<Begin Segment 8>

AL: And you said earlier that your parents separated when you were about five.

EO: Five and a half.

AL: Do you know anything about the circumstances of why they separated?

EO: Yes. Near as I can kind of, shall we say, piece things together, they separated when I was five and a half. Mother told me this. And I knew Dad was very old-fashioned Japanese, head of the household man. And you can probably say almost like autocratic, I guess. 'Cause that's how many of the old timers were, whether it was from Europe or from Asia. The man was the boss of the house. But he was very strict and I know he was very strict with Mother. And Mother was probably a little bit more open-minded about things, a little bit more Americanized, leaning a little more towards freedom for the women, too. And I think it just plain got to her and it was just getting to be a little bit too heavy. And she knows that she could not have told Dad that, "I want a divorce, I want to leave." Dad would say, "No." You know what I mean? And for the Caucasian, like some of the old European parents, it was the same thing. They were the boss, that was it. So, she had to get away somehow. I remember the night she left. Dad had a friend visiting her in the... visiting him in the studio. They were chatting away and I was there, I listened in with them. And Mother came with my youngest brother. And she said to my dad, "I'm going to the corner drugstore," the Rexal drugstore. I remember Rexal Drugs not because of the R-E-X-A-L on it, but by the fact that it was orange and blue color. [Laughs] Now, she left, took my brother and went there and it became later in the night. She didn't return. And we wondered, "Well, I wonder what happened." So Dad took me and we went to the drugstore and we went in there and looked around. We didn't see her. But we found my youngest brother Sam in the back part of the store where the public gathers. And we asked him what happened, and he said, "Mother just went. She didn't say anything." So we knew she had left, so we took Sam and we went home together. And that's how they separated.

AL: Do you know if he tried to persuade her to come back?

EO: Yes, he did. Finally got in touch with her. I remember in camp, even in camp -- this is a few years later, of course -- writing some letters to the camp director of the camp that we, that Dad learned she was in. She was in Topaz. Saying that he wanted her back and all that. She had run off, she had run off with the help of another man. And whether they got married then or not, I don't know that part. But she did not want to come back. But I remember writing those letters that this other party had stolen my mother, things like that. The copies of the letters were in my file in the National Archives, or they were in Dad's file, I forgot, I don't know which, probably Dad's file. But since I got copy of the file, that's how I ran into it, copies of letters. And I had written them for him when I was a kid. Dad didn't write English too well.

AL: Do you know who the man was? Was he a Japanese American, or...

EO: Yeah. Japanese. I don't know. He wasn't Japanese American. He was Japanese, Issei...

AL: Issei.

EO: First generation. Yeah.

AL: About your father's age? Or younger?

EO: I don't know, probably younger. Because, backing up again, when Dad and Mother were first kind of introduced by mail, I believe, Dad had told Mother he was something like twenty some odd years of age. And Mother was still probably only about sixteen. And when she did meet him, it turned out that he was about thirty-five or thirty-six years old, twenty years older than she, she was.

AL: I've heard that's a pretty common experience. That they would --

EO: It sure was.

AL: -- send a picture when they were a young man and then, you know... maybe like Internet dating today or something. [Laughs]

EO: Yeah, very, very much so. That's how it was. He was twenty years older than... and she was, I guess rather taken aback a bit because of that. But when you get married baishakunin way, it kind of, ganbaru, you know, ganbare.

AL: Endure?

EO: Yeah. Endure. And I had the feeling that's what she had to do. And it was quite a strain on her and that's why she had to leave the way she did.

AL: Do you know, did she go to her parents' in Seattle? Did they...

EO: No, she did not.

AL: Okay, did --

EO: They took off somewhere out of Tacoma area.

AL: Did your grandparents stay involved with you after she was gone?

EO: I don't know what happened to them. I don't know if they had gone back to Japan after I left them and went back to Tacoma. I never asked my mother that, what happened to them. But chances are they may have. 'Cause she never spoke much about them, ever even we all got together, fifty years later.

AL: That would probably be something that would be a haji, shame, for her parents maybe?

EO: It would be, yeah, it would be a... they were considered haji, a disgrace. Haji is disgrace. H-A-J-I, probably, haji. Because to become divorced was looked upon as being a disgraceful act. But I don't know for sure, what that may have played in my grandparents', my maternal grandparents' lives.

AL: And your youngest brother at that time was what, about three?

EO: About three, uh-huh.

AL: So, how, who took care of him? I mean, what was your family life like after your mother left?

EO: We were there, up there, upstairs in our home, and Dad just kind of looked after us. Studio was right there, so he didn't have to look for a babysitter, if they had one back there in those days. And I remember our little stove, Dad would cook on it. I remember looking out the window. We can look into the rest of the block, below the studio, there. And I remember one night we were eating an apple. It had been all sliced up. My brothers and I were eating the apple looking out the window. And I remember the taste of the apple. It had, what kind, it was Red Delicious. I remember some of the darnedest things. And it had kind of an odd taste, just kind of a little unusual, that you would experience in some apple. I know, some of those little things that I would remember. I don't know why I would remember some of these darn things, but I would.

AL: Did you help care for your younger brothers at that time?

EO: Just kinda looked after. I was too young to do anything, anything worthwhile.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.