<Begin Segment 2>

LT: Okay. I'm going to stop you right there and ask you a little bit more information about your mother before we go to talking about the Oregon Lumber Company. Your mother's name was?

SI: Kotono Moriyasu.

LT: Okay.

SI: And I don't know too much about them because when I was in Japan, I lived in the village that my father was born, and I stayed there three years, went to school there three years. Of course, when I went to Japan at seven, I didn't know... well, what Japanese I knew was spoken at home. And then I went to three years of Japanese school. But when I came back in 1930, I didn't know one word of English.

LT: Okay.

SI: So here I started school, grade school, at Dee, and my brother was already, I think he was already about the third grade when I came back. So they tried to shove me through eight grades in six years. [Laughs] So I had a hard time using English.

LT: Sure. Sounds like your family has been through --

SI: Yeah. But only advantage I had was when I was in Japan I learned Japanese multiplication table, and that was like singsong deal, you know, and I never did forget that. I still use that multiplication table in Japanese and transfer the answer in English.

LT: Can you sing that now?

SI: Oh, yeah, I can remember a bit of it. But nowadays with our computer and other devices we got, we don't have to. Of course, just to check what you're doing, we still use math.

LT: Sure. Can you sing that multiplication table song that you learned in Japan?

SI: Well, it had a, "Ni, ni, san ni, ni shi hachi, ni, juugo nijuu, juurokujuuni," you know, like that. Just Japanese alphabet.

LT: Sure, sure, okay. Well, let's go back to your parents arriving in Seattle on the same boat, and they were married. Do you know about the marriage ceremony?

SI: No, I don't.

LT: Okay. But you know that their marriage was arranged by relatives, then.

SI: Yeah, the village people, different village.

LT: Okay. And they were from the, they were from different villages, but they were both from Okayama-ken?

SI: Well, same prefecture, but different village. That was quite far apart, I think, I can remember. It wasn't right next to each other.

LT: Were their backgrounds in Japan similar?

SI: What do you mean by that?

LT: Were they... what kinds of occupations did their parents have?

SI: Oh, they all, they were farm people, yeah, they raised rice. Of course, Grandpa had a rice field, and he had a little peach orchard, too, up in the hills. I can remember that.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.