Densho Digital Archive - George Kiyo Wakatsuki Interview (denshovh-wgeorge-01-0021)

<Begin Segment 21>

AL: And how many kids do you have?

GW: From my first marriage I have... well, that's the only kids I have, is from my first marriage, is Lisa and Janet. Janet is like, close to fifty-eight, fifty-nine now, she lives in Maui, she's not married. My other daughter is Lisa who lives up in Chimacum, Washington, which is near Port Townsend. She has three sons and a daughter. The daughter has already made my, her mother, Lisa, or my daughter, Lisa, a grandma four times over. So I'm a four-time great grandfather. [Laughs] And then I divorced my first wife who was from Okinawa, who was Lisa's and Janet's mother, and I married Charlotte, who is my current wife, in 1978. And she has a big family herself, she's got two sons and a daughter from her second marriage. She's got a son from a first marriage, and not too many grandkids, though. But on her side, she grew up in Hawaii, she was born in Hawaii, so her family in Hawaii is pretty big, they're well-known. But one of her older brothers, who used to be the president of Aloha Airlines, president of Hawaii Visitor Bureau, and then her brother's a lawyer, one's a doctor, but they're all retirement ages, but they're still working. She had a, what do you call it, her auntie died at the age of a hundred and four.

AL: Wow.

GW: She was rich, she had millions of dollars. She bequeathed about five million dollars to the University of Hawaii. She has another aunt now, still living, who's a hundred and two, and she has some, I guess you might call it her uncle's wife, are pretty old. So they must live long in Hawaii. And what I'm afraid of is Charlotte's got that gene, is gonna last a long time, longer than I am. [Laughs]

AL: What do you care if she lasts longer than you? [Laughs] And then so Jeanne has, Jeanne and Jim have three kids?

GW: Yeah. Josh, twins... yeah.

AL: I wanted to ask you also a story about Woody, and that is, Jeanne talks in the book about him going and meeting your aunt, I think her name was Tomi? No, Tomi's your sister-in-law. An aunt in Japan who tells him a story about how they buried his father, how they buried your father in the cemetery. Is that a true story? What do you know about Woody --

GW: I don't even know that story. I haven't heard of that.

AL: Didn't you read the book?

GW: Was it in the book?

AL: It talks about Woody going to meet your father's favorite aunt in Japan. This is like in the '40s. And in the book it talks about how happy she is to know that Ko lived and had a family and that they had buried, they had a grave for him there because he never came back and they never heard from him.

GW: Hmm, I never heard that one.

AL: Maybe it's just in the book, but I just was curious if that was...

GW: Well, I've heard stories of... I don't know if any records have been made of Woody, but it was overseas, he would, I don't know if he went on these excursions and stuff, but I think he was... I heard that he was one time, he gave sugar to his aunts or something in Hiroshima, and they found out about it or something, they were gonna court-martial him for giving sugar to, sugar out for black market or whatever. I don't know whatever came of that. In fact, Ray's son, Greg, works for the government and somehow he's been trying to track the records and see where Woody would show up. They can't find him in the MIS files or in the CIC files. So he's trying to see where he can dig his name up, if it appears anyplace.