WEBVTT

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(Chris Conybeare) Just to get started,
why don’t you tell us a little bit

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about your background,

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How you ended up coming to Hawaiʻi?
What’s that story?

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Well, it’s funny the way it happened.

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My mother, after the major strike
on the plantations,

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my parents moved back to Japan.

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My father had inherited
the rich rice fields

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and so after settling in Kumamoto,
my mother gave birth to me there

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and my father decided
that after three months,

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he decided that after all,

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America was a better place
to raise and educate his children.

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So above me, I had four siblings
and I’m the fifth one

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and I just happened to,
my mother was pregnant with me

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and that’s the reason why I’m the only one
in a family of nine to be born in Japan

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and so when we came back here,
it’s exactly this year on December 29,

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it will be exactly 88 years
since my parents brought me

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to Japan when I was three months old

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and it dawned on me
that as I was lecturing the other day,

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that actually I came back
with a shipload of picture brides

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and here I ended up doing special stories
on picture brides so it’s funny

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how my story kind of evolved, everything
around the picture bride stories.

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(Chris Conybeare) We should get
back to that but it took you a while

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to actually finish school and get involved
in your current research.

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So what happened?

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I know at one point your family,
your father was fairly well off,

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but then later you came back here
as a young girl.

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I understand you had
to drop out of school.

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What happened?

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Well, my father never worked
in the fields.

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He was, for that period he was
a well-educated man.

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He was educated in the village--

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they called it the Terakoya,
which is the temple school

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where the samurai families
used to have their education.

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So before he came to Hawaiʻi,
he worked as a clerk in the village office

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and that was 1890.

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So that was with his first family,
he came to Hawaiʻi

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and settled in Kekaha Plantation.

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Then after a few years he raised
his family there

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and then he returned to Japan
and he reentered in 1902.

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So by the time he married my mother
and that was already many years later

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after his first wife passed away
and then so in 1921

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when he returned to Japan
and came back to Hawaiʻi,

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that’s when he settled
on Oʻahu Sugar Company

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and he died in 1928, so actually,
he didn’t live too long after that.

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When he died, he was 63
and my mother was a young widow at 39.

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There’s 24 years difference between them
and she was pregnant with her ninth child.

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So for us, our lives changed
dramatically until--

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When my father was living,
we had a fairly good life.

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He was the salaryman and he worked
under Mr. Smith at the huge warehouse

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where they held all the inventory
for the Waipahu Plantation Hospital,

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the plumbing shop, the carpenter’s shop
and all the inventory I understood

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that my father was in charge of.

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So I was surprised
that he probably had some English,

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he understood some English
because he used to keep the books too.

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But then after he died
of brain hemorrhage in 1928,

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our life changed completely
and my mother being pregnant

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with the last child,

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she couldn’t work in the fields
like other women did and she...