<Begin Segment 6>

LT: Thinking back, at your home, with your parents who were Japanese from Japan, what was mealtime like? What did you eat?

DS: What did I or how did I?

LT: What did you eat and how did you eat?

DS: We ate always as a family. We always, all of us ate together every evening, we had dinner, we all ate together. And lunch, of course, when we were in school, we either took lunch or sometimes I ran home for lunch. But it was all, mostly Japanese food, and we all ate together. That's one thing we did was we all... you know, families now, the kids are in football or whatever, and they don't eat together. One of my daughter's friends was visiting us once from college, and he said, "Wow, you eat every meal together?" At home, he never ate with his family. I mean, it was because he'd come in and his mother would make him something and that was it. Well, we always ate together as a family.

LT: What do you remember eating? What might be a typical meal?

DS: Oh, it's usually rice, miso soup, and some okazu, you know, sukiyaki or something. And always coming home from Japanese school, and I would always wonder, "I wonder what Mom is making today for dinner." [Laughs] But it was always, mostly Japanese food. We grew up on Japanese food, or Chinese.

LT: And then during the meal, what did you talk about? Did everybody participate equally, did your father and mother lead the discussion?

DS: No, I think us kids, 'cause there's five of us, I think we dominated the conversation at school, and my parents would tell us what they thought of what we said. But, no, our dinnertime was not a battlefield. I mean, it was pleasant, as I remember, but I don't know. And then, of course, we had to clean up after that. I felt it was just a typical...

LT: And you were the middle child. You had, can you talk about your sisters and brothers?

DS: My older sister was very smart in books, and we all looked up there. And my brother was never the, see, my sister was very smart, and so she'd be in classes in high school where they knew her as being smart. Then came my brother, and he didn't, like all, maybe, boys, he didn't apply himself. So they expected him to be as smart as my sister in the classes, but they're the same classes, but he wasn't. And then I came along, and I wasn't dumb, but I wasn't smart, all that smart. My two other sisters below me, they graduated, like I said, they graduated in Puyallup. They graduated high school in Puyallup. So, yeah, my sister was very smart. She went to Seattle University, got her master's at Columbia, and the last job she had was at a counselor at Ingraham High at Seattle.

LT: As the middle child, were there some specific responsibilities that you had in your family?

DS: No, everybody had the same... no, there wasn't... my being a middle child was nothing different from sister who was below me, or my youngest sister, we were always treated all the same.

LT: Now your family did go through a transition that involved your father and your moving from the hotel. Can you talk about that a little bit?

DS: Yeah. Like I say, it was before I went to high school, we moved, we sold the hotel and moved into a place on, Poplar Place, it was just a little house, Japanese neighbors. And we just accepted it. Well, it was good for my mother not to be associated with the hotel as she was getting older, she was doing most of the work, and for her to get out of there. So it was mainly for her, I think, that my father and mother sold the place. And we lived at this house on Dearborn, and then later on, about a year after we bought this place on 26th Avenue where we were when the war broke out. You know, life just went on. I mean, I graduated from high school in '41 and the war started in '41, 'cause I was out of high school in June. And I worked at a little factory, I can't even remember what I did. And then when the war broke out, then that was it.

LT: And your mother was a single mother with five children, and too, with the passing of your father.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.