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RP: Let's talk about your mother, first of all, her name?

AW: Her name is En, spelled E-N. And her maiden name is Kamo, so it's En Kamo.

RP: And how did she end up coming to America?

AW: Well, she was a, I guess what they call a "mail bride." When my father was here, mother sought single ladies that was available for him. And my father, as I say, is from a little village called Matsubara village and my mother was from the Kabushi village. And the village is only about two or three miles apart. And my, let me see, my grandmother, my grandmother who was in the Matsubara village, found this family who had three girls. They were not married yet, they were marriage age, I mean, they were available. And no my mother was selected from the three for my father. And, so this is how they met. And my mother talks about looking at my father only by a picture, and this is how she recognized him. And I guess my father doesn't say anything but I guess I assuming that they must have sent them a picture of her, to my father.

RP: And sometimes those pictures were taken a lot, many years earlier.

AW: [Laughs] Oh, it could be deceiving.

RP: Right. False advertising.

AW: I suppose the only thing that kind of humors my mother, kept talking about, is that the picture showed him, didn't show how tall he is. And it turned out that she is taller than my father. So, she, I think she was a little bit disappointed in that. I'm not too sure, but she brings that up so I'm assuming that she was a little taken back by that.

RP: And your father went back to marry your mother, or...

AW: Yes, yes. My father, they made some arrangement and they don't talk about that but the photos that we have shows that my father and his sister and the sisters, there were... taking pictures together like that, so yes.

RP: Well, let's talk about your mom in terms of her personality, what you remember about her the most. You told me one thing, one interesting thing about her is that she was, had a very special hobby. She used to write tanka?

AW: Yes, yes. All of her life, ever since I could remember, she would be writing poems and they called this... actually, she doesn't call it poems, she calls it song, the tanka, but this is translated into a Japanese poem. And she had, she was writing that all along, whenever she had time. And of course at the time it occurred more during the winter month than the summer month, because during the summer month she was out in the farm like all of us. But whatever she wrote, she wrote the tanka and she was always looking for new subjects to write. So as soon as -- I shouldn't say "soon" -- but when we grew up and was able to take her around, my brother and others, we would take her to various sites, such places as New York City, Niagara Falls, down in Texas where they have citrus, the Washington, D.C., she wanted to see the cherry blossoms. She would write tanka about all of these events. And her poem, the tankas, was concentrated more on the family activity, family events. And over the years, what she did was she, I don't know how many she had, but she did collect a hundred of them and made a, bound it into a hard-bound book. The tanka is written in Japanese and romaji and then into the English. And so she was able to get that published before she passed away. So this is something that the family has to remember her poems. So, it's a hobby that, that I wish I had that I could pass on, like she did. But, it's very nice because it talks about various family activities, such as on the farm there was a plane accident when it was spraying, so she made a tanka about that. She came out to -- I was getting my PhD in University of California, Davis -- she came out and I explained to her what I'm doing. So she wrote a tanka about my research program. And things of this... so it's a very interesting for the family members.

RP: Kind of a historical account of your family life --

AW: Yes.

RP: -- by poetry.

AW: That's right, yes, it is. And I, I know one tanka poem that's very interesting is she's talking about brother below me, he had to milk the cows. And he, I guess one of the cold days, I guess he didn't want to milk the cows anymore. He said, "The teats are frozen so I can't milk anymore." So she made a poem out of that. And so that's a kind of humorous poem.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.