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DG: Okay, Matsue, if you can just, we're just going to start off, if you can just tell me about your family and their occupations, of especially your parents, back in 1942, right before the war.

MW: Okay, my dad was a strawberry farmer. And, but he, besides strawberries, he had peas. And in the wintertime he had rhubarb because, you know, when you have a large family, you have to supplement. So they started doing all that. And, and that was the main occupation that he had. And, because our place was five acres -- which, you know, you can't do a lot of strawberries on five acres, or peas -- so he leased other lands. He probably leased about, farmed about 40 acres in all. So it just kept my older sisters and brother busy, but I was the one designated to take care of the house and go to the post office, go to the grocery store and take care of my little sister.

DG: And what were the ages of your siblings, back then or approximately?

MW: Back then?

DG: Yeah, around the war.

MW: Oh, probably, Tyke was probably in his early twenties, and then Massie would be two years younger. And they're, we're each about two-and-a-half years apart, so, we come all the way down to my little sister who was nine. But -- was nine -- but there's five years between she and myself. So, yeah, she was so... my brother must have been twenty-five then. Fifteen, fifteen... he was, so they're fifteen years apart, so he was just that age. He's ten years older than me, so he must have been twenty-four, okay. That's a good way.

DG: And what other sort of things did you, you were fourteen, and what sort of things did you do as a young girl on Bainbridge Island, other than the things you just talked about?

MW: Oh, I used to bike a lot. And we used to bike to the roller rink and, and roller skate and bike back. And visit my neighbors and play with, play with the other friends there. And besides going to school and helping, and swimming in the bay. So we did swim in the bay, which was pretty clean then. But, I guess we wouldn't do that anymore. And, and my mother used to like to go pick seaweed, so we used to do that. And then she used to grind it up and my dad made those forms, so, which, you know, you make makizushi. And so she never bought any nori because she always got it out of the sea and they fixed it up themselves.

DG: So, what do you remember of your childhood in, on Bainbridge Island? Can you tell me, describe it to me, in general?

MW: Well, I feel that it was very comfortable. I didn't, I don't feel that I had any real big problems because we played a lot and being the younger, younger daughter, that I had older sisters and my brother that, you know, led the way for me. And so, I would say I would have been real thankful that they were older and I was one of the younger ones. I just remember also receiving a bicycle for a birthday, which was, you know, really something then, because we weren't rich family. So, to me, it was real special. And that's why we did do so much bicycling around the island. We bicycled a lot, with my friends. And other than that, we went to school and had many different friends that we just played with and did the activities with.

DG: And were your friends primarily Japanese, or were they also Caucasian, or...

MW: No, they were both. We, we didn't... I felt that we didn't segregate ourselves, anything like that. We played with, we all, I think, practically everybody on the island, you know, they were integrated with all, all groups. So, it worked out fine. But you did have certain activities that you had at the Japanese Hall. And that would be like, just programs and eating and things like that. I can remember tap dancing for a program and things like that. I taught other girls to do that, too, so we would do it together, and it worked out fine.

DG: Very nice.

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