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BN: Then your mom, being a girl, didn't have...

JF: The same responsibilities on the farm.

BN: On the farm.

JF: No. She was pretty much saved from that. Helped my grandmother in the kitchen, but yeah, she didn't have to get her hands dirty, but she still kind of was growing up as a tomboy because of the influence primarily of Nori. He was a real prankster. He used to play a lot of tricks on her and torment her. But so in response, she was a pretty tough cookie as she calls herself. So they wound up shifting my mother back to Japan so that she could grow up to be what they called a "proper young lady," and she wasn't turning out that way. So they sent her back to her aunt in Osaka where she lived for three and a half years, for all of middle school.

BN: Wow.

JF: And she was teased over there, she hated it, and they called her a "beanpole." [Laughs] I don't know what that is in Nihongo, but evidently it's derogatory.

BN: Not good.

JF: And they would say things, some of the young boys would say, "Yeah, we're gonna kick the United States' butt, just wait." And then she said, "What are you talking about, you guys? You guys are nuts." But let's see, what else do I remember?

BN: You said she was there three-ish years?

JF: Yeah. So she enrolled in these flower arranging classes and classical Japanese, and she took koto lessons.

BN: This is like in the mid-'30s, right?

JF: Yeah, late '30s.

BN: Mid to late '30s. And where in Japan?

JF: In Osaka.

BN: Because by that time, Japan is already in sort of this war footing and heavily nationalistic and all of that.

JF: Oh, yeah.

BN: Did she pick up a fair amount of Japanese?

JF: Yes. Although it was, she came back with that Osaka-ben. So instead of "Konnichi wa," it's, "Konnichi waa." [Laughs] And so I can't tell the difference, but evidently, people immediately picked up on it and would kind of snicker and laugh. But she was never embarrassed by it.

BN: How did she manage to get back?

JF: My grandfather made several trips back and forth. So I collected the manifests off of Ancestry.com, so they made at least four trips. On one of those she would retreat back. She wound up going to Venice High School as a freshman, reunites with her longtime friend from kindergarten, Mae Kakehashi, who I think is still around. Yeah, they're both West L.A. girls. And so she folded right back into jitterbugging with Mae. Mae had kind of a tough high school time because her parents, I'm not sure how they died, but both her mother and father passed away in quick succession. So it was up to Frank, the oldest in their family, to be responsible, be the parent. She wanted to keep the sisters and he together so that they wouldn't be institutionalized. So he left high school and began working. And Mae says that he would leave a dollar for her on the table before he left for work, and when she went up and went off to school with her younger sister, she would take that dollar and she knew that she had to make dinner for the family using that one dollar bill. Mae's younger sister is... I can't remember, she's the Songbird of Manzanar.

BN: Oh, Mary.

JF: Mary.

BN: Mary Nomura.

JF: Mary Nomura, yes, that's Mae Kakehashi's younger sister. I mean, that's a little aside.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.