<Begin Segment 11>

CO: Okay, so let's go back to when you were born.

JO: I'm still born.

CO: Let's go back to your just being born.

JO: Okay. Well, after the, I was born in this sort of a mansion-like doctor's place and residence, I was taken to a bay house which stood on a bluff overlooking the inland crescent of Eagle Harbor. Around that, around the house was a large fenced area, ten acres. And there was a big huge grim-looking barn at the north end and the harbor was at the south end. And to the west was a deep gulch. The strawberry canyon was on the other side of that gulch, but in a pile of timbers so you couldn't see it. And to the west was nothing but pasture land, fenced in. And we were, from the harbor, we were a quarter mile to the... what do you call it? The arterial, the, from, that ran, the main arterial that ran through the island to Port Blakeley.

When I was young, my fath-, my mother was, was our chief center of focus and she used to tell me and my brothers stories about old Japan. She had this Japanese paperback and she would read from it and then translate the story into English for us. One night she told us a story about an obake, or ghost story, Japanese ghost story, about how a beautiful woman went into a roadside inn and changed or transformed into a jaguar or tiger and then pounced upon passersby and chewed them up. When she regained her natural form again, she came out of that roadside inn dressed like a human being and left the inn unaware of what she had done. Toward the end of that story, my mother told me a ghost story that related to a weeping willow that stood at the southeast corner of our front yard right down by the harbor. She said that when the moon is full, a ghost will descend from that tree and walk around the yard. The next morning I went to the edge of the bluff and I looked down at that tree but, of course, it was daylight then and I couldn't feature a ghost coming out of that tree.

We had, there's one thing we didn't have, we had everything else, all the amenities except a telephone. To compensate for that, we had a courier come every other day. The courier was a white person. And he would always pass by us when he went to the house with a message and we always played down by the floating boathouse. So one day I, a few days later I asked him, "Is that tree haunted?" He looked at that tree seriously for a long time and then he turned back and said, "Yes, that tree is haunted." Then he told us of an odd story, that a long time before Winslow was Winslow it was formerly called Madrone. That there was a bad man out on the point. And this bad man had done something very bad so that the whole town of Madrone went after him. They finally caught him on the field above from our property. And he said someone remembered to bring a rope. So they dragged this man down to the weeping willow tree and hung the man.

Well, that was the story, but there's a sequel to it. In, we didn't like our guardian in Seattle, when my father took my mother and the children to Japan. So we, so my eldest brother ran away. He was caught by the police but when he was brought back, he threatened to run away again. So they decided to take us back to our home on Bainbridge Island so we wouldn't run away. But when we got to our home, we refused to go because the guardians were inside. And we stayed outside, were playing jacks or some other kind of game on the front lawn. And after a long time, I drew back 'cause I was getting tired and looked out toward the harbor. And I saw an object. Couldn't make out the object, but it was like a round sort of an object that was moving very slowly toward the boathouse on the harbor path. And from it seems to be some type of a flame emitting. And I said, "What's that?" So my brothers stopped playing and they looked, too. And we watched it until it started to come up the cliff road, when it was about a third of the way, I recognized the object as a tall white man, his face, there was no face, it was featureless, it was just an outline. And we couldn't understand the bulge, there was a big bulge like this along his side, right side, but when he came halfway up the cliff road, we made out that bulge as a small woman and she seemed to be merged to the chest of this man. And around both of them was wrapped a white sheet-like thing that shone in the night. And true enough, there was flame coming out of the chest of this tall man. When this, when we saw that, we got scared and made a rush for the door, you know. Ordinarily, the front door, we never locked the front door, but this was a guardian, so he locked the front door. When we got to the front door, why, it was locked. So we began banging on the door to get in. And then I turned around and watched this apparition come up while my brothers banged on the door and cried and shouted. And just as the two figures came abreast of the veranda, the door opened and we just fell right into the front door, picked ourselves up and scurried upstairs to our room. And a few minutes later, I got a hold of myself and said, "Let's go the back window and see if we could catch a sight of the thing again." There was no answer so I turned around and my brothers were still trembling so I went by myself to the window and, of course, we couldn't see anything. There was no sight of this ghost, but you can bet your life that three pairs of eyes saw that apparition and you can't say that it was a childhood fantasy.

CO: But your mother had told you...

JO: The story. She told the story, confirmed by the courier, which was, who was hakujin, and it actually happened.

CO: About the hanging?

JO: Yes, yes. That actually...

CO: So she had seen the ghost?

JO: She never, I couldn't tell you that, whether she saw it herself or not. But she knew the story and she told it to us. Now, you have to remember that this courier did tell me what the man did out on the point, but because of the many years, I've forgotten what it was.

CO: You mean the bad thing that he did?

JO: Yes, that's right.

CO: Have you ever seen another ghost?

JO: Well, I've never seen another ghost, but I've read about, was it Amityville terrors and I know about Bridie Murphy and the UFOs and things like that, and I think there might be something to it.

CO: Great story.

JO: You have remember, too, that because in my time, you'd be laughed at if I told this story. So we never told it. We never told it until I told it to Frank Chin at a oral history, and then at Fullerton State at, also at an oral history. You're, this is the third, third time, I guess. So you could believe it or not. [Laughs]

CO: Believe it or not. Okay, so, we'll now pick up where we left off, which is, you had gone down to Los Angeles and then you came back. You were passing through. So let's just pick up, let's, where, how you came to get a job, the next job on the New World Daily.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.