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LT: So in the summer of 1959, your parents returned to Japan. Where were you and what was the purpose of their trip?

GI: Well, for the few years leading up to that, Daddy was, his colon cancer condition was really deteriorating, and he would oftentimes be rushed out in the middle of the night bleeding and being taken to the hospital and brought back. And he would kind of disappear from the store, working in the store for a lot of days before, to recover from that sort of thing. And then they found out that there may be some radiation therapy available to him in Japan. I don't think they had any kind of insurance here, or any kind of benefits because they had been dishonorably discharged from the military, so there wasn't any support. And so we saw them off at the airport, and that was the last time we saw him.

LT: And where did you stay?

GI: We stayed with our mother's sister, Yoneo, Auntie Taniguchi. And she and her husband Joe had two daughters, June and Carol, lived there, and our Uncle Frank lived in the back with our Auntie Yoshiye and their sons Henry and... I can't remember their other sons' name, but their two kids. And so Lloyd and I lived back there with them, and Steve and Phil lived in the front.

LT: You were just ten years old and your father died when he was in Japan. So your mother returned, did she continue the store? How did she support four boys and also make a living?

GI: Well, Mom... a couple of the DB Boys, Mr. Nomiyama and Mr. Ogawa and one other that I'm not thinking of right now, three of them had gardening businesses in Orange County and they catered to the wealthy people in Corona Del Mar. So they were able to find our family a nice little ranch house, and across the street was a horse ranch with real horses, and down the street they were building Westminster High School, and over the hill they were building the 405 freeway. So it was a whole another world from the inner city ghetto kind of scenario.

LT: And so how did your mother make a living?

GI: So Mom, I guess her major job was working at what she called the factory, which was doing, like, piecework on, I guess they sewed clothes together. I actually went to the factory a couple times myself and kind of looked in, and it was just very industrial kind of work. And then I know that she was working as a cleaning woman at her friend Mary's massage parlor, which was probably a brothel or something like that.

LT: What do you recall about your mother during that period of time?

GI: Also she supplemented her income by trading in the stock market, because that was how our dad had supplemented his income while we lived in Watts. And I remember he subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, so he would always teach me about finance and economics and stuff like that, he would talk to me about stuff like that.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.