<Begin Segment 6>

FA: Okay. So you're in Pomeroy, the Pomeroy Cafe. What caused your family to move to Seattle?

SS: That was the death of my father.

FA: What year?

SS: In 1924.

FA: What caused it?

SS: My father died of a hemorrhage of the lungs. Very suddenly and very unexpectedly. I'll never forget that morning when someone came to -- I was in the sixth grade then and someone came to let me and my sister know that we were "wanted at home," as they put it. And my mother tended to be on the frail side and she... well, not infrequently, wasn't feeling well, and so when this notice came that morning, my sister and I decided that it must be our mother had gotten sick. And the biggest shock in my life was returning home and discovering that my father had died. Until that time, living in Pomeroy was almost like living in Heaven. I had both parents. I was happy with both and I had nothing to worry about. But with the death of my father and then I was suddenly burdened with the question of how we were going to make a living. I remember at that time I had $62 in the Postal Savings Bank and I knew my mother would need at least that. So that was the first thing I did, was to go to the post office and withdraw the $62 and bring it home and give it to my mother. And from then on, I had, I didn't have any personal money of my own. It was always family money.

FA: And you were ten or eleven years old.

SS: I was only eleven.

FA: What was your first step towards providing for your family?

SS: Well, that came a little later. A couple of... let's see. We moved to Seattle because that's the only place my mother would be able to find work. She didn't speak any English. She had to be in a Japanese community and also a great help to us at that time was the Furuya empire, which eventually ended up bankrupt. But Mr. Furuya and my father had become friends quite early. And they used to help each other out if they were short of change and so forth. And Mr. Furuya was often criticized by people that didn't know him, who borrowed money from him and so forth. That period after we moved... oh, yes. We moved from Seattle or rather from Pomeroy to Seattle because Seattle was where Mr. Furuya and his stores were. He had, he owned one department store and he had a couple of branches, one in Tacoma I remember, and he had a branch in Portland. In those days, Furuya was the richest man in the Japanese community at that time. And he and my father had been quite close as friends and Mr. Furuya later owned a couple of banks and several stores. Mr. Furuya had started out as a tailor. That's something he learned in this country and my father often used to laugh at how poorly those suits were made. And fortunately, Mrs. Furuya was an educated woman. A schoolteacher and she and my mother got along quite, very well, I'd say. And Mrs. Furuya came from a samurai family. I don't know what Furuya really was, what his... strange, that question never occurred to me. But Furuya was the richest man in the, among the Japanese of that day, in and around the Seattle area.

FA: So what did you do and what did your mother do?

SS: Well, my mother's first job was to help at the homes of Issei women who had just given birth.

FA: Midwife.

SS: No, not a midwife. She went in as a servant in that household. My mother hated the job because she herself had been waited on by servants in her home where she was born and in the home where we lived in Japan while we were there. And here my mother had to change places with servants, really, just to stay alive for us and the family. I had an older brother who, we were hoping... my older brother was nine years older than I was. And he picked up the English language quite easily. And he soon got a job as a buyer for a vegetable wholesale dealer on Western Avenue.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.