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HM: All right. I think we'll start with the name of your parents and kind of the background about your family, who you are and things like that.

IW: Okay, my parents were Yoshiaki Amatatsu, and my mother was Taka Aoki Amatatsu. And my mother was a schoolteacher before she left Japan and she taught in Bailey Gatzert school and she taught in Bainbridge for a little while until she had a family. Because just before I came, I know Johnny Nakata was one of her students and Yoshie said, "Oh, so was I. I was a student of hers." Anyway, they had four children, Elsie Yoneko and Kazuko and Michiko, and I'm Ikuko. But it was so nice, we all got together from faraway places yesterday for the reunion. And what else do you want to know?

HM: Tell us a little bit about the background of why your parents came and how they got to the island?

IW: Oh, okay, my father was in medical school in Kumamoto when the war with Russia was on, so he was drafted and went to the World War, Russo-Japan War, and saw all his friends dying, and he was a medic and so he didn't want any part of medicine anymore, so he came to America. And my mother was teaching school in Kagoshima, and he called her and they got married. And it's a funny story, I wrote some of it, but our name is Tentatsu, or heaven and dragon. It's quite a contrast, heaven and dragon, so heavenly dragon, is what the title, so people brought paper and start writing this, and anyway, and then they came to Seattle, and the only job he can get was in General Hospital Seattle as a janitor. So then I understand he got bleeding nose, so anyway Sakumas started a farm and told my parents to come to Bainbridge Island. So my parents, you know, they never touched the soil. My mother played piano, violin and something that we never got to do and so they came to Bainbridge and we have to laugh every time, because Sakumas did so well, they had eight boys and my parents had four girls. So you can see that they weren't too successful, until he cleared up some land where they live right now, grandson lives there. And I remember I went with my father and since he had no boys, I tagged along with him when he dynamited those trees and so, but just before the war, that part of the strawberries were real good. But unfortunately they had to go away with all the rest of Bainbridge people.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.