Oral History Program Yaeko Bryner Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 11 November 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Yaeko Bryner Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 11 November 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Immigrants at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories, photographs and artifacts related to the immigrant populations that helped shape the cultural and economic climate of Ogden. This project will expand the contributions made by Ogden’s immigrant populations: the Dutch, Italian and Greek immigrants who came to work on the railroad and the Japanese who arrived after World War II from the West Coast and from internment camps. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Bryner, Yaeko, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney, 11 November 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Yaeko Bryner November 11, 2014 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Yaeko Bryner, conducted by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney on November 11, 2014. Yaeko shares her recollections and experiences growing up in a Japanese family in Ogden. She also discusses her views on balancing Japanese and American cultures. BW: We’re in the Stewart Library, in the Special Collections Department with Yaeko, is it Brinner or Bryner? YB: It’s Yaeko Bryner. BW: Thank you, Yaeko Bryner. Today is November 11, 2014, Veteran’s Day. I’m Brian Whitney interviewing with Lorrie Rands. Thanks for coming back and visiting with us, Yaeko. So we’ll start off with some simple questions and then just get into your history from there. So when and where were you born? YB: I was born in Ogden, Utah, in the old Dee Hospital on September 29, 1946. BW: Great and your parents, when and where were they born? YB: I assume that they were born in the town where they lived; they lived in Miho, a small town in Shimizo City, and Shizuoka Province Japan. Dad was born in 1902 and I think my mom was born in 1905. LR: And what were their names? YB: His name was Ichitaro Kawaguchi; after coming here he went by Ike or Ikey. My mother’s name was Jun Matsudaira Kawaguchi. BW: Great, what recollections did they tell you about their life in Japan? YB: You know I’m not sure. There were just things that would—we never sat down and talked about Japan, but it always seeped out in all the things they made us 2 do. Behavioral restrictions maybe, or behavioral expectations. That’s probably how we knew best. We lived on a farm. My dad made us work very hard and I probably didn’t understand his perspective until going to Japan. My husband and I went there to live for nine months when I was twenty-six years old. When Dad would tell me things it didn’t quite make sense. He told us about raising silkworms for instance. Our neighbor had a mulberry tree and that’s probably how it came up because the silkworms eat the mulberry leaves. Anyway he used to say that they would take the silkworms after they’d built the little cocoons and they would boil them in water. Then they would take the bristles of a broom and they would hit these pods, and the silk threads would float to the top and all the little larva would drop to the bottom. Then they’d skim off the silk so that it could be sent for processing. He would strap what was left on his back and take it to the field and use it as both fertilizer and water for the field. We had this little doll that was carrying water buckets, so it kind of made sense, how you’d carry water buckets. What I didn’t realize is in Japan the village is the village. The farm could be a half a mile away, which it was, it was detached totally from where they lived. So he could’ve been carrying that bucket of water, that small bucket of water, for a mile. So you get a different perspective once you see what was really happening. When we were kids, we were always told, “You’re Japanese.” We’d say, “Can we do this?” Dad would say, “No, you’re Japanese.” He was very authoritarian so, “You’re Japanese,” was the only explanation we got, and that was that. 3 LR: What kind of things specifically? YB: Well you know it was kind of just assumed, this was never told to us directly but dating somebody that wasn’t Japanese or going out with all your friends doing the things that typical high school kids do. You could do a few things, but he didn’t want us totally immersed in being American. He didn’t object to us being American but he always wanted us to remember that we were Japanese. My mother was kind of the buffer, she would say, “That’s the way it is and just do what your dad says.” LR: That makes sense. BW: When did your parents come to the States? YB: My father came when he was thirteen years old in 1915. His father was here, I don’t know when his father came, but Dad and his mother came to join the father. The whole point of coming here was just to make money and go back to Japan and possibly buy some land which was not a very easy thing to do because there’s just not much land available in Japan. So that was the plan, and they came here and then the obasan, the grandmother, had another child while she was here. They left one brother in Japan, at the house in Japan. He lived with the grandparents there and then my grandma came here with my dad who was the oldest of the brothers. He, well they came here in 1915 and then I had another uncle who was born here and then sent back to Japan to learn to be Japanese. He was a bit younger, quite a bit younger and then my grandma probably went back at the same time the brother did. 4 My mother came when my dad was twenty-one. He went back to Japan and they had a matchmaker find him a bride. So he went