<Begin Segment 3>

RP: Tell us about your mother, first of all her name.

YW: My mother's name is Hatsuko, H-A-T-S-U-K-O. Her maiden last name is Nakamoto, N-A-KA-M-O-T-O.

RP: And can you give us a little bit of her background?

YW: Yes, she was born here in Los Angeles, and she had two brothers, younger brothers. She was the eldest. And I'm not sure what her folks did for a living, frankly, but they were here, they preceded the family and they started their family here, so both my uncles and my mother were American citizens by right of birth. They were born in Los Angeles, and somewhere along the line the parents decided they better take the kids back home to Japan, to an area, to a country that the kids knew nothing of, and started them off in Japanese school. So they ended up finishing high school in Japan, so they lost any English they knew, if they knew any at all, frankly. And so my mother lost most of her English, if she had any at all, so she was basically Japanese-speaking the rest of her life. Okay, now her younger brothers were bilingual, but mostly Japanese, but their English was much better than hers. And during World War II they ended up in, I guess, the (Military Intelligence Service) and they were part of the postwar occupation forces, served as interpreters for the U.S. Army.

RP: So your mother graduated from high school in Japan?

YW: Yes, they all graduated from high school. Yes.

RP: And do you know roughly when she came back to the United States?

YW: Beg pardon?

RP: Do you know roughly when she came back to the U.S.?

YW: I don't know. I really don't know when that happened. I was looking back in my paperwork and I can't figure it out. In fact, all the kids came back, I don't know whether the parents came back or not. I can't establish that from the records. As for her brothers, after the war was, after they served in the Armed Forces, the younger of the two brothers stayed in Japan and married a Japanese woman and took on her family name. It's called yoshii. Because they had nothing but girls in that family. You can plan like this, but as luck would have it, he had nothing but girls, so that family does not propagate that name too well. [Laughs] My other uncle, the older of the two, came back to the U.S. and he brought back a war bride, if you will, and he lives in L.A. somewhere. I lost track of him.

RP: Can you give us their names, both of the uncles?

YW: Let's see now, the older one, his name was Yasuo, Y-A-S-U-O, and I think he took on the name Harry also. The younger of the brothers was, I think it was Yasuto, Y-A-S-U-T-O, and his English name was George.

RP: What do you remember most about your mother?

YW: What do I remember most about her? Let's see, what can I say? Hard working around the house, always trying to nurture us, and always encouraged school, good behavior was expected of us. She ran the house with an iron fist without using an iron fist, you know what I mean? She was very persuasive. Says, "Don't do that. That's shaming the family," that sort of thing and that straightened you up right away." She died at a young age, about sixty-one or sixty-two. Had breast cancer, and so she was the youngest of the, my kids' grandparents had died. It was kind of tragic 'cause I wanted her to see them grow up a little bit, but never got the chance. My dad followed suit later. I don't know how many years after that, but he also passed away then.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.