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BN: We are interviewing today, Sumiko Higashi. It's November 11, 2022. We're doing a remote interview with Sumiko, who is at her home in Connecticut, and Dana Hoshide is doing the videography and technical support remotely. And I'm Brian Niiya, the interviewer. So good afternoon, and let's get started. I wanted to start by asking if you could tell us a little bit about your parents -- what you know about their prewar life and their background.

SH: I'm going to start with some photos. I don't know if you can see this very well. This is a picture of my mother taken shortly after she became engaged to my father. I think she was then, very early twenties, maybe late teens. Oh, and this is my father as a judo student; he studied judo and kendo in Japan. And this is what I had a few minutes ago. This is a portrait of my parents when they were married after they were repatriated here.

So what should I say? My parents were kibei. My father was born in Sierra Madre, California. His father had arrived here to work on a large estate to compile some capital. And then he returned to Hiroshima and he built this rather large house and went back to farming; they were farmers. And, in fact, decades later, I was having tea in a coffee shop in Little Tokyo, and this guy who was sitting at the table next to me -- he and his family and I started talking. And, of course, they were from Hiroshima, and they remembered my grandfather's house, which I visited when I went to Hiroshima after my mother died. My mother's family is interesting, I think, because of her mother's line. Her father came from a fairly prosperous family, but his father died when he was nine. And she doesn't know why but he wound up in Hawaii with a young family. She said he was working in some sort of a capacity like a foreman at a plantation, but again they were amassing capital. The interesting part of this story is that my grandmother, Itoyo, brought back to Hiroshima with her a sewing machine. Back then sewing was done in Japan by hand. She was very entrepreneurial so she started a business sewing school uniforms. And my mother said she remembered . . . helping out; she would sew on the buttons, etc. But my mother's family, the Nakashima line, that is, her mother's family were -- they had very interesting women in that family. One of her -- my mother's younger sister ran a restaurant, but the most interesting sister was named Omitsu. And she wore, my mother said, a hakama, a man's sort of long trousers outfit. And she would get on her jitensha or bicycle and go off to see her patients because she was a midwife. And I've always been very sad that I don't speak Japanese very well -- that's a problem I'll come back to -- because when I was in Japan -- my mother's sole surviving sister is still alive; she's a hundred and one. But her younger sister, who died in her eighties as a hibakusha or a victim of the bomb blasts, she was still alive when I (went to Japan) when my mother died. I just felt stupid because I couldn't ask them about that family. And so those are stories that are just lost and that I'll never know about, but it's interesting to speculate.

My mother's father, when he returned to Hiroshima, worked in a bank, but his real important role was that of the president of the town council. And she said he was juggling all these responsibilities, trying to find a way to get out of the bank early so he could go to a meeting, and that her house was just always crowded with people who were there for various reasons that had to do with his political position. And my cousin Yukio, who is now in Georgia, told me years ago that he didn't know what a great man my grandfather was until he died because so many people showed up at the funeral that they couldn't get them all into the temple. And my aunt showed me pictures of crowds of people, you know, standing in line outside, etc. So I think my mother's family, but also my father's family, were interesting but I don't have any information about them. I do sense, though, that when they came to this country, because of the intervention of the war, that they were on a downwardly mobile process that they couldn't arrest.

My father came out here because he was the youngest child in a large family, and I think, in fact, there were . . . I'm not sure, but there may have been two marriages that his father had been involved in. His oldest brother, Moriso, was eighteen years older, and he had come out to Long Beach. And according to my mom, he set up the first grocery store on Broadway in Long Beach. So, of course, after Pearl Harbor the FBI came and, you know, arrested him. But she said it was a fairly large store; they sold fruits and vegetables, and there was also a floral market on the premises. She said that next door there was a bakery and there was a butcher nearby, and that some of their customers were military personnel. In any case, my father had come out to inherit that business, and my uncle was stockpiling American merchandise, etc. that he was going to take back to Hiroshima. Well, the war broke out and you know the story. So they wound up in Amache, and I think that that process doubled the deracination. That is, they're already deracinated when they came here because they've been brought up and educated in Hiroshima and in fairly comfortable circumstances. My mother said she was sent to a private school, that she learned the tea ceremony and ikebana. In fact, her younger sister became a well-known ikebana teacher whose flower arrangement I saw in a book. So her mother, interestingly enough, put her on the boat or the ship in... not Hiroshima, but in Yokohama, and got my mother en route there a ring and a watch and made sure that she was outfitted with all these silk kimonos. But she came out here totally unprepared for life here. And then they were deracinated again in Amache, and I think there they were extremely marginalized because they didn't speak English all that well. My father had been going to a Long Beach high school to learn English and take over the business. But in any case, that's their story up until the point of being in Amache. Now, as far as that camp is concerned, I remember very little.

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