back to Japan, never knowing this person and my mother never knowing him. The families probably knew some things about one another, but the marriage was arranged and he went to Japan and picked her up. On the ship back they didn’t share accommodations. There were women’s accommodations and men’s accommodations so I remember her telling me stories about the people she had to share a room with on the boat. In those days it took several weeks, almost a month to cross. As I remember it took them three weeks to cross. BW: What sort of stories do you remember her telling you? YB: Maybe I ought not tell because it’s a little biased. LR: What do you mean when you say a little biased? YB: The Japanese are set in proprieties, what they think is proper. For instance, if you look at a Japanese kimono when you buy the fabric it all comes in the same width, and the same length and you sew it together. It’s four pieces; it’s two in the back and two in the front and then the pieces for the sleeves. So all kimonos are equal in size and width and then it’s divided so that all of them are the same length regardless of how tall you are. The obi secures and covers the fold that adjusts the length. When you fold the kimono to put it away, you fold it along the seams so it folds very nicely. Then there are two folds going horizontally. When we were in Japan, I remember my aunt that we were living with saying to me, “Oh poor so-and-so, his wife doesn’t even know how to fold his kimono right,” 5 because the folds were in the wrong place. Traditions and proprieties mattered a lot. You know just things like that. When we were in Japan we helped with soy beans at the home of a farmer. The soy beans are pulled out of the ground whole and sold that way. But you bundle them in sets of so many and you had to estimate that there was an acceptable number of beans included in each bundle. Then you took a piece of twine and tied it a certain way so that when it was untied it would fall open with a single pull. So, you know it made sense all the times my dad would make us do things just a certain way. He was disappointed if we’d get the task done, but if it wasn’t done a certain way. At Japanese School, they taught you to write characters in a certain order or how the teacher would make us exercise at the beginning of class. Now you know that that would probably do our kids a lot of good because it kind of gets your brain in order. So anyway all these things, I just remember changing. It’s that old saying, “Your parents get a lot smarter the older you get.” I remember when I was in high school having an eye infection and my dad would say, “It’s because you paint your fingernails and it’s that stuff that you put on your hair.” Well that just sounded really stupid to a teenager, right? Well it was; it was the hairspray in my eyes that was bothering me. Now you look at all we know about the effects of environmental pollution. My parents were environmentalists way back when. My brother would try to talk my dad into using quicker methods of farming like herbicides to inhibit weeds. My dad would just shake his head. Now, my brother won out in the end, but my dad never did like it. 6 This is a guy who carried the silkworm larva you know. In the end I would be much more in favor of organic farming. BW: Very interesting. Tell me more about Japanese School. YB: It was just every Saturday during the school year. In the summer we were a little too busy with farm work because most of the Japanese were farmers. My father and some of the other Japanese families arranged the school. They would hire a teacher and he/she would come every Saturday morning. I remember in the early days there were a lot of area people there. Then on the second go-around my dad helped restart the school. I was probably the oldest student. Nobody else in my family needed to go at that point, just me. I was probably in junior high school. Everyone else in my family was out of high school by that time. My nephews attended with me. I think my dad arranged the school so grandkids would be able to go to Japanese School and learn the language. We had this little teacher who was this little old lady, maybe four feet five max and she would make us exercise as part of the academics. She was always nice, but she just had rigid rules. The teacher before her was a younger teacher and she was really a sweet lady, but Mrs. Uchida was pretty stern. The first years, when I was little, I went to Japanese School all I remember is wanting to play with the little piano stool that rolled around and went higher and plunk on the piano when nobody was looking. I don’t remember much about the school except for the little books we had and learning to read and write hiragana. It was a male teacher and I was just a little kid, everybody else was much older. LR: Where was it held? 7 YB: It was always in Syracuse when I went. I’m sure they had them elsewhere as well, but the one I went to was in Syracuse not very far from the current Syracuse High School location. BW: Was it hosted at a… YB: It was a Japanese Buddhist Church in Syracuse. LR: Something you mentioned a little bit earlier about your father, he came here to make money to hopefully go back and buy land in Japan. He didn’t do that, he didn’t go back. YB: They did buy land. LR: Did they buy land? YB: They did. LR: Oh okay. YB: But by rights, by Japanese law at the time the oldest son inherited all the property and the house. My mom and dad went back to Japan in 1954. I was in second grade. I think they went to finally see whether they wanted to move back there or not. Our family was huge, I was the eleventh child. I had a younger brother who died as an infant. I think he died