<Begin Segment 2>

TI: So let's talk a little bit now about your mother. What was her name and where was she from?

RT: She is Kikuyo Yonemoto and her family is from Yamaguchi-ken, and she was born in Hawaii, 'cause her father was a labor contractor or whatever and they, so she grew up in, until, I don't know how old she was when she went back to Japan with her father, and probably very young, because she went to grade school in Yamaguchi-ken. And when she was fifteen or sixteen she came to the United States, I mean, to Hawaii, to live with her uncle and aunt in Hawaii.

TI: And so how did your mother and father meet?

RT: I'm told that my mother had a older sister that had come and was married in the Salinas Valley, and her name was Okamoto. And from that sister, I guess when she was, she was maybe told to come to Salinas Valley.

TI: Okay, so probably through her, your mother's older sister, that's kind of, a connection was made.

RT: Yes.

TI: Okay, good. And do you know if she came already with kind of an arrangement to marry your father, or did she just come here first and then later on met him?

RT: She came here, I don't know at what age, but she married my, it was a baishaku marriage, and she married my father from Aichi-ken and then she was from Yamaguchi, but it was a prearranged marriage.

TI: Were there any, did you hear any stories from your mother or father about what it was like when they first met?

RT: No.

TI: Okay, what --

RT: All I know is that my mother later on was always telling us stories about her mother-in-law, how hard it was because she had a father-in-law and a mother-in-law, and most Isseis in that era didn't have a mother-in-law and father-in-law, but she did. In a way it was, I think, nice, but it was a very hard life for her, she said. Yes. And I was the firstborn in our family, and so we had Big Boy and another Japanese man who was unemployed -- I think he was in fragile health and that's probably why he was living with us, he wasn't working -- and I had my grandfather and my grandmother, and so it was all adults, and so I was born into an all-adult family and so I was just spoiled rotten, from what my mother says, that she, she later on had to lock the door so that my grandmother wouldn't spoil me when my mother had to go into the fields to work. She said she would sometimes lock the door so my grandmother couldn't spoil me. [Laughs] So I was a spoiled brat, I guess.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.