Densho Digital Repository
Katsugo Miho Collection
Title: Katsugo Miho Interview I
Narrator: Katsugo Miho
Interviewers: Michiko Kodama Nishimoto (primary), Warren Nishimoto (secondary)
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: February 2, 2006
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1022-1-2

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MN: Okay, we were just talking about the circumstances of your mom and dad getting together. And if you can just kind of back up and tell us the story again, how your mother and father got together.

KM: As I understand, because no one really told me about it, especially my mother or my father. But I understand that my dad used to pass by my mother's house on his way to school, and pretty soon got interested in who she was. Maybe as neighbors they knew each other in different families. In Hiroshima, in that area, it wasn't that big a town yet. Today it's more, there's a lot of people, but the village was very small at that time. But anyway, soon they got to know each other better and talking over the fence, so to speak. Unlike the custom at that time, and period in Japan, they had a relationship which was not, with a go-between coming in and introducing one to the other before you start having a relationship. It got to a point where he wanted to get married and found out that, being the eldest girl and lowest son, the only way he could get married was to be adopted by the Miho family. His name was Imamura. He came from just in the suburbs of Hiroshima, he was there in a naval, naval town called Kure, where Yamamoto is supposed to have trained the pilots that bombed Pearl Harbor. Kure is the center of the naval establishment in Hiroshima. And I understand that my father's side's background was military. In fact, for a long time I've heard stories that a marine brigade in Hiroshima was known as the Imamura Butai, which is marine brigade, Japanese marine brigade, supposed to have had a very historical background as a marine brigade in Hiroshima. But he chose his profession as a schoolteacher and came to Hawaii provided that my grandfather ruled that he would leave behind one son and one daughter to take over the family. And with the number three daughter, Tsukie, my eldest sister, they came to Hawaii. And as I said, they first moved into Honolulu in the Palama district area. I'm not aware how many years they were in Honolulu. Ultimately they go to Maui and he started to teach Japanese, went back to teaching in Maui. Until they moved back to Honolulu, moved to Honolulu after the war, World War II.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.