<Begin Segment 8>

MR: After Pearl Harbor, did you hear from your family?

YD: No, I didn't. No. I have a diary that I kept, and I will show one of these days that when, after Keiko was born and my son Robert was born, we lived out in the country. And for three nights, I had dreams of my parents... I'm going to start getting weak again. And it was very odd that I woke up every night crying, and my husband would wake me up, and he'd say, "Did you have a bad dream?" And I said, "Yes, I dreamt about my parents." And the one dream that I vividly remember was that we were in the old house across from Franz Bakery, and I went to my parents' room, and I crawled into bed between my parents and started crying. And my mother said, "Why are you crying?" And I said, "Because I won't see you anymore." And then one night, I remember my father coming into the Japanese house, and he was dressed in a black coat and a black hat, and he opened the door. And I said, "Papa, what are you doing here?" And three nights, these dreams were so vivid that I wrote in the diary. And after the war ended when the first ship from America went to Japan, Yoji's uncle was one of the first on the ship to get to Japan, and he was the one who told us that my mother had died. And when I had these three dreams, I wrote a letter to my aunt and told her it was very odd that I would have three dreams. And she said, "I think you should be prepared that probably one of your parents had died." And so when I was told that my mother had died, I knew that there was, I felt that there was ESP. And I'm very conscious of the ESP because after I came back here on one Thanksgiving, my husband and I were going over to my sister's house, and I felt very strange. I had a very cold feeling, and I was sitting down here, and I look around, and I said, "Auntie?" and of course, you know, nothing was there. But I'm glad I have a sense of humor because I remember pinching myself, and I said, "This isn't a dream." And then later, I found it was my aunt who had died. And so I strongly believe in ESP, that there is something that, there is a soul living.

[Interruption]

YD: Going back to my marriage, the next day that we were married, would you believe that we went on our so-called honeymoon? I took hold of my husband's father's hand, and we went to Tokyo. And we also went to Nagoya, to Zenkoji Maeri because that is a place where everyone in Japan is supposed to have gone to pray at least once a year. And during the three years that we were on our so-called honeymoon, I was with my father-in-law, and my husband being tall, would walk five steps in front of us. We followed him wherever we went. People would laugh, and they'd say, "You went with your father-in-law on a honeymoon?" and I said, "That's why I called it a so-called honeymoon."

MR: Let's go back to the war. When the war was really raging full force, how did your life change, and did people know that you were from America, and does that cause you any problem?

YD: I think because I was so, became such a Japanese woman, the people didn't know because my language was perfect, and I didn't act like an American. I wore Japanese clothes. My children were all brought up very Japanese, very strict, and we lived out in the country. And all we heard was stories about Okayama City being bombed. And when we did go out to the city, we found that there was just absolutely nothing. It was just absolutely destroyed. And during those years, because we lived out in the country, I would go out and go up to the mountains and gather wood, which was a no-no, and the people in the village and the other teachers rush and say, "You shouldn't do that because you're our principal's wife." And I think those are the kind of things that bring out the fact that I was American because I felt that I needed to do things and to learn things myself. And I learned how to make vinegar just by picking up overripe persimmons, putting them in a jar, leaving them out in the sunlight, so that it would ferment by itself. And I learned how to make shiitake out of the pieces of wood that I stirred up on the north side of the house. And of course since I hadn't learned how to cook when I was in America, I did know something about jam, so I would get these overripe persimmons and cook them. And since I didn't know anything about pectin or anything, I cooked and cooked and cooked until they almost turned out to be like rubber, and so there was many disastrous things. But I was really, I hate to say it, but I was really what you'd call a perfect housewife. I was very Japanese, and my husband during that time was very active, and he became the head of the youth organization of the whole of Okayama prefecture in that he was at that time the principal of an all boys' high school, and that was a very prestigious, old, there used to be a castle there in that, it was a very feudalistic town where we lived, and we had rations of sugar. And because I had three children, we had more sugar than normally. And people, our neighbors would ask us if we could have, if they could have the sugar, or we saved rice by going to Kyushu to my husband's farm every summer so that we could save our rice. And I learned how to make lard by going to the butchers and buying bones and cooking and then letting it cool down so that the fat would be up on the surface and use that for different things. So I became very innovative in this, and now I don't cook at all. [Laughs]

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.