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FK: Tell me more about your family, your siblings and your brothers and your sisters.

SO: Well, some of this I can only recall by hearsay. When my family came over they did not settle directly on the island. They lived in Seattle, and I think, and I could be mistaken, I think they had a laundry. I'm not sure, 'cause I wasn't born yet. But there was also an older sister who died somewhat in, I think in infancy. I don't know anything beyond that, but my oldest brother was born in Seattle, Sets, so that, and it must've been no more than maybe five or six years that we then moved to the island. But I think part of the move to the island, as you probably well know, reestablishes the ties of the Japanese kenjinkai, or the prefectural ties that they have to one another, because they were, obviously, the prefectural ties of the Yamaguchi-ken already on there, like the Nakadas, the Takemotos, and they tend to support one another, like a more, like a Communist way, I guess. [Laughs] In a way, you help them out, they help you out. So that, I think that was probably the reason my family moved here, and I don't know the circumstances of the, getting into the real estate, but I'm guessing that had to happen, that is, the ownership of property going back to my two oldest brothers and my sister at that point, so that they then settled, or resettled in the, on the island. Even today, when you go past the Wing Point Golf Course there are remnants, there used to be remnants of the, little clump of trees. That's where the house was. I can remember when I was probably very young, the remains of what looks like a pioneer house, a pretty rundown house, that many of the Japanese, I think, moved into coming to this island, and they may have come as workers or what have you, but they would then live in the house, which at one point was inhabited by the Caucasians, so we had that, when you talk to Yuki -- maybe I shouldn't mention it, but the Kadayamas also had a piece of property and they were in the greenhouse business, and that wasn't very far from, again, the golf course area. So that's about as much as I know about what they did and so forth.

FK: Tell me about your brothers.

SO: Well, in 1942 I had four, three brothers, Sets, the oldest, who died several years ago and I'd forgotten already; Takiro, who's three years younger than Sets, who lives in Seattle at age ninety; I had another brother, Masakatsu, who was about a year and a half older than I, than I am, who, I guess, I don't mean he was a renegade, but he took off to Chicago during the time of the evacuation, lived, settled in Chicago, and ultimately died in Chicago. And then I come fourth in the line of the brothers. I mentioned my sister who died, I think, in the same year as my dad's death. It's a little fuzzy there, but she drowned, and you can imagine Wing Point as it was in the earlier days, had a big bulkhead, which, to prevent washing away of the earth, the soil, and she didn't appear at one point -- when I say appear, she was to meet her other girlfriends, classmates, for swimming, and I think Yuki might've been a member of that group, I don't know -- but, but my sister, Kani, or Kako, never made it home, and so there was a kind of a massive search for her, my sister. Got to a point where at the very last, after several days, I can remember some of the discussion about going to the packing sheds to look and see if maybe she had fallen asleep and so forth, but towards the end of what would've been her last days John Nakada, Masaki, was going to go to Seattle to see what kind of assistance a bloodhound would provide for those searching for my sister. As John was about to get onto the ferry at Wing Point, they looked over and they saw some body washed up on the shore, and that was my sister. And I can remember one other thing that just, I don't know whether it's traditional or not, but I remember as a child, with regards to this particular incident, the women, several of them, bathing my sister in a tub, and I then guessed it might have been related to a more traditional cleansing of some sort. I don't know beyond that, but anyway, I remember that scene because it was so graphic and stowed in my memory, a round tub, the body, the other women bathing her.

But when you asked about my brothers, Sets spent his whole lifetime doing yard work, and there are a couple of families, I think, that have, for which, for whom he worked for several generations, and I wish I could think of the name. I'll think of it in a minute. And he, like so many others, never wanted to go beyond high school, and so that he was kind of committed to working, but in a very interesting way he got, realized that -- when my dad died Sets must've been about seventeen, and he had then had to take the burden of providing for the family. My mother did occasional work and did housework. She also worked on the strawberry plant. What she did was make these little wooden, used to be wooden boxes -- now they make 'em out of plastic -- and these boxes would be stamped where there's a staple, and every, I think, winter, sometime in the winter, they, various women would get together and they would have this, like a sewing bee of some sort, making these little wooden boxes, nice little boxes. But so Sets spent most, virtually all his life working as a gardener, and he think he, he was, I think, highly respected by his peers. He was, Sets was great at bonsai, which I don't have absolutely any talent for, but he has, he had a beautiful, and still, Yuki still has some of the bonsai. Takiro was, and still is, becoming second in line, probably, his contact with us was a little different. He would play with us, us meaning my two brothers, my, Masakatsu and myself, he would play with us. Sets would never seem to have time to play with us. Being the eldest, he had to do something, obviously, to earn a living and provide food for the table.

So then Takiro had, there's one interesting little thing that he has. Back in the olden days, when newspapers would carry images of people and so forth, Takiro was interested in sports and whenever a ballplayer would have his picture in the paper he would clip it out, and he had a little notebook in which he had positioned the images that appeared in newspapers in their proper playing position. So that was kind of, I kind of admired him for making that funny notebook. It since has disappeared, so we have no way of knowing what it was all about. Now, Masakatsu, otherwise known locally as Bear, was the big guy. He was heavy, and he was encouraged to play football. My mother insisted no, and she stood by that no, and that caused some tension, I think, between my brother and my mother because, obviously, when your parent says you don't play football, you don't play football. My mother said, "You can play baseball or basketball, but not football." And to back that up she said there's always the chance of injury, and I think there were enough injuries to maybe lend credence to that kind of concern, so that, you go ahead and flip ahead to the time of incarceration, my brother not only left for Chicago, but he eventually married in Chicago, so that changed the whole turn of life. My mother, I think, maybe may have gotten out there once or twice after she, after, after a certain kind of period in which she and my brother were not really on speaking terms. So those are my three brothers.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.