Densho Digital Archive - Dave Tatsuno Interview II (denshovh-tdave-03-0012)

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WH: You know, you have such a positive outlook, and yet, when you were growing up, you had a very hard childhood, didn't you?

DT: Oh, yeah. You know, people think that Nichibei Bussan, that store in San Francisco, that I had it easy. But you know what happened? You see, when I was a young boy, my dad brought me, left the family in Japan, and brought me back alone to San Francisco. And my guardian was a man who managed our San Francisco store, he was a drunkard. Drank morning, noon and night. And can you imagine, at the age of thirteen, I was eating in a corner restaurant every night with a meal ticket. Until finally, the man drank the store dry, no more meal tickets. So then I went to the corner grocery store, Hosier Company, and I said, "Until my parents come back from Japan, can I charge?" Well, that went on for a month or so, and they had to turn me down. So then, and then I used to cook my own meals, at the age of thirteen. I was making tofu-yu and sukiyaki, and hamburger and all that at the age of thirteen. So I know how to cook, you see. Other, other people my age, they don't know how to cook, but I did all that. And miso shiru and all that, I used to make myself, at thirteen, fourteen. Well, anyway, they turned me down, and then I was, in the meantime I joined the Y. I became very active in the YMCA, and Fred Koba, the Y's secretary heard about my dinner situation and said, "You come to my house and eat." So I ate, I went to his house and his mother fed me every night for about a month until my father came back from Japan. So it was quite a story, you know.

WH: How did you, your mother kind of abandoned?

DT: Yeah, my mother ran off with four, ran off leaving four children behind. Can you imagine that?

WH: How old were you then?

DT: Well, at that time I was twelve, thirteen, and I had come to America. My father left me alone here with a guardian that was drunk, see. And he went back. So sad story when you think of it, huh?

WH: And yet you never became embittered? You've had a very positive outlook.

DT: Well, that's because I joined the Y. See, I joined the YMCA, and they made me leader of the boy's club when I was only fourteen, young boy. He knew that, the Y's secretary, Fred Koba, knew about my life, and so he said, "Dave, I want you to be assistant leader at fourteen." His brother was a leader, Shig Koba, who died, and I became a leader, and I was a leader for five years until I went to camp. So a lot of the little boys I had in my club at the Y, they're dying off right now, you see. So that was quite a spell in my life, you know. Then I became active in the Y because of that. And then I was, finally I became president of the YMCA for five states. Then I went to the world meeting of the YMCA in Geneva, Switzerland, and Japan.

WH: You seem to have a knack for turning misfortune into good fortune.

DT: Well, I think it was training, your philosophy. Instead of looking negatively at life, you accentuate the positive. And because you suffered so much, even at young days, you know, when you can't be eating at a meal ticket at a restaurant at the age of thirteen every night, that's not very happy. But, you see, you accentuate the positive, and you become better for it.