<Begin Segment 6>

CO: What did your parents think about your leaving at thirteen?

JO: They didn't know anything about it. I just walked out.

CO: So, tell us the circumstances of your leaving. How did you leave?

JO: Just, just left.

CO: You didn't tell anyone?

JO: Just my next brother.

CO: Is this just the way your family was?

JO: Family was only my father then. So, we just didn't tell him.

CO: What had happened to your mother?

JO: Well, my, when I was six years old, my mother suffered a childbirth disease. And in 1919, she was taken to Japan with the three youngest children and our family was divided and broken up.

CO: Childhood disease? Or childbirth?

JO: Childbirth.

CO: Childbirth disease?

JO: [Inaudible], something.

CO: Fever.

JO: Fever, yes. Incurable.

CO: So she was in Japan.

JO: She was in, she, she went to Nagasaki where she was born and stayed with her sister. Her sister took care of her while she was sick, and then she passed away in '33, I think. So our, so our life got broken up.

CO: So were you going to school on Bainbridge Island?

JO: Yes, yes. I was in the seventh grade at the time.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.