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BN: And then you were born like a year later?

RM: I was born in late '31, November of '31.

BN: And then we were talking about this earlier, that you don't have a Japanese name.

RM: No. That's very strange because all my aunts that were born in Mountain View all had Japanese name and no English name. Like my mother Shizuko, my next aunt was Kiyo, Kiyoko, and so forth. And then in Pescadero we had three boys, and they all English names and no Japanese names. Like the oldest one was Frank, Fred, and William. They didn't have any Japanese name. That's why my mother followed that and I was just called Robert. And my brother, however, had a Japanese name. He was Richard Hideo. I used to always call him Hide, Hideo, you know, until much later when I started calling him Richard.

BN: And that's unusual for a Nisei to have an English name and no Japanese name.

RM: Yeah, yeah.

BN: So what's the first place you remember then as a child?

RM: Well, I remember like when I was probably four or five... well, the first memory I have is of my grandmother's funeral. I have a picture of her lying, but I don't know if it was a casket or a bed or what it was, but I just saw her lying on... I was two and a half years old, and that's my earliest memory.

BN: Which grandmother is this?

RM: Hmm?

BN: Which grandmother?

RM: My Morimoto.

BN: Your mother's mother.

RM: Yeah, my mother's mother. She died in 1934, and my mother said that I wouldn't let her sleep, because I was afraid she'd never wake up. So I would wake her up. Every time she'd go to sleep, I would wake her up, because I was afraid she wouldn't wake up. At two and a half, I knew what death was. But that's my earliest recollection. Then after that, when I was about four or five, we moved... I was born when we were farming in Half Moon Bay, and then that was only for about a three-year lease, then we moved to my grandfather's farm in Pescadero, and I was there when I was still a baby.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.