by Ruth Sasaki
“They went to see a Jack Oakie football movie. My mother must have been smitten as this was not at all her kind of film.”
The stories you hear from camp are often stories of what kept people going—the humorous incidents, baseball, dances, poetry clubs; love and dreams for a better, shared future; the everyday, human things that people clung to to keep from being consumed by the yawning abyss that had opened under their lives.
My mother and father were married during the War. But their story started long before Pearl Harbor. This is how they met:
My mother and her family lived on Pine Street in San Francisco. Their next-door neighbor in the 1930s was my dad’s older brother and his family. When Bachan (my grandmother) traveled to Japan to buy merchandise for their store on Grant Avenue in 1935, she took my mom with her. My mom was 16 and this was her first trip to Japan. They paid a courtesy call to their next-door neighbor’s mother, Mrs. Sasaki, in Hiroshima.
The Sasaki family had lived in San Francisco and Berkeley for over twenty years, and all the children except the older brother had been born in the US. The family had returned to Hiroshima in 1926, and my Sasaki grandfather died three years later. While Bachan and my mother were eating strawberries in the living room with Mrs. Sasaki, my dad and his sister came home from school on their bicycles. My dad was too shy to be introduced and peeked at the exotic visitors from America from the kitchen.
Mrs. Sasaki was so kind, and insisted on taking them to Miyajima to eat momiji manju (a pastry in the shape of a maple leaf, with sweet bean filling) and see all the sights. A year later, my dad returned to San Francisco to stay with his brother and became “the boy next door.”
I will never tire of reading stories of how two people meet and fall in love, the circumstances and background, how their lives were brought together.
the stories are especially savored and remembered when those of our own parents. they become part of your own shared family history, but those stories form threads that bind us to all people.
so, thankyou for sharing with us, Ruth.
Thanks, Barbara. Knowing the outlines of my mom and dad’s story helped me to better understand the small part of it that I was privileged to share with them.
A beautiful story, Ruth. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Sheila—great to hear from you!