<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Now, how about your siblings? You have... I want to kind of go through. I mean, how many -- I'm sorry, here it is. So can you just go through in terms of your siblings, so we establish that? So who was the oldest?

KM: Mikiye. Mikiye was the oldest.

TI: And then you were...

KM: Second.

TI: Second. How much younger were you?

KM: Two years.

TI: Two years. And then after you was...

KM: Sachi, which is two years, too.

TI: And then after Sachi was?

KM: Shuji was two years.

TI: And after Shuji was?

KM: Eichi.

TI: Eichi. And that's eleven years. Between...

KM: Between myself and Eichi.

TI: Okay. So there were five children?

KM: Five children, right.

TI: And your mother and father. Any stories about them and how, like, before the war or during this time that kind of stands out for you in terms of your...

KM: Oh, the one that... Shuji's the one that, he was a yancha bouzu, you know.

TI: I'm sorry, he was a what?

KM: Yancha bouzu, the one that got into everything. [Laughs]

TI: Oh, so he was kind of the trouble...

KM: Well, troublemaker but a fun-maker, too.

TI: Fun-maker?

KM: Uh-huh.

TI: Like what would be an example of...

KM: Example was, when he was young, we had a wind-up toy that you pushed, and it would crank up the spring in the wheel. And then you let it go and it'd take off, you pushed it, got the spring wound up, and put it on my brother, younger brother's hair, and it got his hair all caught up in it.

TI: Oh, so it got all tangled up. [Laughs]

KM: Yeah. And another time, when he was going to high school, he went into a Thrifty Drugstore, and nobody waited on him. So he went to the clock department, every clock he had there, he wound it up and set it at the same time, and set the alarm, and he walked out of the store. [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] So that at one time, all them would start the alarm.

KM: All the things went off. [Laughs]

TI: That's funny.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.