<Begin Segment 6>

MR: Let's go back to the wedding. What was the wedding like?

YD: The wedding was a disaster to me. I didn't know anyone in the wedding except for my aunt. And when I say it's a disaster, it's because I had no family other than my aunt. And my uncle would not go there because the go-between on my husband's side was a divorced woman of a former governor of Gifu, and the ex-governor had run off with another woman, and she was not a divorcee, and she was not a widow, but she had to make a living for herself. She had sort of like a boarding house, and she had two sons and one daughter who had been married and who had lived in Manchuria, and her husband had been killed in the war. She had brought her four-year-old daughter back and lived with the mother. And in that household, my husband and his sister lived there, and my husband was sort of a tutor to the two sons. And so when I married, my uncle said, "If you get married, you have to start your own household." But my husband felt that he had the responsibility of living with this woman, with a family because of her livelihood and because of the fact that his sister was also living there. His sister was a teacher. So when I got married, I moved into that family. I did not get married to just my husband, it was into that family, and it was miserable. Her name was Mrs. Oowaki. But she clung to my husband because he was tutoring her two sons. One was a grade school student, and one was a high school student. And she always told my husband that if he left and his sister left, she would have no income. And so because my husband felt responsible, he moved me in there. And so I was not his wife, but I was more of the daughter-in-law of her family. And so during the time that we first got married, Mrs. Oowaki and the daughter and I would take turns in cooking for the whole family, and it was miserable because I had never known how to cook for that big a family. In fact, I didn't know how to cook at all because I was studying all the time. And whenever I made any rice, Mrs. Oowaki would make it a point by saying, "The rice is not good today." And my husband, I look back at it, and I think, I wondered how I grinned and beared it because he was always over on the family's side taking care of that family. And in the evening, he would come over to where we lived on our side of the family. And during the day while I was there while my husband was gone, she would have me do things that she needed to have done like doing, resewing her kimonos or her children's kimonos or making new quilts. And so I was not a wife to my husband, I was a wife to the whole family.

And I was married in October, and I remember that I had sort of a nervous breakdown. And in December, I remember sneaking out of the house and going over to a telephone. In the olden days, we didn't have telephones. And I called my aunt, and I told her that I wanted to come home. And she came after me, and I was taken to their family doctor, and he told me that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And so I stayed at my uncle's home for about a week, more than a week, and my husband came after me. But he insisted that he had obligations to the Oowaki family. And because of that fact, my uncle did not come to the wedding because he felt that my husband was wrong. But in retrospect, he thought more of an obligation to the people that he had been with and felt more loyal to them than to me. And the following March, we finally got our own house. And it was close to the Nagara River which is very famous for the cormorant fishing, and that's when I really started to become a wife. And I love to cook, and I used to buy cookbooks. And because my husband was a dean of the school, he had, he had his students who were actually teachers, young teachers, who had gone back to normal school, and so he was very well noted for his hospitality, and I enjoyed that very much. And we started our own life in March, and it was the autumn of that year that we were transferred over to Okayama.

MR: And you were married in what year? We didn't get to that.

YD: 1931.

MR: You were married in 1931?

YD: Uh-huh.

MR: Okay.

YD: So we've had fifty-two years of married life before my husband passed away in 1987.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.