<Begin Segment 3>

AU: Then after high school, then I wanted to further pursue my education, and my father gave me a choice. He set me down one day in high school and he says, "Now, I don't have money just send you to higher education and then give you with, shower with you all the luxuries. So you have a choice, do you want all the things, you know, the luxuries, or would you rather have that money put to your education?" and I chose education. So he said, "All right, then you can go to whatever school that you choose." And I wanted to go to the Tsuda English Institute that's in Tokyo. That's one of the best women's university in English, and I was prepared to take an exam for that school, and I had been studying. But at the last minute, my father said, "No, you're not going to Tokyo because things were so bad." The war was bad, and everybody was starving. They didn't have enough food, and he said that he would not send me to school when he knew that I would get sick and not have enough food. And so he couldn't, they couldn't be coming to Tokyo all the time, so he said, "Well, you have to go to school which is somewhere closer to home so you can finish school without getting ill or without starvation." So then I, there was a school in Nagasaki called Kasui Women's College, and this college, in Japan, they call it the Mission School because it was originally funded by the Christian missionaries, and they had American teachers. The teachers that came from United States that were teaching in there, and their English department was very good, so I chose to go to that college, and I was accepted there. And so, but then, when I went there, my mother used to come now and then and bring me food. She would leave early in the morning so that she would get there before I went to school, and then she would just go home on the train. And it took a few hours at that time, probably about three or four hours on the train.

During the first year, you know, when you go to college and you go to somewhere that you don't know anybody at all and when I first sat in class, everybody looked so smart, especially people with glasses on. Gosh, I thought, I don't know if I can ever compete with these people. But after a week, the first week, I got so homesick, and Saturday, we had school on Saturday, too, for half a day. So as soon as the school was over, and I saw some people that came from a nearby area that were going home, and I was so homesick, and I got on the train, and I went home. When I got home there in the late afternoon, my father was so upset with me. He told me that he did not send me to school so that I can just come home whenever I wished. "I sent you there to study, and you're not coming home until your summer vacation." And so he told my mother, well, you know, "Feed her dinner. She can stay for dinner, but then you're going to take her right down to the train depot, and you're going to put her on the train and send her back to school," so that's what she did. I know in her heart, she was crying. But then, so I didn't come home until summer vacation. But after a while, you know, you get used to, and then you have fun in school.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.