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LG: So what's the story of how your grandparents came to the United States?

TM: My grandparents, I have two sets, and so my grandparents, maternal grandparents, my grandfather came, I think he must have come before 1900, I don't know the exact year. And he was married in Japan, and he had a wife and daughter. And he, according to my aunt, who was born in Japan, she said he wasn't able to send for his wife until seventeen years later. So my father was born seventeen years later in Pendleton, Oregon. So they came from an area near Kyoto near Lake Biwa. My maternal grandparents came probably in early 1900, they came from Fukushima. My grandfather came because he was the second son, and when you're not the first son, you don't inherit everything. And also Japan was going through a famine at that time, and so Japan had just opened, so he left to seek his fortune in America, and he wasn't married. What I know, according to my grandparents, he had been a principal in a school. After I don't know how many years, I would say within five years, he sent back to Japan for his family to find him a wife. So my grandmother was a "picture bride," and I don't know if you know about what "pictures brides" are, but the family that's, the families, and he was sent an array of pictures and he chose my grandmother. She also came from that area and was a teacher, and she sailed across the ocean, and they met in Seattle and got married. And as far as I can tell, they moved then to an area called Wapato, Washington, which is south central, and I learned after doing some research that Wapato, Washington, was the second largest city of Japanese Americans, Seattle being the first. And I'm assuming that what happens is that once a few families come, then they recommend other people, why don't you come here, there's opportunity here? So I think that's probably what happened. So my father was, he had two siblings, his older sister was born in Japan, and was seventeen years older, and then he had a younger sister who was about two years younger. My mother's family had, there were five children, my mother being the second oldest as well, and she lived until she was ninety-eight years old so she died in 2014.

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