<Begin Segment 45>

AI: Well, now then, the boys were growing up, getting older, and you and Jack had been together, almost twenty-five years, was it when you decided to take a trip to Japan.

KM: Yeah, on our anniversary.

AI: Could you tell me about that?

KM: Yeah. Well, because we didn't have any honeymoon or a regular wedding or anything, we kinda saved up our money. And then, but, you know raising two kids, giving them piano lesson, buying books -- it costs lot of money for, 'cause Jack had such a late start in life that he had to kinda gradually climb up. So I still did some sewing to supplement the income. And as we did different things, we said that well, we'll have to teach them and give them whatever we can. And we started from a regular teacher that only charged us a dollar a lesson, which we could afford. And it got to a point they were beyond the teacher. And said they wanted us to go to another special teacher that they would recommend, but she has to accept them to see what their talents were. And so they came to the recital, and then they said that they've got a potential. But then this was a $5 a lesson which we -- it was hard. We really squeaked on that. [Laughs]

AI: Oh my. So you really had to save carefully.

KM: Yeah, very carefully. So my two kids know how hard it is for us. And so whenever they, like if Paul was at school, UCLA, one time he came home for break. And then he saw a crystal candle, I mean, not crystal, salt and pepper shaker. And he says, "Mom, Dad," he says, "You got this crystal salt and pepper shaker, could you raise my allowance?" And I said, "This is a gift from our twenty-fifth anniversary." And I says, "We didn't buy this." And then I was telling him the other day, and he said, "I don't remember that." I said, "We remember and we know that you were noticing all we were using." [Laughs] "But oh, if we had extra, we'd surely give it to you." [Laughs] And he was laughing. He forgot about it.

AI: Well, so he went to UCLA. And then at that time, how did it happen that you ended up going to Japan then? You decided that you were going to do that since you hadn't done anything for your...

KM: Well, no, that's a story in itself, too. I got, I became sick, just before, about a year before the twenty-fifth anniversary. And the doctor just didn't know what was wrong with me. I had diarrhea and no medicine would stop it. And it was just constantly. I just got dehydrated and just lost a lotta weight. And then I couldn't even go to the bathroom on my own. Everything was stopped. And when I, so I was on a baby food, strained baby food for one year. And then they took my x-ray again and everything was healing. And so finally they diagnosed me as a ulcerative colitis, which I could have died with.

AI: Oh, that must have been scary.

KM: And so Jack thought that he was gonna lose me. So he, we started thinking about Japan, going to a trip on Japan because we always wanted to go to Japan. And so he borrowed money from the credit union and paid it by monthly in order to go. We didn't go to Japan because we were well-to-do, or we had the means. We had to borrow. And I couldn't see it, but he says, "No," he says, "After I saw that you were gonna almost be gone." He says, "That was the second time." The first time was the baby. And so he says, "I," he'll make arrangement. I said, "What are you gonna do?" He said, "I'm gonna borrow money. We won't feel it." And we didn't. And I'm glad I met all my aunts and uncles, because the second time we went, they were all gone.

AI: So, so this first trip to Japan, you did go to the Hiroshima area?

KM: Yeah, yeah.

AI: And met your relatives?

KM: Uh-huh. But I didn't get real close to them because, you know, we were on a tour and we didn't know how to extend it, or we didn't know enough, we didn't correspond enough that they would beg us to stay. [Laughs] I think they were just getting over the Hiroshima bomb, too. They were really hard up and they were just getting back on their feet when we went.

<End Segment 45> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.