Densho Digital Archive - Saburo Masada Interview (denshovh-msaburo-01-0022)

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KL: There are a couple other sort of projects you've been involved in that I want to ask you about, but before that, I wonder if you would tell us, just briefly, what the rest of your mother's life was like, and also what the rest of Aiko's life was like?

SM: Okay, let's see, I'll start with my mother. She became a very devout Christian, and I remember morning after morning, not because I always awoke that early but I knew she was doing it, she was going out to the grapevines and under the grapevines she would just pray, like an hour at a time. And I guess she was praying for our family, but according to Miyo she was praying for twenty years for her husband, who was not a Christian and yet we had a Christian funeral service. And she had her own way of trying to interpret this, like she baptized all of us on the very first day we ever stepped into a Christian church, which, I learned in high school, you don't do that. That's not right, because you're supposed to be born again first and all that. Anyway, she said, well, in the bible the Philippine jailor, when he was converted he baptized his whole household, meaning the servants and everybody, so Miyo said, our mother told Miyo, "Well, if he could do it, I could it." So that's why she had everybody baptized. So she was a very devout -- and I just read in this little history that there was a blind man, Christian, of her church, in her church in Fresno. She seldom was able to come to Fresno because we lived fifteen miles out of town, and she didn't drive or anything, but he gives a testimony about my mother saying that every, gee, either twice a day or twice a week, I forgot which, he would call, she would call him and read the bible to him, because he was sightless. And he said, "Nobody knew that she did that, other than God." And she thought the world, he thought the world of my mother.

Chaplain George Aki told us, in testimony, or in his interview, that, he said, "You know, your mother's a real saint. When we tried to build a new church in Fresno, all these rich farmers, they would say, 'Oh, maybe a hundred dollars, fifty dollars,' and your mother said, 'I don't have any income, but I'm going to donate two hundred dollars,'" which was sort of embarrassing to the well-to-do members of the church. But George said, "Your mother was a saint, if there ever was one." Well, when I interviewed him, I didn't want to identify her as my mother, so I just said there was an Issei lady that George said was a real saint. But George had a hard time here, in this church in Fresno. He came out of the chaplaincy so, in Europe if, he had to learn how to drink, 'cause he didn't drink, because the hostess in the families over there would offer him drink and he didn't know how to handle it. Once he had, he said, actually, once he said he kept drinking, but he said he doesn't drink, he said, "I don't drink." So they brought him a little one, so he thought, 'Oh, a little one," so he gulped it and it was, it started to boil in his stomach and he had a hard time, so he said, "I better learn how to drink." [Laughs] So when he came back to Fresno, the best restaurants, they automatically serve drinks on the table, and so he said, "Wow, this is great." And his wife said, "You better not, you better not drink. People are lookin' at you." Well, he got a phone call the next day from his mother in Chicago saying to George, "Don't drink. You can't do that." So somebody had reported to his mother in Chicago. [Laughs] But when he went to the next church in Chicago, he wrote, "I hate the Isseis. I don't want to be a minister to the Isseis, and so the church members said, "Why is that?" He said, "Well, they really gave me a rough time in Fresno, so I'm just not happy." But after a few years he fell in love with the Isseis in Chicago and he treasured their presence in the church. But in Fresno he wanted an air conditioner for his car, since his wife was in Berkeley and Fresno was so hot, and I guess she was probably pregnant, but the church refused to do that. So he just had a lot of negative feelings about the... and the Isseis were the leaders of the church back then, in the '50s. Let's see, did I go off on a tangent? Where were we?

KL: Well, I wanted to hear, you didn't, but I wanted to hear also about Aiko's profession and later life.

SM: Okay. I moved away soon after graduation, so I wasn't in that close touch with everything going on, Aiko was in San Francisco when I graduated and she's the one who said, "Why don't you go to school here and be a schoolboy?" I was already committed to go to Reedley College locally, because that's my school district, so when I registered at San Francisco City College, with the job of schoolboy, they said, "You can't attend here because you're supposed to be back in Reedley." But I said, "But I live here now." And they said, "Well, okay." And so I ended up going to City College, but during the registration, I should just tell you that, to show how naive I was, when I registered they said, "What's your father's name?" And I thought, gosh, Issei, I mean Ihei, is such an uncommon name that I was proud that I remembered what his first name was, because we never called him by first name, always Papa. So I remembered it was Ihei, then they said, "What's your mother's name?" I said, "Nobuye," which is more common. And then the registrar said, "What's your mother's maiden name?" I said, "She did haven't any." We looked at each other, they said, "She had to have a maiden name." But that's how Japan was to me. it was the other side of the moon, I'd never even heard of or thought of having a mother over there, or ever had a mother over there. And so I called my, Miyo, when I got home that day, I said, "Miyo, what's Mom's maiden name?" And she says Onishi, and that was like Johnson or Smith. So next day I went back and said, "My mother's maiden name is Onishi." [Laughs] And then to register that day, the professor said, wanted to know what classes I wanted and said, "What's your major?" All I knew is Major League and Minor League baseball. I didn't know what he was talking about. So he said, he saw that I was sort of in a daze and so he said, "What did you, what classes do you like?" I said, "I like chemistry, physics. In high school I took those." He said, "Here, give me your card," so he wrote down some courses, chemistry and physics, and he says, "How does that look?" I said, "I like those classes. Good." So that summer my cousin asked me, "What are you majoring in?" I said, "Gee, I don't know." He said, "What are you taking?" I said chemistry, physics, and he said, "That's good, because you wanted pre-med." So here I was told I'm taking pre-med and gone through two years of college, and I haven't learned how to put a band-aid on. [Laughs] So I said what is this pre-med and I'm not even learning anything about medicine? So that's how unprepared I was for college.

After school I was going to, high school, I was going to work on a farm. I mean, that's the normal thing. My, none of my older siblings ever went to college, so it was sort of strange. I think those junior high years, though, junior high years I would've been schooled in preparing for higher education. Because during my senior year University of California recruiters came to our high school and they met with my classmates, and they knew what was going on, but I didn't know anything about what was going on. So anyway...

KL: Did Aiko remain in San Francisco?

SM: Just for a short time. And then, then she went to Japan to work, civil service, then she got married. And then she was in Hawaii when the fiftieth anniversary, reunion was scheduled, so she wrote that letter to Dildine was the maiden name, Hunter. And then she went to Los Angeles, lived there.

KL: Did she continue to write letters to the editor?

SM: No, no, I don't think so. No.