<Begin Segment 2>

MR: And when did your mother come to this country?

MY: My mother came about 1919. She was a young girl at that time, and she came as a war bride of another person.

[Interruption]

MR: You were saying that your mother came to this country as a war bride?

MY: Yes. She was supposed to be the bride of this man who grew up in her area, same hometown. But when she reached America, she decided that no, she wasn't going to live with this guy. So the marriage was a "picture bride" marriage, so it was already on the records, but she refused to go as his bride. And her sister was already married and living in the Los Angeles area, so she decided that she would go and live with her sister for a while, and she did that for a few years until she met my father. Now, we never got the story from her, but there are records of her arriving in America on such and such a date. And then we had an exchange student living with us for a while, and he read our family koseki tohon which is the genealogy records, and he said, "Well, according to this, your mother was married when she came to America, and then her name is crossed off of the koseki tohon, the genealogy, so it must mean that she got a divorce." And then she is entered again a second time as the wife of somebody else who happened to be my father. So in putting all these things, stories together, we decided this was what happened that she didn't like the man that she was supposed to be the bride of, and she decided to just wait at her sister's place until her future was changed.

MR: Can you talk about what a "picture bride" was?

MY: Well in Japan, well, there was the law that said that no new people could come over to America. And so in order to get around that law, the young fellows who came to America to work in the beginning thought that after working a while and they decided that they couldn't go back to Japan to live, that they would start a family here, but the law forbid that. So what they did was they had the picture bride arrangement where they would write to people back in Japan to select a bride for them, and they would agree to be married. And as long as they were married, they could enter the country, the United States. Now in Japan at the time, as long as the person's name was entered into the koseki tohon, or the genealogy chart, that that would mean that they were married, and this is what they did. They would marry the person by proxy, and in most cases, they gave, they exchanged pictures, and an agreement was reached, and they were supposedly married, and they came to America. Very often, once they reached America, because the United States government didn't really think this was a legal marriage, they had to be married again, but at least they were in the country then.

MR: Did your mother share much about life in Okinawa?

MY: My mother wasn't from Okinawa. She was from Shikoku. So in fact in those days, the people on the mainland kind of looked down on the Okinawans. They were considered second class citizens, and I imagine some of that feeling extends to people to even today. But my mother had friends from the Okinawan community, and they were very close. And the Okinawan people, I believe, are very, very friendly, and she made friends with not only a lot of people, but my father.

MR: You said that her sister was here and that she stayed with her sister. What do you think brought them here? Why did they want to come to America?

MY: Well, there were more opportunities. That raises an interesting subject. My father was the chonan of his family, the firstborn son, which means that he has a special position in the family hierarchy that he would eventually inherit the land that the family lived on. And actually his family lived quite close to the castle, the Shuri Castle, and they were considered nobility, but he left all that to come to America. So then when his father died, the title of chonan was passed on to one of his younger brothers, and people always wondered, well, why did he leave Japan and all of this, you know, the future wealth that it was connected with it to come to America and to struggle all his life, which he did. You better repeat the question. I don't think I'm answering it properly.

MR: You're answering it for your father. I was asking why did your mother and her sister, what motivated them?

MY: I believe my mother came because her sister was here. Her sister was here, and her sister married this fellow who also grew up in the same hometown, and he had a hog farm, and apparently, he made out very well with that. He called his I don't know if they were married before she came or if she also went to, went abroad as a picture bride, but she joined him much earlier than my mother's coming to America. And so my mother thought, well, this would be a good place to live until things got straightened out.

MR: Did your mother work while she was waiting for her life to change?

MY: I really don't know. There was a period of time when we don't know what my father was doing or my mother was doing or a lot of other people. There aren't records explaining that. And one thing about growing up as a Nisei, the Issei spoke mainly Japanese, and especially the women didn't explain things in English or couldn't speak English too well. And as a child, we grew up with a lot of Japanese, but we couldn't carry on a very serious conversation. I couldn't in Japanese and my mother couldn't in English, so it was all kind of mixed up, and we did the best we could, but there were some things that we just didn't talk about. I wish I had now.

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