of SIDS; he died in his sleep. They needed to decide where to bury him. Graves are very important to the Japanese, you visit them often to light incense and say a little Buddhist chant or prayer for the deceased. Anyway, they needed to decide where to bury this child. I think they realized that their children were American and weren’t going to go back to Japan to live. Too much had happened along the way but they went back to see 8 what it was like in Japan. By that time my dad had bought some land here too. He always envisioned himself as a Japanese cowboy. In Japan they could buy land but it was just a small parcel. Maybe a half acre and so he bought 320 acres of land in Liberty. He had cattle and horses and he was a little tiny guy. I’ve been taller than him since I was in eighth grade and I’m not that big. Just this little wiry guy, maybe 5’2” maximum. He used to wear a big cowboy hat, a Stetson, cowboy boots and a bolo tie. He liked the idea of owning vast land that you owned as far as you could see. We called the land “the ranch.” He had cattle and horses that grazed the ranch in the summer. LR: You couldn’t do that in Japan? YB: Oh no, so I think that he bought the land here about that same time. I think that they knew they never were going to go back because their children were here. The Japan they knew no longer existed. They were born in the Meiji era so it was a long time ago. They left in the Taisho era before Hirohito took power. When we were in Japan in 1972 and 1973 it was the 48th year of Hirohito. So it had been Hirohito’s time for a long time. World War II had happened and the Japan they knew didn’t exist. Those things that governed how they raised us weren’t in place anymore. A lot of things were different. Modernization brings about lots of things, not just physical conveniences. Anyway so they went back. I remember they were gone for three months. A month going, a month there and a month back. I was in second grade. I had an older brother and a sister who were adults, so they took care of us. When my parents came back I think my father had given his rights to the land away. He 9 gave the house and the land to his nephew who lived in the house with the grandparents and took care of them and the land. BW: Was that considered a pretty big break in tradition? YB: I don’t know. I know that my father thought it was a big deal. I don’t want to say he was a martyr about it, but you can imagine. This was the tradition and he was bucking tradition. It had to have been difficult. BW: I want to go back to 1915 and your grandparents with your father that came over to the states. Did they come to Utah? YB: They did. BW: Okay. What brought them here? YB: Well, it’s very much like any immigrant community. Somebody comes and then folks back home hear that they’re doing pretty well and so many more from the same area come. So I don’t know who came first but I do know that my mother had a sister whose husband was here as well. BW: At this time in history did it require sponsorship? YB: I don’t think so. Now along the way my dad did sponsor some people, but I don’t think my dad needed to be sponsored but I wouldn’t know for sure and there’s nobody who’s alive who could tell. BW: Then your grandparents, I forget did you say that they ended up staying here or did they return back? YB: They returned. BW: When? 10 YB: When my mother came I think, then there was somebody to take care of the house and do the cooking and that kind of thing and so my grandmother went back to Japan. BW: So I’m really interested in this relationship and fascination that your father seemed to have with American Western life while still trying to retain a strong Japanese identity. YB: It is curious, isn’t it? My mother probably stayed more true to her roots. Dad came when he was thirteen so his experience was different from hers and influenced who he became as an adult. He went to school here, he could read and write English. My mother grew up in Japan and I like to think my father married up because her family was a Samurai family. So although that system was no longer in place it still had a little bit of prestige and I think that the only reason Dad could marry her or that they would match her with him is because he owned land. Going back to Japan and meeting her family you have this tendency to think, “Oh, they went through the war,” you think of them as the poor people in Japan. My mom had two sisters. Of the three sisters I think my mother had the hardest life. She worked awfully hard. My husband was an artist and we went to Japan because he wanted to study the arts. He loved the Japanese painting, especially the scrolls. So the word for art in Japanese is e and to roll up is maki. So we visit with this uncle. They live in this lovely house, it’s not big, but it’s just a really nice comfortable house. I think the first nights we were in Shimizu we stayed with them. Anyway they have this little alcove there that all traditional 11 Japanese houses have. It’s called a tokonoma, a little alcove with the typical scroll hanging and a little flower arrangement. Anyway so they have this nice little painted scroll there. We visited their home several times during the months we were in Japan. We noticed a different scroll each visit, so obviously he owned several. I had told him when we first met that Dale was interested in scroll painting. Maybe my Japanese was too limited in explaining emaki but he didn’t say anything. He showed us little cha-no-yu bowls, the tea ceremony bowls. One was chipped and the chip was filled with gold. The last week or two we were there I said to him, “I keep seeing that your scroll keeps changing.