Densho Digital Archive - M. Jack Takayanagi - Mary Takayanagi Interview (denshovh-tmjack

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KL: I was reading in the book that you created, Jack, about your father, his becoming interested in learning to paint. Was that when you were a young man, too?

MJT: Well, the interesting thing about my father and his painting, I never saw him paint.

KL: Never ever?

MJT: I never saw him take... he always carried a sketchbook in his pocket, and a pen. And I would see him occasionally doing something in the sketchbook, but actually sitting down and painting these pictures that we found after Manzanar was a total surprise to most of us. Because he didn't exhibit them, or didn't say, "See what I did today?" or anything like that. But he evidently had time on his own when he either went out and sketched something and made it into a painting or whatever. But that was his painting. And then he went to evening classes in high school.

KL: When he was in high school?

MJT: No, when we lived...

MT: After high school.

MJT: After high school. And he would go, but I wouldn't know when, if you asked me, well, "When did he go?" I wouldn't know when he went. But he would go to the classes that they offered in watercolor, I guess, painting, and he would go between times, free time or whenever he could make the time to do it. So it was a pleasant surprise when we discovered these paintings.

KL: Where did you find them?

MJT: Oh, basically just kind of stacked in the house. My mother rarely said anything too much about them either. I have his sketchbooks, which are full of different kinds of... one of the saddest moments of my life after the war was that someone told my dad that, "You'd better get rid of those sketches that you've taken," or handmade books, "because if they find you with those sketches, they will accuse you of spying." And so one of the hardest things that I remember of my dad was that before, in front of the fireplace, he would take these sketchbooks and tear out the pages and throw them into the fire. I'm sure that was a hurtful thing for him. Though, for some reason, there were a lot of other sketchbooks that he didn't throw in the fire, and he kind of hid them, I guess, and that's what we have. But my dad was a very quiet man. He was a maverick, if you know what a maverick... don't know where he came from, but the story is that my mother's father ran a spring resort.

MT: Hot springs.

MJT: Yeah, hot springs resort in Fukuoka and Nagasaki. And it's said that my dad just arrived one day looking for work, I guess, and my grandfather, or my mother's father, gave him a job. And then like so many young people in those days, of his age, they heard about work elsewhere. And so he went to Hawaii and worked as a professional mourner, and he was hired out to mourn at funerals. And then from there he went to Alaska, and there he worked in a sardine cannery. And his job was to cut the heads off of the sardines as they came down the chute and into the can. And they would bake the can and send the can of sardines. And my dad said that after he had that experience, he never ate another can of sardines. [Laughs] Then he went from there to Chicago to work at Libby, McNeil and Libby company. And they wouldn't let him smoke inside the building, and so it was too cold to smoke outside, so he learned to chew tobacco. He admitted that he'd swallow half of it, so that cured him. He ended up down in the Gulf Stream to work in the shrimp harvesting business. Then for some reason, we knew that he was at the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, because he tells about he was irrigating the fruit trees there in a town called Alviso. And I could hear him telling right now how that morning, the water out of the ditch just jumped out of the ditch when the earthquake happened, just literally jumped out of the ditch. So that was 1906.

KL: Did he sketch, and was he drawing in Japan, do you think, and Hawaii?

MJT: I'm sorry?

KL: Did he make sketches or drawings in Japan or in Hawaii?

MJT: I don't know. But those we don't have, he's dead. But he went back to Japan, and no doubt went back where my mother's father gave him that job first, and he went back there. And as he went back there, he was so enamored by the opportunities of what was called in many places the promised land, the promised land, you go there to make your money and come home. And so he says, "I'm going back to America, and I'd like to take with me a wife. Do we have any volunteers?"

KL: How romantic. [Laughs]

MJT: Mary's father, no one said anything when he made that announcement. "Anybody want to volunteer to be his wife to go to America?" And so as the day came closer for the ship to leave, and he wanted to be on that ship. He announced once again that he was going to America, and he wanted a wife to go with him. Would anyone volunteer? That's when my mother, who was only eighteen years old at the time, volunteered. And I've kind of been thinking about that recently as I was thinking about some other things, how much courage it took for a girl of eighteen, against, I'm sure, the opposition of her parents, plus going to marry this totally strange man who was sixteen years older than she. But she married him, and that was the year 1913 rather, when the era of the "picture bride." In Oregon alone in 1913, there were a thousand bachelor men of Japanese descent in this state, and a large majority of them wanted to have wives, not only for companionship, but also to raise their family and so on. My dad and mother came to the States in 1913, at the very height of the picture bride era, and came to the Bay Area, to San Francisco. And what they had hoped to be the promised land turned out not very promising because the work that was available for them were those that the Chinese now had left. And they went to, the Chinese went to a little more progressive kind of work. And the manual labor work was what the Japanese came and inherited by coming to this country, and they became farm workers, most of them, or work in the fishery, or on the railroads. And the women were usually put in the house service as maids and working, cleaning homes and so on.