<Begin Segment 2>

BN: Then just to circle back to your grandfather, you said that he was, they were looking for a place to migrate or immigrate, but that relatively few people from Hyogo immigrated. So what was it that made your grandfather or your uncles want to go?

RM: Well, because the oldest son inherits everything and the others have to find land or some kind of a profession. But in Japan, you inherit the land. You don't buy land, you inherit the land. And that's another point that I was curious about, which I still don't have the answer, is that my great-grandfather had a huge parcel of land. Because instead of the oldest son inheriting that land, it was divided between my grandfather's brother, the older brother, which supposedly was supposed to get the whole land. But it was divided between his older brother and him, and the grandfather stayed with the younger son. There was quite a gap between the brothers. There were five girls in between, so it's almost a generation that separates. So the great-grandfather stayed with my grandfather, the younger one, rather than the older one. And I still don't know how they, my great-grandfather inherited that land. Because in the old days, the daimyo, the lord of the area, would give the land to the person who performed various good deeds for the daimyo. And we were under -- and this is Akechi Mitsuhide -- if you know Akechi Mitsuhide, he's the one that assassinated Oda Nobunaga. But the mon, looking at where this mon came from, it came from the north of Hyogo, or the northern part of Hyogo. Of course, it wasn't called Hyogo then, it was... what was it called? It started with an H, I can't remember. But the area was known by a certain name, it started with an H. Can't remember now.

BN: So since your father is number seven, right?

RM: Number seven.

BN: And it's a big family, obviously, so the younger ones all kind of were looking for other places to go?

RM: Yeah. So my grandfather told them, well, go to school, learn English and so forth. And, of course, he didn't know any English, so he's stuck in with the second graders or whatever, and he didn't like that, he was too embarrassed.

BN: Who was he living with at that time?

RM: He was doing schoolboy, so he was living in a home somewhere and doing some...

BN: This is in San Francisco?

RM: San Francisco. But he said he didn't want to go to school anymore. So my grandfather said, "Well, if you're not going to go to school, you have to go to work. So he went to work, and my grandfather was farming also, so he went with my grandfather and cut asparagus and worked out in the orchard picking fruits and so forth. And, of course, my grandfather and my uncles, they didn't know the land, they didn't know the way that they farmed, and so they were not very successful, farming. In fact, when my father landed here, my grandfather was actually working in Southern California. So he went all the way up to pick up my father. So anyway, they did that, and I don't know anything. I know he worked around Stockton and all that, but I don't know too much of the details of the farming that they did. Except he told me about the asparagus and things like that. And they took time to play tennis, and he was playing tennis. So they were not working all the time. And the family was not a poor family. They had workers.

In fact, my father said while they were in Japan, they never worked. They had servants, they had workers where they, they had land where the workers worked, and they worked on their land. In fact, my grandmother's family, Akamatsu, and my grandfather's brother, older brother's wife was also Akamatsu. And they both came from a samurai family up in (Kobe) area. They said they owned, they lived in a castle. And then one of the older brothers' son was sent to the Akamatsus as a youshi in exchange. So they got wives, and they also sent men over there when they didn't have any men. So there was a lot of exchange there. So the story that I'm not clear on, because it was just word of mouth, is that when Oda Nobunaga was assassinated by Akechi Mitsuhide, we were supposedly involved. But when Hideyoshi, who was fighting in Kyushu, came to avenge the loss of his master and killed Akechi, we somehow escaped. So in reality, if that was the case, we would have lost all our land, because he would have avenged it by taking over all the land. But somehow, we got a large parcel of land, and I don't know how my great-grandfather had that land.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.