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JA: Tell me about your life and even your family before the war. Who were your parents and where did they come from?

GI: Well, my father came from the Miyagi prefecture, and my mother came from Fukushima. And I, I really don't know too much about their growing up in, in those country, but I do know that my dad came here about, about 1900. And I'm sure, I'm sure that I'm one of many, many Niseis that didn't ask their parents much about why they came over here, where they, where they landed, and what they did. But I found out later on that my dad had landed in Hawaii first and then I guess he came -- and from there he landed in San Francisco or Seattle, I don't know which. But I know he worked on a railroad for many years and he was a cook, I'm pretty sure he was a cook on the railroad, railroad gang, because he used to do all the big cooking for the family on the big holidays at home. And I used to never -- well, it never dawned on me where he learned how to cook, but I did find out later where he did.

JA: Did you find out what motivated him to come to this country?

GI: No, I don't think... he was a farmer, growing commercial flowers to take to the flower market down on Wall Street in Los Angeles, but I really think that the... he never, he never really wanted to be a farmer because he was more of an intellectual type. He liked to read every day and he knew how to, he was one of the very few people that people came to ask him to write things in Japanese for funerals and weddings and I don't see how he had the knack and power to do all that. I guess you call it sumi writing, I'm not too sure about that. But I know that he was very good at that, and, well, during the Depression years, I know he got very ill, and when he came back from the hospital he couldn't, he couldn't drive or he couldn't work anymore, so he, he really hadn't did any hard labor after that. I remember that part. So I remember when I was a kid, too, when he came back from the hospital, he took us for a ride in his car and nearly scared the heck out of all of us because he didn't know how to control the car. Because his foot wouldn't work, because everything was all clutch and he had to, you had to maneuver the car with your foot and a clutch, and boy, I'll tell you, it really scared the heck out of all of us. And then he quit driving all together.

JA: Now, you say he came in 1900. That was, the early 1900s was a time when a lot of people were coming here from Japan, I think.

GI: That's right, and I, I have some postcards at home where he was in Hanford, California, he was down in Calexico, he was in Brawley, and he was even in, in Old Gardena at one time, and a number of other places which I never knew that he, he had gone to. But I do have that postcard at home.

JA: So how big was your family?

GI: There were nine of us, nine children, had seven brothers and one sister, and I was the one in the middle, I was the fifth one, four, four below me and four above me.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.