<Begin Segment 28>

KL: You kindly agreed to stay for another little while, because we were kind of curious to hear more about what became of your parents. And I was curious about their... okay. So tell us about what became of your parents after you left Manzanar.

MS: They went back to working hard again.

SO: And it's when he, our dad got a job as a fisherman that they started, he started making good money where he was able to buy us a house in an all-white neighborhood. And he just continued to fish. And when our mother got sick and the doctor, she started getting sick, so they were going to do this simple surgery on her, because she couldn't keep food down, and so the doctor said, "Well, this is very simple. We're just going to go in, and there's a plug in the esophagus," and they're going to just unplug that and she'll be good as new. When they opened her up, the cancer had spread all over. And my father, our father was on a fishing trip in the...

MS: Mexico.

SO: The tip of Mexico, and so it took him forever to come home. They got him to come home, it was a couple of days after he got home, and then the doctors said that she had six months to live because the cancer had spread and it's just... so anyhow. Back in those days, they couldn't do too much to cancer patients. And so I used to take her to the UCLA Medical Center because they agreed to accept her, and then the only other place was the City of Hope. And so anyhow, she was doing this experimental drug, and I believe it's chemotherapy. But anyhow, she kept getting sicker and sicker, and she died within five and a half months since the doctor told her. And she was forty-nine years of age, and just when her life was just getting where she could start going out and having fun. So she, but one good thing about that is she did get to go back to Japan a couple of years before she passed away, right?

KL: What were the circumstances of that trip?

SO: Why did Mama go?

MS: For a visit, for the first time.

SO: Oh, to visit this... did she go to visit her real mother, or her birth mother or the woman that raised her?

MS: Well, they're all right there.

SO: Oh, I believe she wanted to see her mother, but I don't know which mother, right? Well, maybe she saw both.

MS: Well, the sister wasn't all that nice to her, that raised her. So I would think that it was her real mother.

SO: Her birth mother. So she did go in 1959. I think 1959 she went for a month.

MS: Then our father, he died when he was, like, seventy-eight?

SO: Seventy-six.

MS: But he was, what happened to him was... well, he had a part-time gardening job. So every evening he would, he and his, the new wife, would prepare their lunch for the following days and then go to bed. And his room was at one end of the hall, and hers was at the other end of the hall. And this one night, shortly... well, he went to bed, and he'd read for a little bit, it was the same ritual, and he'd turn off the light and go to bed. Well, this night, when he read and turned off the light, there must have been someone in his closet, because they, with the...

SO: Butt.

MS: ...butt of the gun, just hit him on the -- he was laying like this on the side, and hit him so hard that his whole thing was crushed in.

SO: Skull.

MS: Like about the size of an apple. And he survived all that, but he had just come back from Japan for the first time, and he was, wanted to take some money back to the bank in Gardena, so he went to the bank. And when he was coming back, I think he went kind of blank. It was recommended at that time that they were deciding whether to put a plaque in his head to protect it, but they thought that just a simple operation like that might kill him, so they decided not to. But he blanked out and hit a semi head on. He was in Harbor General Hospital for a while where we constantly was there like twenty-four hours. And finally the doctor said, you know, he felt that we were keeping him alive, and he felt that we should let him go. And when they told us all to go home, then that's when he died. But he died tragically, you know, with so much pain, and all the, it was sad. So they never caught the people, but Grandma is what we called her, and she said --

KL: His wife?

SO: Yes.

MS: She had been here not too long, and so she didn't understand English. And she said she heard our father yelling and saying, "Don't do that," in Japanese, "it hurts." But she couldn't hear what the other person was saying. But there was blood splattered all over the bedroom, and (the person) ran out the front door. And she ran to a neighbor's across the street. Nothing seemed to have been taken, so it was very bizarre.

SO: He survived that; that has nothing to do with that car accident, this was another accident.

MS: Yeah, it was shortly after that, but he was taking phenobarbital, and that's what they thought caused the accident.

SO: That's just... we had a lot of violence. And I think when our mother died and then it was just the five of us kids with our family, it kind of... we got closer because our father is gone, and here we're just all huddled like what shall we do? It brought us closer together. And we took care of our father, and he remarried seven years after. I think... I don't think he knew this third wife, they just... it was my uncle's friend, and they sent her to the United States to marry him.

KL: Did they, was the marriage okay? Were they happy with each other?

SO: Well, I don't know. [Laughs]

KL: That's a hard arrival, for her to have that attack.

MS: She looked a lot like our mother.

SO: She did? She didn't. [Laughs]

KL: Did your father reconnect with that first child that he had with his first wife?

SO: Yes, he brought her over in 1957.

MS: With two children, she had two children.

SO: And her husband.

KL: Is she still in the States? Is she still living?

MS: No, she had severe rheumatoid arthritis where her hands were crippled, you know. And she said the sister, his sister that raised her always used to say, "Gosh, for someone, your mother dying giving birth to you, why..." you know, kind of wondering why they would leave a child so deformed like her. Because she said she got this arthritis when she was sixteen. And so she was like that all her life, she suffered like that with her feet, too, and all that kind of thing. So she passed away several years ago. But she was the nicest, nicest person, real nice.

SO: And she and our mother were just like nine years apart, and so they were like sisters, being raised by the same sister.

MS: And our mother always talked about her, so it felt like we knew her, even if it was the first time we saw her. Just seems like we knew her all our lives. Anyway, everything's fine now.

KL: Wow, I don't know what to say.

MS: We have a bunch of little kids, and now they're all grown.

SO: Yeah, we're all healthy.

MS: Big kids.

SO: All of us siblings, we're all healthy.

KL: It sounds like family has been a real strength for you.

SO: Oh, yeah. So that's it.

KL: Thank you for...

SO: Oh, thank you for hearing our story.

KL: I'm honored to hear your story.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.