<Begin Segment 6>

LP: Did you get a sense of your parents and their family backgrounds? Were they relatively similar or did they come, it sounded like earlier there was, like, social economic backgrounds, but were the families, did they get along, were they similar, different?

MS: I imagine. I think the parents knew each other way back, because they're from the same village and everything. And she was thirteen years younger than our father, so there was no interaction between them. And it wasn't that unusual for them to have a big gap in age, marriages. But kind of interesting, too, also, the grandfather, actually his last name was Honda, but he married a Takaha, and the Takahas didn't have a male to carry on the family name. And apparently this was pretty common in those days also, so he took the Takaha name when they married, to carry on the lineage of the Takaha family. And from what my mother said Takaha is a one and only name, so if you run across another Takaha, it's a relative. And I've Googled Takaha on the internet, and I find all these strange names that come up, and I think, oh, wow. I find there's a Takaha that has a wine business in Japan.

ST: Oh, yeah?

MS: Yeah. [Laughs] So it's kind of interesting.

ST: I've got cousins here in the United States, but I don't know where they are or what they're doing or anything.

MS: Yeah. It's gotten to where the kids have had kids, and the kids have had kids, and we've kind of lost track of a lot of them.

KL: You were saying earlier that your mom was a, turned out to be a pretty good farmer?

ST: Oh, she was the farmer. She ran the farm.

MS: Yeah.

KL: And you were kind of going through where your different siblings were born, and I think I left off with Yoneji or Nij. Where was he born?

MS: He was born in... Isleton, and then Ack or Akira was born on Mandeville Island. And then that's where the other story comes in about the potatoes. With all the rich silt that comes down the river, Mom said that our father thought it would probably be good to plant things, so he tried, got some of it and he planted potatoes, and he ended up apparently with these humongous potatoes. And Nij said it's recorded somewhere, and I didn't quite pay attention. He said there's a record of it somewhere, that he had grown these huge potatoes. But there is a little town, or an area up there that I noticed when we went riding up there, and there's an area called "potato slough." So I figured that might have something to do with Dad. And I've seen pictures of other people holding up these huge potatoes.

KL: What did your mom tell you about what Mandeville Island was like, besides being good for growing potatoes? Did she say anything about the community there or who their neighbors were or what it was like for them?

MS: Not really. I think it was probably difficult because it was an island, and you're not free to just go get off the island to go get things if you needed it. But they weren't there very long either. From there I think they moved to Stockton. Let's see, Chick was born in Stockton?

ST: I don't know anything. [Laughs]

MS: And Tsuki, I think.

LP: Where is Mandeville Island? I wasn't familiar with that place.

MS: That's also up in the sloughs, near Isleton. So it's kind of like between Isleton and Stockton. But it is out in the sloughs. I'm pretty sure it's there yet. And I don't know why they moved from one place to the other.

ST: Oh, it was with the crops, you know. It depended on what they were planting and growing and harvesting.

MS: So they probably did, not really farming then, but helping with the harvesting and things for other farmers, I guess. So then from there, they finally moved to San Francisco, and they went there, too, that's where Sat was born. And then they moved to Half Moon Bay, and then the last three sisters, Hatsune and Mitsuko and me, we were all born in Half Moon Bay.

KL: Sat, what was your given name? What's your formal first name?

ST: Sanzui. Actually, it's Sanzy, but they can't pronounce "zy," it came out "zui." So I went to school, "What's your name?" "Sanzui," so they spelled it S-A-N-Z-U-I, in school. But on my birth certificate, it's S-A-N-Z-Y.

MS: I didn't know that. [Laughs]

ST: Yeah.

KL: Does it have a particular meaning?

MS: Undoubtedly.

ST: Yeah. San for San Francisco, and zy for my father's initial.

KL: That's... so they made up a name for you.

ST: Yeah.

KL: Oh, how cool.

ST: I guess they ran out of names. [Laughs]

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.