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CC: Well, and that's, I mean, unless, you have anything else to say about them, that's probably a good segue to start talking about your dad. Are you ready to do that?

MM: Sure.

CC: Okay. So why don't you give us his name and when he was born and where?

MM: Okay. My dad, his name was Shigenori Oiye. However, I don't know if you know this, Caitlin, but I think he was given the name Shigeyasu, but he decided it was not a propitious name, so he changed it to Shigenori. [Laughs] And he was born in Tacoma, St. Joseph's Hospital, just like I was. And he was born March 9, 1911.

CC: And so what do you want to tell us about him? Like maybe tell us, first, just some of what he did over the course of his life? You already talked about him going back and forth, what kind of education he had and what kind of work he did?

MM: Okay, so my dad's side of the family is, let's see, I think that when they came here, they must have not liked being in the United States very much. Because they went back to Japan fairly early in his life. And the reason I think this is because my dad had a heavy accent, English accent. There were certain, like he couldn't say "Ls" very well, so this is sort of funny. My mom wanted to name me Claire, but he couldn't say Claire, because he couldn't say the "L." He wanted to name my brother, my next brother, Shoji, she actually wanted to call him Glen, but my dad couldn't say "Glen," so they named him Shoji. By the time my youngest brother came, Alan, she couldn't care less, apparently. [Laughs] So his name is Alan. Anyway, my dad was, he had a really good sense of humor. He liked to whistle a lot, and I don't know when he quit whistling, but he did that. And he was mainly wanting to be an artist, a graphic artist. And I remember he had, he was taking correspondence courses, and I don't know where those things are, I don't know if your dad has them or what, but they're like, I remember they were green and long, and he used to draw figures all the time, and he used to practice doing that. And he was really good with his hands, and I remember that when I was starting cursive writing, he would show me how to work my wrists and everything, so I would have a nice handwriting.

But he was, I think, way ahead of his time in terms of men, what men and women should do, because one of the things in Japanese culture is that it's really nice to have a boy first. So I asked him about that, and he says, "How do you feel about me being born first?" and he said, oh, he liked it. He was just fine with it, and he didn't mind. And in terms of, in the house, he sometimes was vacuuming, he sometimes cooked, but he knew that my mom was working really hard. So he did some of the things that you wouldn't normally have a husband do or a father do. One of my most favorite memories is that when we got out of camp, I had to, well, they wanted me to be in school, because they had to start working right away, they didn't have any money. So they had to start working, so they wanted me in school, me to be in school. But I was, like, only four, and I think the cutoff date for starting kindergarten was five. So I had to take a test, but I didn't know how to speak English. I only spoke Japanese, because they thought they were going to be sent back to Japan. So anyway, my dad was the one who took me to the place to be interviewed, to go in early to kindergarten. And this is the one thing I remember, and thinking about later, that the one question I remember they asked me was to, well, they pointed at a picture and asked me what that was. So I said, in Japanese, "inu," which is "dog." And my dad had to, of course, translate, and so they apparently trusted that he was translating correct. Truthfully, because I know that he wanted me to be in school, and I knew what that was. So anyway, I got into school, that was grade school, well, kindergarten, when I was four. So he was really quite a person and he... should we go into the time in camp or not?

CC: Well, first, why don't you just... so he wanted to be an artist, but what did he actually end up doing for work?

MM: Oh, this is what was so sad, okay. Because my mom and dad were really both very, very smart, but because they had just gotten out of camp, there was a lot of prejudice, and this is just looking back on my part of it. They started a laundry down in Pioneer Square across from the old Seattle Hotel, apparently. They did that for, I don't know how long, let's see, maybe a couple of years. And then eventually my dad and his brother who is very close to his half brother, they started a restaurant on First Avenue, and my mother also worked there, and my aunt, who was the wife of my uncle, who was my dad's half brother, she watched all the kids. And that was one of the happiest times, I think, in his life. He liked what he was doing, I think he would rather have been doing the art, but he was all right with it, and he was a waiter, my uncle did the cooking. And beyond that, do you want to know beyond that? I'm not really sure what he did beyond that. The restaurant had to be abandoned because they didn't own the property there. And the owner of the property sold the place to a garage, which I still believe to this day is a garage, which seems really stupid because they were doing really good business. It was one of the best places to eat, I believe, on First Avenue.

CC: Do you remember what it was called?

MM: It was called the Old Grand, it was called the Old Grand restaurant, well, that's Old Grand. And as kids we used to go after it closed, and we used to help out and fill the salt and pepper shakers and that sort of thing. I have really good memories of that place. So after that, when it closed, I think he was really at a loss as to what to do. Because by then he was probably in his forties, middle forties, maybe getting close to fifty, I'm not really sure. He got really sick. I remember... let's see. Yeah, I remember him getting very, very ill, and having to take him to the hospital, and I was pregnant at the time, so he must have been close to fifty. And so he worked for a time doing jewelry, which was kind of something he probably kind of liked to do, but it didn't make enough money, I think, and he quit that job. And the last job that I know of that he had was working as a typesetter, I believe, at a Japanese newspaper place, I don't know what it was called. But we think that that was contributing, my brother and I, Alan, he and I think that that was a contributing factor to his getting cancer and dying, because probably there was no ventilation where they were doing this. And my brother remembers him coming home with all this black ink on his hands, and we thought he had kidney, tuberculosis of the kidney, but as it is, he died of kidney cancer, and we think it's all related.

And oh, one of the things I wanted to mention is that coming out of camp, while he was in camp, the food did not agree with him. He looked, I have a picture of him when he was probably just mid-thirties out of camp, he looked really old and skinny. I'm sure the food didn't agree with him, so that didn't help. And you take a look at, you take a look at him in the pictures when he was like seventy, he looked way healthier by then. So I think that the camp food was really horrible for him, not only for him, for my mother as well, and I think we'll get to that, probably.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2024 Densho. All Rights Reserved.