Densho Digital Repository - Katsugo Miho Interview I (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1022-1-1)

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MN: This is an interview with Mr. Katsugo Miho in Manoa, Oahu, Hawaii, on February 2, 2006. And the interviewers are Michiko Kodama Nishimoto and Warren Nishimoto. And for today, we're gonna focus on your early life. And we'll start with when you were born, your year.

KM: 1922, dog year.

MN: And where were you born?

KM: Kahului, Maui.

MN: Based on what you've heard, tell us about your father's family background and life in Japan up to the time they immigrated to the islands.

KM: As far as I know, my parents came from Hiroshima, Japan. And in Japan, he was a schoolteacher. And he came to Hawaii as a schoolteacher. He was married and he had three children when he decided to immigrate to Hawaii. I guess that one of the reasons that he moved to Hawaii was he was an adopted son into my mother's family. And although my grandfather was a merchant, established merchant, preparing and selling ajitsuke nori, it was this seaweed that, they put on their own sauce. And my grandfather did a lot of research into this seaweed, to the extent that he went to Korea to develop his own sauce to spread over the nori. Today, even today, my aunt, my mother's aunt, who took over the business, is still involved in what we call this ajitsuke nori business in Hiroshima, I visited them many times. But my dad was not a ajitsuke nori, so he decided to let his wife's stepsister to take over the business, and he asked his permission of my mother's father to immigrate to Hawaii. And partly, I guess, because adopted husbands in Japan normally had a bad time in Japanese culture and society, especially back the early 1900s.

So he had three children at that time, and my grandfather had allowed him, provided, on the condition that he left behind one boy and one girl, the eldest son and daughter, with him in Japan to take over the business. And the third child was my elder sister, Tsukiye. And with the, I think she was one or two years old, around 1910, they moved to Honolulu, came over to Hawaii as an immigrant teacher. And my understanding, however, is that in the beginning, he was not teaching Japanese school because around the time when California gold rush was going on, he's supposed to have gone to California to explore the possibility of going into farming in California and raising bees. But that didn't pan out because while he was there, my mother got seriously ill, I think it was smallpox, at that time, which was drastic happenings in Hawaii. But a relative's doctor, who was one of the first doctors at Kuakini Hospital here in Honolulu, who happened to be a relative of my parents, supposedly did a lot in saving the life of my mother. And his name was Katsugoro Haida, and I was supposedly named after Dr. Haida. Not only that, because I was the number five boy, they stopped at "Katsugo" instead of the old style Japanese "Katsugoro." But supposedly I'm named after the savior of my mother, Dr. Katsugoro Haida, who was the founder of Kuakini Hospital in Honolulu. And subsequently, after a few years living in what is now the Palama sector of Honolulu, they moved to Maui. And it was there, I understand, that he started teaching Japanese school out in various camps, Japanese school. Maui was a sugar plantation where people lived in all these different camps, there were a few, a large number of Japanese workers compared to other nationalities, especially on Maui. And a lot of the immigrants on Maui were from Hiroshima to begin with, so he taught in the Japanese schools in Maui until he decided to retire from teaching and became bookkeeper for Onishi grocery store where he worked for many years until they decided to own their own small little family-run hotel.

MN: If I can move you back a little bit and get a little bit more details on your father. What do you know about his own educational background and his background in teaching in Japan?

KM: Very little. Very little, except that I understand that his family side had strong connections with the military. However, I don't know for what reason, he himself was involved in the military, he became a schoolteacher. And to this day, when I first visited Japan, I visited this little primary school. I don't know if it's a middle level school, but I visited this school back in 1966, I think it was, when I first went to Japan. And the school was there, and the row of pictures of the principals of the school, with my dad being the first one. Most of the people in Hawaii came from Hiroshima, came from this district known as the Nihonmachi area, where we had, even in Honolulu, at one time we used to have sub-prefectural clubs. Within the Hiroshima group, we had this Nihonmachi group, which was made up of five different suburbs, like in Honolulu you'd compare to Kaimuki Kaka'ako. But Nihonmachi was all closely located next to each other. And a lot of people from Hawaii came from that particular area.

MN: And then going back to your mother who was Ayano, what do you know about her education and background? She's a merchant's daughter.

KM: Yeah, she was a merchant's daughter. And unlike the custom in those days, the story I heard is that it wasn't an arranged marriage. As I understand it, my dad and others that go to his school had to pass my mother's house on his way to go to school where he taught and was the principal. And every now and then she'd be out in the yard doing this and that, and pretty soon, they started to speak to each other and got to a point where he wanted to marry her. But he found out that she was the eldest daughter. There were two girls in the family, my mother and a stepsister, because my grandfather's first wife had passed away and my aunt was the daughter of the second wife.