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MR: As you were growing up, did your parents talk much about their time in Japan?

YK: Well, not an awful lot, but my dad was the youngest of a family of about four or five boys and one sister, and he'd talk about that. He'd talk about swimming in a lake or something underwater, but he didn't go to school. He said he'd read books by candlelight. And then he was too short to draft, I guess, with the Russians, it was a war. And he'd go up there, and he was an inch too short. And it really bothered him; he'd go back every year and they wouldn't take him. And so finally he decided to come to America, and he's very proud of the fact that he came on a businessman's passport. He kept telling us this, it was very important to him. So he came over in 1903 and he worked out in the woods, lumber, I guess they were wood, and then I don't know if he worked on the railroad, but he worked out toward Boring someplace. And this Caucasian lady and her husband took him in, and it was a farm-like, and they taught him, he'd hold the string -- he told us all this -- and they'd hold the other one, and they say, "When I say 'to you,' that means toward you. 'From you,' you go the other way." And he learned that, and he kept telling us that those were the first words he learned. And then at night he'd go in the house and he'd do her dishes, and then she'd teach him English. And so that went on until he moved on. And they came and saw us one day when we were in our new house, and they were real nice people, you know. They were getting elderly, but they had to look him up. And so he learned his English, and then he had a dictionary, Japanese-English dictionary. And he said he went to the store and he saw an apple, and he pointed to it and then he'd look it up in the dictionary and pronounce it. And he bought an apple and learned to speak English that way. And so he learned to write, and he writes some nice letters when he was in camp. I'd get nice letters from him.

MR: And your mother, why did she come to America?

YK: He worked 1903, and then 1911 he went back to get married. And so he married, he was offered, asked to marry my mother's older sister, but he would have to take her name, they call it a yoshi, you accept the woman's name to keep the family name going because they had no boys. And he said no, he didn't want to give his own name up, but he said, "I'll marry the younger sister," and that was my mother. And so they said okay. So she's ten years younger than he. And she was teaching school, I don't know what grade or what, but she was teaching school so they got married, and she was only nineteen or twenty, and she was real naive and quiet. And they took the train from Chiba -- they lived in Chiba -- to Tokyo, and then they came over here. I'm sure she was real shy, 'cause she's not a real chatty person. And they came over here, and then they worked out in the hop fields. He did all kinds of work, but they had no children for seven years. And they went out to the hop fields to work, and she got pregnant. So he tells all young girls after that, "You have to go out to the hop fields if you want any kids," and that's really funny, and then he laughs. And then he had first the child, Ralph, and he died when he was only, like, three months, he got a cold. And it broke my father's heart to lose a child, 'cause they had just conceived. And then they said, "You shouldn't have any more children because your wife has a bad heart," so she proceeded to have six more. [Laughs] And they named my brother, oldest brother... he was in a greenhouse business by then, and so they called the greenhouse, Portland Seed man said, "General Grant, that's a nice name, why don't you call him that?" So he's named Grant. Everybody under the earth knows who Grant is, and his middle name was a Japanese name. And then my next sister had a Japanese name first, Ise, and then her middle name was Alice from the doctor's wife. They're the only two that have two names. The rest of us just have one name, and it's all Japanese. Oh, I forgot where I was... I went sideways. [Laughs]

MR: I was asking about why your mother came to America.

YK: Oh, and she came in, they got married in 1911, and she stayed home mostly, once she started having kids. And she didn't work in the greenhouse until the Depression, then she helped out in the greenhouse. But up until then, she's being the housewife, and I think she really liked that. So they had a dog, we had a dog called Pochi, and my dad would say he'd watch the buggy, that whoever was in there, no one could come near the baby, or any of us, because he just sort of watched us. But in those days, there weren't that many problems like there are today.

MR: Did she have anything to say about how different life was here for her?

YK: She was very quiet. I didn't realize this, but she wrote a lot to her sister in Japan. And they all knew, they called her the "Auntie in America," they called her "American Obachan." And one of them, we met her about three years ago, they came and they looked us up, we made contact. And it was really nice, and the things they said was really sort of surprising that they knew so much about our family. She must have written off and on to let 'em know what she was doing, and they asked about her children. Her side, for five generations, there were no males to carry the name on, so it kept getting yoshis, men to marry into the family. And I, to this day, feel like those women are very strong, and they sort of looked down on those men that they married. They don't honor them, I don't think, like normal, because they gave their name up. And I get that feeling inside of me, that the women, because we met three of them and they're all very independent women. You ask about their husbands, and they sort of titter. "Well, why didn't they come?" and they just sort of laugh. So I thought it must be because they gave their name up, that they're not held in high respect. I thought, "Well, that's sort of sad." Because they gave them a male, eventually, one of 'em did.

And so my mom, when she had the first child, a boy, but he died. And I notice, her family, they have a lot of, we have the lineage thing, and they all died within a couple of months, the male, not the girls. And that's why they didn't have any until the last generation, they had a male. But she was so happy, and then when he died, then she had Grant. And he was so cute in pictures and everything, and when he went, started school, he was a little bit, he was retarded to a degree, he was slow. And I don't think they even realized that until he was up into the, maybe the fourth or fifth grade and realized he couldn't keep up with the class. And then the sister right below him was very bright, and so he was excelling and he wasn't. And so I think, for that, she really sort of babied him, and it was a hardship in a way because he had a mind of his own. As he got older he would take off and wouldn't come home, and she always had dinner for him. He'd never show up sometimes, and when he did, she always had it there for him. She just was so patient with him. I took care of him after we got older. He was still in town, so that became my job.

But she was real active at the women's society, and she loved that. And then she did flower arranging. And when we were all left, the two of them, my father and her, they'd go out in the country and pick things that they thought that she could use for flowering, and they were very content. And it was really nice to see that. He was pretty gentle with her, and she in turn... it was nice. And then they got to the point when they got sick, they couldn't do it. But it was nice because they were separated during the war. And so when they got back, I guess, it was really meaningful to be together. They were gone, separated about four or five years. That's later on, though.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.