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Do you have a bunch of those?” He said, “Yes.” I look at him and say, “But I told you that Dale came to study emaki.” He said, “Oh that’s not an emaki, that’s a kakejiku.” So if it unrolls this way it’s called something different and an emaki is like the tale of genji that rolls up horizontally. A kakejiku, kate means to put on and so he says, “Oh you should’ve told me a kakejiku. I didn’t know.” LR: That’s fascinating, but that’s a great story. BW: What did your grandparents and your father do for work when they got out here? Did they get into farming immediately? YB: They rented until 1958, when Dad bought a farm. They always rented and they farmed. They would also farm themselves out as laborers. The sugar beets— they would go to Logan when they finished the beet thinning season here and beet harvesting. I remember Dad talking about going down to Bingham Canyon to work sometimes and riding the Bamberger. I think it was before my mom 12 because his mother would pack them a lunch and when they ate the lunch on the Bamberger people hated it because they had tsukemono, which is the pickled radishes which have a definite smell, if you’re not used to it. He was really a character. He would tell funny stories like that. There were three brothers and then the fourth one came later, but Jutaro came here when he was young as well. The third brother, Yokichi, stayed in Japan. A younger brother, Masa, was born here but returned to Japan with our grandmother. He ended up coming back and living in California. So we have cousins in California. My husband and I lived with Jutaro when we were in Japan. BW: Were there other Japanese families beet farming as well? YB: Well I don’t know what else they raised but beets definitely. Lots of families were here. I don’t know whether originally but it increased, definitely increased, during war. BW: Which war? YB: WWII because people on the coast were evacuated and sent to camps. If they had somewhere to go then they didn’t need to go to a camp. They could go inland with relatives. So we had relatives come and live here. BW: How many and for how long? YB: I’m not really sure. I was born in 1946 which was just after the war, but I know that the one family we were really close to, most of them are dead now, they were one family that was here. I think they were my dad’s first cousins. They were all flower farmers in California. 13 BW: So let’s talk about what you remember growing up in Roy in a Japanese family, farming area. What are your memories? YB: We had this little rented house. We had no indoor bathroom. We had a bathhouse, a Japanese bathhouse, it was detached, and an outhouse. We would heat the water for the bath and that was done by taking the water with the hose and putting it in a metal tub rather than a wooden tub. It had a kamado or a cook area underneath it so that you could heat the water. There was wooden board that you put down inside of the tub so that you didn’t get burned from the metal tub. Everybody would bathe in this out-building. You all bathed in the same water, but it was very clean because you washed before you got in the tub. The tub was just to warm up and relax. Which is the same thing they do in Japan. BW: Sure, you had neighbors around you? YB: Yes. BW: How did bathing in this fashion, does this seem strange to… YB: It was a lot of fun. We used to bake potatoes in the little fire that heated the bathwater. We had an old winter pear tree. The pears would never ripen. They were really hard but if you threw them in the fire you could peel the black crust off and it really made the pears sweet inside. So we used to cook potatoes and pears. We used to write on concrete with the charcoal pieces from the fire. It was like we were Little House on the Prairie. BW: How did you get along with your neighbors? YB: We had a fun time with the kids, we loved to go over and play. One family had a really neat swing set, not just a little one but it was big. My dad didn’t like us 14 going over. He didn’t want us to bother the neighbors, so we weren’t allowed to go over and play very often. We had one neighbor, her name was Mrs. Norman; she was this old Scandinavian lady, a little lady with white hair. Just this really neat lady, she and her husband didn’t have kids. We really liked to visit with her. She was always very nice to us. My dad would say, “Don’t be bothering the neighbors.” So when my dad wasn’t looking we would stand at the fence and say, “Mrs. Norman, say yoo-hoo!” When she wanted something from us she would say yoo-hoo. So we’d say, “Mrs. Norman, say yoo-hoo!” We had another neighbor that was really nice to us, but she just would call us the Japs. She didn’t think it was derogatory. BW: What about school? What kind of experiences did you have growing up in school and maybe with your siblings? YB: We went to Roy Elementary School. When I was in first grade there were three of us in the school at the same time. There were a few kids who would call me a Jap. One boy in particular used to tease me a lot. My sister, four years older than me, would walk me part-way home during her recess so that I wouldn’t be picked on. She would forfeit her recess to walk me home. I also used to walk down the railroad tracks. They were beet harvesting railroad tracks that were only used during part of the year and if I walked down the railroad tracks I could avoid the harassment, plus it was a shortcut. LR: So you experienced a little bit of discrimination growing up, but not much? YB: Well there was always this feeling that you were the other, you know, you couldn’t hide the fact that you were Japanese. When I was in elementary school 15 there were a lot of patriotic war movies, and