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MR: And when did your mother come?

HY: My mother came in 1912. Let me say something about my mother. She and my father knew each other in this little tiny village, tiny, tiny village called Nanukaichi in Japan, and my mother always thought he was an ornery little kid. And she, he was a couple years older, but she never thought much of him when she knew him in Nanukaichi, in Japan. But then eventually when they both became of age, he started looking for a wife, and since they knew each other, he had my uncle, Uncle Renichi Fujimoto, kind of act as what they call a nakoudo or a baishakunin, an in-between to arrange a marriage, and that's how they got married. But she came in 1912.

MR: And same question. Could you describe your mother?

HY: Okay. My mother was a kind of, for that day and age, probably better than average educated woman because she went to two years of college and what we'd call a normal school or teacher's school now, and she specialized in home economics, flower arranging and cooking and so on. So she was not as driven as my father, well, I don't know if my father was driven. He was ambitious. My father was not one to sit back and let things take, happen to him. He's the one that's going to direct things. My mother wasn't like that. She was quite the opposite. She would let things come to her, and she'd handle it the best she can, so there was a difference in personality. But anyway, she was very gentle and very easy to get along with, but she was better educated than my father. She never let him know that, but she was, and she was interested in the arts and culture and the literature and things like that. But at the same time, she's very domestic because her specialty was home economics. And after all, she raised nine kids, so you're going to like kids too. So yeah, my mother was a very nice person.

MR: Did your mother learn English?

HY: Well, you know, Margaret, in those days, the Japanese women had very poor, very limited opportunities to learn English, and this is especially true in the rural areas, and you have to make a mental demarcation between the rural and the urban areas because in town, like Portland, women worked in restaurants. They worked in laundry. They worked in factories and so on, so they were exposed to a smattering of English. In the farms that was not true because the women generally were stuck out in the farm, and they had no one to communicate in English to except the children. So most Issei women in my generation that I knew in Hood River did not speak English well, and my mother was no exception. Her English was probably a little bit worse than survival English. In other words, if she was all alone in the big city, I don't think she could have gotten about and made her needs known. In Hood River, she could do that because there were lots of Issei and lots of help there, but her English was poor.

MR: As she was in the home taking care of nine children, did she even have time to appreciate the things she enjoyed, the flower arranging, the arts?

HY: Yeah. Well, in the beginning of course not because the kids are very demanding. You got to eat and be put to bed. The diapers got to be changed and all that. But as we grew up and became a little bit more independent, I'd say, oh, around teenage, my oldest sister -- well, she wasn't really my oldest sister, my next to the oldest sister because my oldest sister died in infancy. But my next to older sister Michi took over, relieved my mother of some of her chores like cooking and grocery shopping. So my mother was able to indulge in some of her hobbies and desires, but this came when she was, oh gosh, must have been shortly before World War II beginning in the '36, '37, '38, '39, and so on. So yes, so she would voluntary teach things like tea ceremony and flower arranging. You know, that was her specialty because that's what she was taught. That's what she trained to be a teacher for. So just about the time the war begins, she was getting into a lot of these little activities. Another thing that she enjoyed was writing poetry called senryu. It's a type of Japanese poetry. So she was getting into that, so, but the war again changed things.

MR: This poetry, what was it, specific about it?

HY: Well, there are several types of Japanese poetry. The one everybody knows is haiku, five-seven-seven-five whatever. And then senryu is something like that, but it deals more with nature and humor. And then there's tanka which is a different type. Maybe it was tanka that my mother was in. I'm not sure, but it's one of those poetry that she wrote. It was very popular in those days, still is.

MR: You said that your sister helped around the house.

HY: Oh, yeah.

MR: What did the boys do? Did they work in the family business at all?

HY: Well, yes. Our situation in Hood River, we were a big family in Hood River, about the only Japanese family in Hood River that lived there any extended period of time, and we did have a store which was within walking distance of our home. So particularly, during the busy season which was the Christmas holiday and especially New Year's because that's, to the Japanese, New Year's is a big thing. So we'd go down there and help stock the shelves and sweep up the floor, things like that. When the boys, my brothers, older boys were older, they would help my mother by driving her around the countryside taking orders for groceries and so on. Yasui Brothers did that because, out of necessity because there was a grocery store in Portland called Furuya, and they sent people from Portland, drove all the way up to Hood River sixty-plus miles to take orders, and Furuya would also deliver Japanese goods. So my older brother who were capable of driving drove my mother around, and they'd go out, oh, three, four times a week, I suppose, in the mornings and at night to get these orders. The biggest thing for me and my next older brother, who is Shu, was helping on the inventory, and that was kind of a dull job, but at the same time very interesting because we encountered... in those days, inventory was taken by hand. There's no computer, nothing like that. So we'd have a big ledger, and we'd write everything by hand, and he'd tell me what it was in English, and I'd write it down, and then we'd leave my uncle to figure out what everything was worth later on, so that's the way we did the inventory. But that took a month or more because we inventoried everything, chopsticks, paper napkins, and everything. It was a tedious job. But at the same time as I say, it's kind of fun because we'd encountered some Japanese things that we don't know how to describe. For example, you know what mizuhiki is?

MR: No.

HY: Well, mizuhiki is a formalized paper of colored Japanese strings. You know, you look at it, and some of them are very ornate, very, very nice looking. It's usually applied to something like a special wedding gift or even funerary gifts or something, usually it's money. But the colored paper strings, making an inventory -- remember we're fourteen, fifteen year old boys. My brother looking at it, "Colored Jap strings," so I'd write it down. [Laughs] Then later on, my aunt or, we'd have to translate this to my mother or to my aunt what we said here because it's in English, and they knew it in Japanese. They do the inventory in Japanese. So it says colored Jap strings. What's colored Jap strings? Well, we finally figured out mizuhiki is what it's called. Oh, they were funny days.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.