<Begin Segment 5>

TI: So I'm curious about this one, because both your, well, your mother was already in the United States, most of the people I've interviewed, their parents were married through kind of an arranged marriage between, with the woman being in Japan and the man being in the United States. In the case of your parents, how did the two of them meet?

AM: That, that is... I just never did find that out. But I imagine it was one of those, the Japanese term is baishakunin.

TI: So you think it was even arranged here.

AM: Yeah, it was arranged, there was an intermediate person, and they said, "Well, you need to get married, so-and-so's got a daughter and so-and-so's got a daughter," and they show pictures and stuff like that. But when I was a kid, that was the way it usually happened. Even for Niseis it happened, and I think that was the end of it. When you was a Nisei, I think that was the tail end of all the baishakunin marriages.

TI: Okay, I was just curious about your parents, if it was like a relationship of love or something, that they saw each other in Scottsbluff or Denver or something like that.

AM: At that particular time, when you're, Nebraska, if you go out in a place out in Nebraska, "Where is that?" Even today, people don't know where Nebraska's at, you know, as small as this world has gotten to be. But everything, hardly anybody traveled out of the community, and maybe they came to Denver and back and that's about it. They never went to Lincoln, Lincoln was probably another two-hour drive from Scottsbluff, whereas coming here to Denver was, what, four hours, five hours at that time, slow traffic, and the train ran there.

TI: So when you talk to some of the old-timers that perhaps knew your father, how would they describe him? What kind of man was he? Do you have a sense of, in terms of his personality, or was he talkative, was he quiet? What do you know about him?

AM: You know, he spent more time at work than he spent as being a father. He was always someplace delivering, get up early in the morning, we never even seen him get up to go to work. And then, of course, we're all in bed by the time he'd come back, lots of times. And he'd do his book work during the day and all that stuff, get stuff ready and put the orders together, and he'd go out and deliver. And in those days, you know, one-way trip over ten or fifteen miles, from one town to the next town, and as it were, the Japanese, well, where they settled was probably within a ten-mile area in most cases, but I do know that he went to some places which was probably thirty, forty miles away on a, on a trip. So I don't know whether he stayed overnight in some of those places, which I suppose people did in those days because travel was kind of slow. He had a pickup truck and he loaded up and off he'd go.

TI: And so you never heard stories from people like, "Oh, your dad was like this," or they remembered your dad and they just mentioned something to you? Or do you even recall when we was with Mr. Westervelt in terms of how he was just with some of his business people?

AM: Well, he was able to hold a conversation, most of, a lot of my conversations, I guess, with my father would be during the times I was in the service and we communicated by mail quite often. But he always used to tell me to, he always instilled in me, "Alfred, be a good soldier and do as you're told to do. Obey your superiors, don't bring shame to our family," things of that nature. I think that's kind of his evaluation that they bring from Japan to this country. And you know, they just kind of instilled that all the time, and I remember that's what he used to talk about a lot of time.

TI: Let's talk about your mother. What was she like?

AM: She was an awful hard worker, she raised the kids and feed 'em and she used to work the store when my father got ill. And here she had to run the store by herself, and I remember her making tofu and making age, and most of the stuff that she had to prepare she did herself. My dad probably showed her how or he went someplace and learned and then showed her. And then, of course, he did the outside part of the business and she did the inside part of the business. And I remember not so much my dad being in the store except when he was behind the desk working his abacus. But I remember being with my mom and maybe I wouldn't feel good and we had a little cot there. It wasn't really a cot, it was more like a table, tabletop with the side put up that she would put me in when I was a little kid and wasn't feeling well. That's the only thing that you remember -- other times I'm out playing someplace. [Laughs]

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.