<Begin Segment 9>

DG: But probably after 1907, when people couldn't come in, see there was the exclusion treaty.

KS: No, it was before then, it was about (the 1890s, near) the turn of the century. He said he washed dishes in restaurants, because doing that he got food. After he watched all of the cooks prepare food, he decided that's what he wanted to do and he took classes in cooking school at night. I think he spent the next twenty years working in different restaurants and hotels and he got to be quite a chef, I guess, in those days. A lot of cooks take to drinking very hard and he became quite an alcoholic. He ended up in Chicago, down on Chicago's skid row, and went into a mission house. The minister at the mission house got him off of the liquor and he became a Christian. He never took another drink, he said, after that and it just changed his whole life. He decided that he wanted to have a family and so he saved his money (to go) back to Japan to find himself a bride. So that's exactly why he went back to Japan. In those days, there was quite a Christian revival in Japan, so my dad was able to meet quite a few people who were Christians. One of them knew about my mother (who) also became a Christian but from various other happenings in her life. But that's how they first met because somebody knew...

DG: But she was already a teacher by then?

KS: Oh yes, my mother was born in Nigata which is on the other side of the mountain, it was in Ura-Nihon and her mother, (because she could have no other children,) was divorced by her father when she was about nine years old. Her stepmother, in order to handle a nine year old who was quite spoiled, kept sending her off to school. So my mother was very fortunate in that sense. She was able to get a very good education for women of Japan in those days. And this was before 1900, and not very many Japanese women got education. And so she became a school teacher and she had an opportunity to go to Korea. One of the... I was talking about the religious or the Christian missionary efforts in Japan and they were going to start a kindergarten in Korea and my mother volunteered for being one of those teachers and since this was a mission, she became, she was introduced to Christianity. And I think she really was converted and I think she taught in Korea for several years and then went back to Japan. And I think that when people talked to her about getting married, she was not that anxious to get married. She was already thirty years old and she saw a wonderful life for her in (Christian education). Evidently her parents and other mission people talked her into getting married so that's how my mother and father met.

DG: Just one note interested me is that when her parents divorced, she lived with the father.

KS: That's right.

DG: And most of them did, right? The father took the children?

KS: Oh yes. The mother was literally sent back home and she just lost out.

DG: I think that happens in a lot of families.

KS: Yes it did. It was a thing that just happened.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.