I was an American. Japan was the enemy. I remember my mother saying something about the devastation of the atomic bomb—it became evident to me that she felt the Americans were wrong to drop the bomb. I can remember thinking, “Don’t tell anybody,” because to Americans the bomb was a good thing. Now I can understand that it was not so simple. BW: This is very interesting to me. So you’re seeing a certain depiction and thought about your own heritage and how… YB: It was more my parents’ heritage; we were just somewhere in between. We were American and absolutely felt American. When I was in third, fourth grade, there was a movie called The Fighting Sullivans. Anyway, we were watching this movie on TV and we were all crying. It’s about a family with five sons and they all die in the war. So there are stars for each son that dies in the window. One of my brother’s friends was there. He was a funny guy; he just had a really cute sense of humor. He’s standing there watching us cry and he’s looking at the TV and he says, “Those dirty Japs,” and we looked at him a little shocked. It was then that I realized if you could say it then it didn’t hurt so bad. BW: So what I wanted to discuss next and we’ve hit on this a little bit is the idea of balancing these two cultures. Trying to retain a link to your heritage while becoming American, particularly for your father who was mostly raised here and then you, you’re an American. What practices, both culturally and religiously which are very intertwined, were retained to try and keep that connection with Japanese heritage? 16 YB: Well we ate rice twice a day and the first serving of rice and the first brewing of the tea, the first pouring always went to the shrine for the departed ancestors. My sister has the shrine and she does continue the practice. We still buy flowers and treats for the shrine. My mother used to buy Hostess Snowballs, there was a pink one and a white one. The shrine always had fruit, it always had flowers and any day there was a commemorative day that somebody died or somebody’s birthday, you’d smell the incense when you’d wake up in the morning. At meal times my father insisted that we all sit down at the table together. LR: You mentioned before that you would occasionally go to the Buddhist Church but it wasn’t an integral part of your life in a religious sense, it was more culture. YB: Well when I was really little I remember being part of the—or at the least the Ogden Buddhist Reverend coming. There are different sects of Buddhism and my parents were technically Nichiren. I think that in Japan I like to say, this is just my own thoughts, but that they need religion to marry and bury. They need someone when there is a ritual needed; they need someone to preside over that ritual. So that’s probably why my parents were part of the Buddhist Church in Ogden, but that wasn’t really their sect of church. So I think it was probably early 1950s, or maybe I don’t know, I was probably in school by then. A Nichiren Buddhist Reverend came and they established a church in Salt Lake City. There were very few members. Some people were Nichiren but they didn’t switch because it was inconvenient. My parent’s church in Salt Lake didn’t have regular services because there weren’t that many members. The members were from this area and also Idaho. It was a bigger area so they would only have services 17 on very commemorative kind of days like the Obon or Hanamatsuri. I was the youngest in the family so if only one person went with my parents it would be me. I did get to go to church with them. The church was in a house in Salt Lake. BW: Let’s talk a little bit perhaps about the difference between our western ideal, idea about religion and how it plays a role in this. How important was this devotional aspect in your family? YB: It’s hard for me to know because customs and rituals and religion are all interwoven, so I can’t say whether it was being Japanese or whether it was being Buddhist. I don’t know how devout my parents were as far as the Buddhist religion; they were very devout Japanese culturally. My own thought is that it wasn’t so much the religion, it was who they were culturally and it was all interwoven in there. BW: Do you feel that it helped you maintain a connection to being Japanese? YB: The religion? BW: The rituals. YB: The rituals definitely did, and it didn’t have to be just Japanese rituals. The rituals of your childhood, how we celebrated Christmas, how we celebrated New Year’s, the things we didn’t celebrate, they’re all part of the rituals, it’s what you know. As you try and raise your children you think of those rituals that you were raised with and kind of carry them on or maybe if they weren’t as important to you, you don’t. BW: Tell me a little bit more, was there a difference in how you celebrated Christmas or New Year’s than perhaps… 18 YB: I don’t know. I’m sure it was different than other people’s Christmas, but everybody’s Christmas is different anyway. So I was just glad we celebrated Christmas. It wasn’t a religious thing, it wasn’t about Christ, it was just a holiday. Now New Year’s was special because the Japanese, for Asians in general, New Year’s is a big thing. It’s a kind of rebirth. Maybe it’s because they think that the sun rises in the East, it was the land of the rising sun and still is. So maybe that’s part of it, but New Year’s was really the major event. We would cook—my mother would make all kinds of things. I remember her—they would do all of this grocery shopping. Until recently my sisters and I used to go to Salt Lake City to shop at the Japanese Market to get the traditional Japanese foods. Now you can buy things most anywhere. There was