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VY: I wanted to ask a couple of questions kind of about what you already talked about, just for clarification. And I'm sorry if you already mentioned this, but your parents got married, how old were they?

MM: My mom must have been seventeen. No, just a minute, she might have been eighteen. Yeah, she was eighteen and my dad was eleven years older or so, he would have been twenty-eight, twenty-nine. And then that's what I think if my math is correct, but it might not be correct. But I was born when she was nineteen, but she had just turned nineteen. Her birthday is on the fourteenth and my birthday was on the twentieth, so she's nineteen years older, but just barely nineteen years older than I was. So she was a youngster raising a youngster, but she experienced all this before.

VY: I see. Yeah, things really happened quite quickly for her.

MM: Yes.

VY: One more thing I wanted to clarify, this goes back to your mom's childhood, and when her mom passed away, you said that they were, your mom was in Japan at that time, is that right?

MM: The whole family was.

VY: The whole family was there, okay. So the whole family was in Japan, and during that time, her mom got sick and passed away?

MM: No, she died suddenly, so we don't know what she died of. I'm assuming it was either a stroke or a heart attack. It was like my mom said she just kind of fell down the stairs and she was gone.

VY: Wow. How old was your mom?

MM: I think she was... I don't know how old she was, I just figure she was still in junior high, I don't know. So she was maybe thirteen, fourteen, something like that.

VY: Thank you for clarifying that.

MM: Yeah, I just don't know for sure.

VY: Okay. That's a lot to go through for a little girl. Okay, thank you.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2024 Densho. All Rights Reserved.