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DF: So we talked about your dad.

AT: Oh, my father. My father was a very interesting man. He was very innovative. He could do anything. There was nothing the man couldn't do. He always felt as if he wasn't, he didn't achieve what he was meant to. He was very bright, but he could not go on to college, so he sent his younger brother to college. He helped him to get through the University of Tokyo. He came back to Hawaii when he was eighteen after high school and just to be with family. He was so different when he came back. Of course, he was an adult, and the family couldn't accept him as an adult, so he went off on his own. He worked in a grocery store and met my mother, sent her to Japan to be educated. It was, in those days, you sent the bride to be to Japan to be educated in the ways of, to learn all the different cultural things in Japan. I can't think of the word. So she went to Japan and learned to do, she did the piano. She did doll making. She learned to sew. She learned to cook. She learned all the things that she and I, what is the term for that? Anyway. And she came back then an equal to my father so he could marry her.

They settled in Punene or in Lahaina. They actually settled in Lahaina where my brother was born, and then I was born there also. We went back to Lahaina not too long ago, and it's now a prison where we used to have, well, no. We were right next door to a prison. He had a little school there. Then they moved to Punene because that's where his family had lived, and my grandfather was gone then. My grandfather was a luna. He was one of the, he came from Japan with his wife to make a new life in Hawaii because there was nothing in Japan for them. He was a leader in the community. And after they realized that they were doing all the hard work and the plantation was earning all of the money giving them very little, he decided to grow their own sugarcane as a group. So he gathered all of his friends, and they invested in land and planted, and they spent all their own money. Well, in doing that, they had a crop failure that year. Everyone lost all their money, and one of the crazed men never forgave my grandfather for having lost all that money, and he was, he was not himself, of course. And they say that he fixed it so my grandfather would have an accident. And he did and he died which left my grandmother to raise the children alone. My grandmother was just a tiny little lady, but her daughters worked as housekeepers. They worked at the stores. My aunt was a wonderful seamstress, so she worked in a dress shop. My uncle was a, worked while he was going to school, and my father of course was older then, but he was already married and had a family of his own, and they were struggling to make ends meet. He was, my mother could cut hair. She was a beautician, but she could cut hair so she did that, and they ran a Japanese language school. And my father also ran a little grocery store. He was very ambitious. He wanted to do everything.

When he was sent to camp, he was taken right away the night of Pearl Harbor and was there being guarded by his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law was one of the guards at the camp, at the jail in Maui. After six months, they were sent to Sand Island, but Dad was very clever. He could do, he met the right people, so he was given advantages that others were not. He worked as an interpreter in Japan as I had said. And after they no longer needed the interpreters in Japan, of course, they were released and that was in 1959. He came back to Hawaii, and he still had a few years left that he needed to work, so he went out to try to find a job. Of course, he was older then. No one wanted an older man working for them, so he decided he would, he needed a job to do something. He needed to do something, so he applied to be a dishwasher. Well, to be a dishwasher in Hawaii, you had to pass a test. The test was if you had, if you were going to wash your dishes, did the dishwasher, did he start with hot water and end with cold to rinse or did he start with cold water to wash and hot water to rinse?. Of course, he just took a guess because he had no idea that it was so complicated that there was a certain standard, and he guessed wrong, so he was not hired. He then found a job on the army base again. But this time because they didn't need interpreters, he worked as a janitor on the base, and he did that until he could retire which was, oh golly, about five years which he hated. He hated that. He was a very fastidious man. He just hated the fact that he had drop to such a level. He played go a lot for his enjoyment. He and my mother both played go which is a Japanese chess game. He was a, he wrote poems, Japanese poems. He belonged to some, a group in Hawaii that did that. He would come here to visit with us. And when he came, when they'd come, they would, we would take them mushroom hunting for matsutake which was a really joyful event for us all.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.