandfather just went all out, even though he only lived like one day, the baby did. And the reason why he's buried in Sacramento is that's where the women went, because that's where the, you know, the women who help people with childbirth, there's a name for that, but it escapes me.

TI: Midwife.

FS: Yeah, midwife. There were Japanese midwives there, and so when you got to the point when you were just about ready, then you went over there and you stayed in this home, the midwife's home, and then you'd have your baby there. So they must have had a miscarriage or whatever it was in Sacramento. But the sad thing is that it was such a beautiful tombstone, I mean, it was about that big and that wide, that after the war, during the resettlement period, probably around 1947 or so, that tombstone was vandalized, because it was in this little section of the cemetery where all the Japanese tombstones were. And because it was knocked down like that, today, when you go to the cemetery, actually, it lies flat on the ground, but you can see the big crack that goes through the bottom of it, from left to right, when they had to put the thing back together again. You can see the point where they must have used a crowbar or something to kind of leverage it, because there's a big chip on the side that's gone. If it wasn't for that tombstone, the story behind it, probably wouldn't remember Shigeru's name. The other interesting thing was, I took a picture of it, and when I was doing family research, I found out that it had the old family address from Wakayama, the mother's address.

TI: Oh, interesting, they placed it on the tombstone?

FS: Yeah. Well, they did in this case, and I don't know if they always do it. To find your family koseki, you have to know the address, because that's how the system is, it's based on where the household is.

TI: That's interesting, it's almost like a document, this is how you can trace your roots back.

FS: It's really kind of, I had this eerie feeling, because I didn't realize it was the old address. So I took a picture of it with my cell phone, and we went to the local Buddhist temple there, that's been there forever in the little village. And we showed him the picture, and he read the address and even had the house number on it. And he says, "Oh, well, that's it right across the street there." I mean, you go out the front of the temple, and the street is a real narrow street, only like twelve feet wide, and there it was. It was an amazing thing, and I started thinking, my grandfather, he was sending a little message here.

TI: It's like a little clue or a breadcrumb or something there.

FS: Yeah. And there it was, just sitting there. Because most people who do that kind of research, that's the big problem, is they may know generally where their relatives came from, but you really have to know the address, because that's how they indexed everything.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.