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HM: My name is Hisa Matsudaira, and I am the daughter of Ichiro and Nobuko Hayashida. At the time of the evacuation they had five children, Tomi, Tomiko, myself, Yasuko or Yako, Hiroshi, Hiro, and Toyoko who later took the name Susan after we got back from the war. Well anyway, I just wanted to start out, not from our family, but from the generation before because it has a big impact on our family and how our family dynamics was working. Okay, just as from Europe all the people coming to the East Coast from England, Ireland, Germany, and all these other European countries, they were settling more on the East Coast. Whereas the people from Japan, China, and the Philippines were coming over and settling on the West Coast. Well, there was like a famine or something in Japan and both my grandfathers -- on my mother's side the Nishinakas, and the Hayashidas -- were not the oldest child, oldest boy, so they didn't get to really inherit their farms there. So Grandpa Nishinaka left Wakayama and he came to the United States and he worked for a while in, at the lumber mill on Bainbridge Island. Okay. Later on he went back for his wife and they came, I believe in 19... let's see, in nineteen-oh-something. Anyway, and then they lived on Bainbridge. Then they went, moved to Seattle from Bainbridge. In the meantime they had children, so all the children were born in the United States, in Seattle. Your grandmother, Shigeko, was born in Seattle. Then Fujio, the Arimas' mother, was born in Bellevue. They moved from, from Seattle to Bellevue. Then my mother, Nobuko, was born on Bainbridge Island. So they lived on Bainbridge. Then later on, down the way, one of the younger kids was born in Seattle, so they moved back to Seattle. Then they finally came back and settled on Bainbridge again. Well anyway, on my father's side, they came over in 1902, and they went to, they first stopped in Hawaii where they had a child. Then after they went to Hawaii, they went to Bellevue where they had more kids. Then they came to Bainbridge Island and three of their, three of their children were born here on Bainbridge. That was starting in 1913.

The last one in Bellevue was 1908. Okay, so, my father was the oldest of the Hayashidas. He was born in Japan. So they left him with an aunt and the mother and father came over and then went to Hawaii where the daughter was born. My dad went through sixth grade in Japan, and then he came to America. Okay. Then my mother was already here of course, 'cause she was born on the island. So they were the first couple of both who were from the island, that got married in the Japanese community. That was, that was in 1933. But in the meantime, what my grandparents had done, both sets, was to earn enough money, which was their dream, is to earn enough money to go back to Japan. In doing so, they took the two younger children back with them, the two boys from the Hayashidas, back to Hiroshima. And then my maternal grandparents took their two younger ones, and the grandmother took them back first. Then the grandfather went back with Fumiko later on around 1933. Okay, so they actually, they moved back to Japan to live forever in 1932. So they had spent all that time here in the United States.

Okay, so along comes the war, and along comes many children besides. Before the war, my grandparents, before they had moved back to Japan, were farming. Right as they moved back and things, the three older brothers, Ichiro, Saburo, and Tsuneichi -- who we called Hohoy, and most people knew him as Snippy, farmed a farm on Island Center where they had their house. Then they also had a field in Manzanita near where the Kouras lived. So three brothers then were into farming. It always amazes me when I think of, you know, like my grandparents. They came here on nothing and they spent their life just working away just to earn enough money to go back to Japan. Then they made it and so they, they left their boys with the farm. By just before, before the war began, they had made enough money so that they could build a new house. Several Japanese Americans at that time were then able to, were old enough to own land and they could build their houses. So the Nakatas, the Kouras, the Sakais, the Hayashidas, to name a few, built these brand new houses. It was from scratch to that. They worked hard.

During that time I remember going to some picnics that the Japanese had. There were several, even before my time, there were several Japanese clubs that the... like the Girls Clubs and the Women's Clubs that they had. They had the Farming Association which that made the cannery, put up the cannery. They had a Japanese Hall. So they built a hall there in Winslow where they had several gatherings and things. A Buddhist priest would come over and do services. So they had all these things going on. The picnics were, were like fun and games for the kids. They had races and things, and they had a lot of Japanese food. They would kind of do a potluck type of thing and everyone would share in each other's food. They also had mochitsuki and things like that where different families would get together and they would pound their own mochi. And so I'm glad to see that some of these things are still being done here on Bainbridge.

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