<Begin Segment 3>

RP: So was he tempered by your mother and what she brought to the relationship?

RS: Well, my mother was also a very, very intelligent smart woman you know. But of course she was brought up in the system of deferring to the males but she couldn't quite do that. Things I remember is that there were a lot of arguments as I was growing up because she wouldn't always do the things that were demanded of her even though when it comes down to it she was the wife and of course he decided what went on and so forth. But she stood up for herself even though in the early part of my recollection of her she was not the healthiest. For a while she was not in very good health but even during those times she stood up in a kind of not in a big demanding sort of way but in a quiet very inner strength kind of way she stood up for what she thought was right.

RP: What was her name?

RS: Chiyoko and her maiden name was Takeuchi.

RP: She was born in the United States?

RS: She was born in the United States.

RP: And what was the circumstances regarding her parents, also immigrants coming over from Japan?

RS: Yeah, my grandfather also came to this country early on, very close to 1900, and I don't know whether my grandmother married him here or back in Japan. Anyway, my grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side were here in Portland working and so my mother and uncle and aunt, couple of uncles and aunt were born here in this country. But after a while, after being here for a while, my grandmother just wanted to go back to Japan. She just... I don't know, somehow that she just missed Japan. So they went back to Japan, the whole family went back to Japan. So my mother, and she was a fairly young girl, went back to Japan with the family. Shortly after that, another uncle was born in Japan, and while that uncle was still a baby, that grandmother died as well. So my grandfather, after a little while, remarried and he didn't have his original wife with him anymore so he came back to this country again. And started doing his business here in Portland and left the kids back in Japan under the care of their grandparents. And so my mother did most of her schooling in Japan and when she finished the standard number of years of schooling then came back to this country to rejoin her parents.

RP: How many years did she spend in Japan overall?

RS: I'm not quite sure but maybe... it can't be very long, seven or eight years, something like that.

RP: She was what's referred to as a Kibei?

RS: In many ways she's a Kibei, yes. I'm not quite sure how many years of schooling she had in this country but I know she did go to school here for a while. Now whether she went to school before she went back or whether she went to school here after she came back this way, I just don't remember.

RP: And do you know how your parents met?

RS: Well, they knew each other from way back. Actually my stepgrandmother on my father's side is the sister of my grandfather on my mother's side. So of course you see the two families know each other very well. And so actually after my father and my mother got married, my stepgrandmother on my father's side is my mother's stepmother-in-law as well as her real aunt.

RP: That is really interesting.

RS: But then of course they knew each other from way back and so when my father came to this country when he was fifteen years old, my mother was still here before going back and so she was a fairly small girl, and of course they knew each other. But then she went back to Japan and then when she came back to this country, of course, as she was growing up, then she of course she knew him.

RP: Now she was a U.S. citizen and he was a Japanese national.

RS: Yes, but back in the time when they were first married, there was a law that said that if a citizen marries an alien who is ineligible for citizenship, they lose their citizenship. So for a while my mother lost her citizenship. It was only later that they changed the law so that people could recover their citizenship that my mother had to apply to recover her citizenship.

RP: That was the infamous Cable Act.

RS: Yes, that's right, the Cable Act.

RP: And I think it actually came into law just before they got married and then it was repealed later on.

RS: I don't remember when it was repealed but I think for a while my mother didn't know that it was repealed, but when the war started, then there were a lot restrictions put on Japanese people, particularly aliens. And so my father couldn't do any banking business for example. I mean everything in banks for aliens was frozen so he couldn't do anything. So at that point my mother learned that she could recover her citizenship so she applied to get her citizenship back. And then so all the banking things that needed to be done for the family, my mother did it.

RP: Another one of the many discriminatory laws that were in vogue at that time. So your parents initially settled in what area of Oregon?

RS: The farm was in Troutdale. In those days Troutdale was a farming community, there was a little town there. That's still the center of the town of Troutdale, but nowadays Troutdale, the center is surrounded by housing developments and things like that. But the farm area is still a farm area but then there's more and more houses being built up there too.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright &copy; 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.