always kind of a centerpiece and it could either be lobster or it could be a fish that she would make so that it was the classic fish that turned up. So she would tie it so when she steamed it would bend a certain way. I can remember, my mother was really ingenious. She just—everything had to look nice. It always tasted nice, but she had the little manjus, we call them. They were the rice flower on the outside with beans on the inside and you would steam them. She would fashion a wire into a decorative floral design. She would heat it over the gas burner and brand the manju so they had a little design on the top because otherwise they’re just white. Each year we would make rice cakes, the good luck rice cakes for New Year’s. Making mochi, the rice cakes, was an annual ritual. It was done outside. You steam the rice, then we had the isu that was wood. It’s a hollowed out tree 19 trunk they put the rice in and they have these huge wooden mallets to pound the rice into mochi rice. My mother, you’d have to soak the rice so it’d be really sticky and then would steam nicely. Three men would take these mallets and beat the steamed rice. It had a certain rhythm. One, two, three, and my mom would put her hand in and flip the hot rice over. One, two, three, turn, one, two, three turn, in rhythm. We still make mochi only now there’s a machine that does it. It was an all-day event that everybody participated in. To eat the first mochi was really pretty exciting. They’re good luck rice cakes and you’re supposed to eat zoni, a soup made with mochi, on the first day of the New Year for good luck. One year, my mom and my dad got really sick and almost died the same year, just kind of some crappy things happened and I remember her saying, “But I ate mochi.” She ate the zoni and she really believed the good luck thing and now it was throwing it into doubt. LR: So were there a lot of activities centered around the New Year in the Japanese community? YB: My mother would cook all this special food. One year we had a lobster, and I remember the long antenna of the lobster got broken. My mother repaired the antenna with a little toothpick so it looked perfect. She was incredibly resourceful. She could always make things work. So they make all this food and then just lay out a spread of just sushi, just all the delicacies that you didn’t eat all year. I remember one that I really liked was called caznoko and it was combu with eggs that had been laid on the combu and you soak it. They dry them, but then they soak them in water and it makes, it reconstitutes them and another was the fish 20 row that was dried and then reconstituted. Just these things that you only ate at New Year’s. So you’d lay out this spread and then starting from about mid-morning all the Japanese men in the area would come to your house. The girls, of which we were many, would just be there to serve the men and the little boys who would come with the men. The men, they would drink. In this day and age they probably would need to have a designated driver, but anyway the boys would come and my family would give them money. The girls had to stay home and just serve and make sure that the tea was hot. It was just totally unfair, totally. LR: That’s awesome. You mentioned that the Japanese marketplace, that there was only certain places you could go to shop for Japanese food. Where was that? Do you remember? YB: Well, it’s still kind of like that, but when I was little there were no Japanese markets, well there was Takahashi’s. It was, I can’t even remember, I just remember it was next to the old Buddhist Church. BW: Okay, so Takahashi’s… YB: I don’t remember much, I just remember that there were some paper goods like fusins, little, paper balloons that you blow air into, I remember that, but I can’t remember much else about that shop. The fish market, Sakarada’s Fish Market was on 24th street. We used to go there now and then, but mostly they would come in a truck from house to house. The fish would be on ice. There was also a man in an old white pickup truck that had running boards. We used to jump on the running board to look under the tarp, where he had all these Japanese 21 canned goods that he would import from Japan. Then he would drive around and sell these canned goods and I remember he used to spend the night at our house when he was in town. I don’t know where he lived. There was a place in Salt Lake that was Nagasawa’s Market. They were friends; I loved going there. They had a daughter that was my age and it was fun to play with the kids. I remember once taking something from the shelf because they were family friends and I thought it was kind of like their house. I can remember getting in really big trouble for shoplifting I guess, taking something off of the shelf. BW: What do you remember of Japan town? YB: I don’t. I mean, Japan town Ogden? BW: Ogden. YB: Well I don’t know, I mean there was the area and I didn’t know it was called Japan town. I just remember that there was an area on 25th and 24th where Japanese lived. There were businesses like Inouye’s Market, but we didn’t really go there a lot. Then in Salt Lake there was a Japanese area too. I remember going and spending the night actually with this Nagasawa family and walking around and there were a lot of Japanese houses. BW: We talked a little bit about New Year’s celebrations. What other cultural gatherings and celebrations do you recall? YB: You know we celebrated all of the traditional American celebrations. We did have the Japanese Farmer’s Picnic. It was usually the first Sunday in May, when it was getting warm and yet it was before the planting season got really into full swing, 22 before the really busy farmer