<Begin Segment 3>

KL: I want to hear more about Maryknoll, but first I want to talk about your paternal grandparents who also came to the United States.

JO: Okay.

KL: Tell us about them.

JO: My paternal grandparents came when my father was eleven years old in October 1916. October of 1916, it was one month before he was going to be twelve. And they came over, they brought him over, and they came over then because his fare would have been half price. Once he became twelve, he had to pay full price. So they landed in San Francisco, and they stayed in San Francisco, and he went to school there, elementary school. Now, he was already twelve. I don't know too much about my grandparents, I only remember my father's life. He came when he was twelve and he had to start first grade, elementary school, when he was twelve. So he didn't graduate high school until he was about twenty-one or two.

KL: He started in the first grade at twelve?

JO: Yeah, twelve.

KL: How was that? Did he talk about that?

JO: Well, what could he do? He couldn't speak English. So he learned eventually.

KL: Were there others in his situation, do you think, other older kids?

JO: I don't know. I don't think so. I don't really know. He didn't ever say he had any friends, so I really didn't know. In fact, I don't even know what his parents did. I know his mother kind of was a stay-at-home mother. I don't know whether she took in ironing or laundry or how they used to do that in the old days to make money. And I don't know what he did.

KL: Your grandfather?

JO: Yeah, I don't know what he did. He --

KL: They -- oh, go ahead.

JO: He was kind of a tinkerer, and he would tinker and do, make all kinds of things. But as I said, I really don't know, and I never asked my dad.

KL: Where were they from in Japan?

JO: They were from the Kyoto area?

KL: Did he talk to you about his memories of Kyoto at all?

JO: No. He actually... his life was a little different. He was born to a family with three boys, I guess, and being the fourth boy, they didn't want him, so they sent him to the Buddhist temple to live. And he lived there for six years, however many years until this older couple wanted a child and went to the temple and got him. That's all I know. I only found out about that when we went back to Japan. In 1997 we went back to Japan because my father wanted to visit his mother's grave before he passed away. So we went to Japan, and he could barely walk himself by this time because he was ninety-two.

KL: That is a long trip for a ninety-two-year-old.

JO: But he made it. And in Japan, the graves are not level, they're on stairs and up hills, and so he had to climb up this hill of stairs, but he did it. And he went to say, pour water on his mother's grave and add a little flowers. But that was the first time that I heard that he had to go to a Buddhist temple to live. Because we went to the Buddhist temple, "Oh, here's the temple where I had to stay."

KL: Oh, my gosh.

JO: I said, "What?" "Oh, yeah." He had to stay there as a child. I said, "Oh, my goodness."

KL: Did he just live so much in the present, you think, that he just hadn't...

JO: He just didn't think about it until taking a trip back there and walking across this area and seeing how it was. It was just amazing.

KL: Was the grave that you visited the grandmother that raised him that he went to see, or the woman who...

JO: Yes, uh-huh, the one that raised him. The sad story was she was married, the father was an abuser, he used to beat her. I guess she couldn't take it, she killed herself. So he was in college by then when he came home from a day in college and came (home) to see his mother, dead. But he never shared that until later on, I think this trip, then he started talking about it. So it was kind of like unspoken. My mother knew about it, I guess, but never said anything.

KL: That'd be a hard thing to figure out how to tell your children.

JO: Yeah. So anyway...

KL: So was he an only child then?

JO: He was the only child, he was adopted, probably around age seven or eight, and lived with them. But his father, for whatever else, made him go to college. I mean, he was not particularly brilliant because he had to start first grade at age twelve, and he finished high school when he was like twenty-one or twenty-five. It was quite a ways. Maybe he was twenty-five when he finished high school. Then he went to Berkeley, UC Berkeley, because his father made him. And I said, "Why'd you take architecture?" "My father made me do that."

KL: And you said his father was a tinker, so maybe...

JO: Yeah, I said, how did he know to make my father take architecture? Although my father said he was an engineering graduate, he wasn't. He was an architecture graduate. And so... and architecture is a school for five years, so he had to leave the school one year to work, and then went back, and I think he made it in six years. But he did go to college, did as his father said.

KL: He finished at Berkeley?

JO: Yes.

KL: That's interesting that it was his father who wanted him to do that.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.