time came. Every Japanese within driving distance of Davis High School came. They would come from all over. So I remember it because it was during my kid days. When I was little it was—I could hardly wait. They used to run little races and win prizes. I remember winning notebooks, the front was red and it had the same Indian that was on the nickel on it, and new pencils. I remember the smell of a new box of crayons, you would win things like that. Every year when I was little I would get excited to be the fastest runner and win the race. The races were all girls, all boys, and it was in age ranges so you had a chance to win. Then when I got a little older you could case out all the kids that were your age, including prospective guys, so it also made it so you knew all of the families. BW: The custom of matchmaking that you discussed earlier, was there any of that that you think was trying to be kept alive? YB: In fact there were some. My brother had a friend who was his age. He was probably about eighteen years older than me, but I remember when I was in high school he was still single and so he would’ve been thirty-ish. They sent him a bride from Japan and she was young, she was probably eighteen or twenty. She came to high school with us for a while to probably learn a little bit of English. So it was still done. I have a sister who’s six years older than me and she never wanted to get married. She was always the best student in our family. She’s a school teacher. So this reverend who had come here from Japan and was looking for a wife was in Los Angeles, he still is by the way. So my parents got this notion that she’s getting pretty old and maybe we ought to find her somebody 23 to marry. So they decided to match her with this guy. So he came from L.A. to the house. My sister went into her bedroom and refused to meet him. Now by this time I was in college; we were the only two that were still at home. I tried to talk her into coming down to dinner to no avail. She got her point across. So there were availabilities kind of, like one family, they lived not far from us and the one guy was, oh about my sister’s age, six, seven years older than me. He called to see if he could go on a date with my sister. She wouldn’t, so he says, “Well what about you?” He was going through all the sisters, so yeah availability was an issue. You found somebody that was Japanese within your age range to date whether you knew them or not. I do think that there were some, especially men, bringing women over. One of our Japanese schoolteachers was one that was matched with her husband. LR: Did you feel the pressure to marry a Japanese man? YB: Yes. LR: Okay and did you? BW: Intermarriage within the community… YB: No I don’t remember my father ever saying, “You will not do this.” I remember my brother saying, “If you had lived during the war you could never marry somebody that wasn’t Japanese or you could never marry a white.” We called them hakujins, but he remembered all the people who treated them with respect and all of those who were really mean to them. So he never did, but I wasn’t the only one in my family who didn’t marry someone Japanese. LR: I was curious about that. 24 YB: Well I’ll tell you about it sometime, but not on this tape. BW: One question that’s kind of been surfacing in my mind and I don’t want to go back to too sensitive of a topic and hopefully this won’t be. YB: What, you don’t want to make me cry? BW: I don’t think this will, but I get this sense that when there’s a group that is being somewhat marked within a society and particularly during WWII. I get this sense that sometimes there is a need to overemphasize how loyal you are to the country or how observant of the laws and rules of society you’re in or to try to keep your family sometimes even safe. Do you get this sense, that within your family and within the broader Japanese community here within Ogden that there is this real conscious effort of making yourselves appear to be good, law-abiding American citizens in order to avoid some of the tensions? YB: Well I think that’s even more stressed within the Japanese culture because you never want to do anything to make yourself stand out. I told you about the rigid rules even about folding clothing and so there are absolutes, I mean from the very, very beginning. Why is it that a five year old can fold a paper crane in Japan? Any five year old can, here you can’t even read the instructions and get an adult to fold one. It’s just an orderliness that they have about their entire existence. When I was in teacher training for instance, the American system says you don’t stifle children, you let them create. Then you kind of realize if you look at Japanese art and American art who’s more creative? Is there a difference? Yet the Japanese, they do everything in a regimented way. They think that if you 25 learn all of the basics then you’re free to create because you know all of the basics. You think Picasso couldn’t paint realistically? You know it frees you up to explore all of those other things. If the field is left too open you don’t know how to attack or where to begin. I think that because of that order and because of those unwritten rules, this is the way things are done. When you exercise you don’t exercise your left arm before your right arm; it’s all done in a sequence. Everything has a pattern and if you look now they know that in mathematics; its patterns that you learn first that make you understand how math works. So I think that there’s that orderliness about the Japanese, so you can be an iconoclast, but you had to have learned the basics first. Back to your question, did we feel a need to conform? I think we did, but I think that it was always there because of the way their culture is. Now did we need to prove our loyalty? Maybe, I think definitely during the war they did. Did I? I’m not as sure. I don’t really know because I was an American. I don’t know, it was interesting because if you ask me which am I more of? Before we lived in Japan I always felt like I was Japanese, my parents always told us that. When I was in Japan boy did I know I wasn’t Japanese, and I knew that I was an American. You miss the things, the differences, they’re amplified and you really know what they are. Then when you come back here you miss the things that are Japanese. I still remember when we got on that plane after living there for that year and all of the relatives are lined up at Haneda Airport. They’re bowing and they’ve all brought us something and my word, how are we going to carry all this 26 stuff home? They’re all bowing and you think, “Oh I can hardly wait to get to where women are more independent.” We get on the plane and it’s a charter flight and we no sooner get in the plane and this stewardess gets on the loud speaker and she says, “This is free seating everybody, free seating. Free seating, those who wish to smoke sit in the back…” At that point I thought, “Send me back to those genteel, bowing folks.” I’m sure everybody’s like that, but you don’t fully belong either place, but you know who you are, you know it’s a mixed identity. I am Japanese, but I’m definitely an American and did I ever feel like I needed to prove it? Probably when I was in Japan more than here because I wanted them to know that I wasn’t one of them. Like when men would do these really chauvinistic things, I remember the guy saying to me once, he made just some sexist remark and I think I must have glared at him and he said to my husband, “Well the trouble is that she’s not a Japanese.” We went to Tokyo, to the horse races. The Japanese are wild about gambling. So we went with my aunt’s brother-in-law to the horse races which were way west of Tokyo and he tells us as we’re getting on the train, “Now the train when it stops it’s going to be full, but you just push and you get in that train.” So we did and before we get to the stop where we’re going to get off we’re halfway down the aisle because that many more people have pushed in. The Japanese are just spotlessly clean so you feel okay, it’s just really crowded. We stop at the race track stop and the whole train empties. All these people are going to the horse races. The Japanese system is once you’re inside you can go wherever you want inside the train station. So Kameo says to us, “Okay, we’re 27 going to get on the train and we’re going to go opposite direction one stop. Then we’re going to switch over and then we’ll have a seat.” So we do that and we have a seat, but Dale says to him, “But you know as soon as I sit down there’s going to be an old lady or a child or somebody that’s going to come and stand right in front of me.” He looks at us and I said, “In America, men stand, women and children sit down.” This guy looks right at Dale and he goes, “Japan, no, no! You fake being asleep.” It’s just funny stories like that I was always glad that I lived in a system that I did. BW: Did you get the feeling that there was more social deviance going on within the younger generation of the Japanese community here in Ogden as they, particularly as we started going through like the 1960s, social revolutions some things like that? Kind of separating themselves from their ways? YB: Yeah probably, but not overtly. I had a brother who got in trouble with the law and it was very painful for our family. We survived it and he didn’t have to go to prison, he went in the military, but it was really difficult. There were stories in the Japanese community. Those stories kept us in check because you didn’t want those stories about your family. I think that the Nisei generation that I’m a part of, they were very cognizant of the pressure to conform. I think with the third generation it probably changed because by that time the ties, I mean they’re more American culturally and not raised with that constant, “You’re Japanese.” BW: Excellent, anything else from you? LR: No go ahead and ask your last question. 28 BW: My last question, okay. From your perspective what do you think the legacy, the Japanese legacy is here in Ogden? YB: In Ogden… BW: Or Utah. YB: I don’t know, I think in general I guess it would be what I know to be the Japanese legacy. You don’t make a lot of noise, you just work hard and things will come around. You don’t demonstrate, you just quietly go about doing it. Maybe now that’s not so and it could’ve been just the times, but they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. Do you think there was any demonstrating about being sent to camps? I doubt it. BW: Compliance. YB: I remember my brother used to say to me that there was a teacher at the junior high school that I had that hated Japs. I just couldn’t believe that. I mean I didn’t think he liked them, but I didn’t think he would be unfair. Now in hindsight my brother was really right, but at the time it’s easier to just live with what you have and learn to live it. Make the best, you know do the best you can. So I think that that served them well, you know a quiet persistence. LR: I like that. BW: Keep your nose to the grindstone and just move forward. YB: Good things will happen if you just do what you’re supposed to do. Karma I guess. LR: I like that. BW: Wonderful. Well thank you. 29 YB: Thank you. LR: Thank you very much. Appreciate your time and your willingness and for being so—just being yourself, I appreciate that a lot. YB: Well it’s all I can be.