Interviews

1. Four sisters had international marriages (Japanese)

2. Disrespectful Child (Japanese)

3. Discrimination faced in San Francisco (Japanese)

4. Missing Home (Japanese)

5. The Kids and Japanese Language (Japanese)

6. Regret (Japanese)

7. How she met her husband (Japanese)

8. Public views on marriage with non-Caucasian (Japanese)

Calloway,Terumi Hisamatsu

(b. 1937) A war bride from Yokohama

The Kids and Japanese Language (Japanese)

(Japanese) I had 4 children. Girl, boy, girl, boy in that perfect order. I was lucky. Two of them were born in Japan, and the other two were born in California.

I did want them to speak Japanese, so I wrote the Japanese phonetics and put it on the wall to teach them in the beginning. Eventually they forgot, or rather… There was a Japanese language school in Santa Maria. We took the kids there on Saturdays. But back then I was working at a tailor. The owner had moved to Los Angeles and I took over the store, which made it impossible for me to take my kids to Japanese school on Saturdays. My husband helped in the beginning, but they quit eventually. They kind of stopped speaking Japanese, so they can’t really speak.

children education Japanese languages

Date: February 6, 2015

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Izumi Tanaka

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Terumi Hisamatsu Calloway was born in 1937 in Yokohama as the 5th of 10 children and grew up in the suburb of Tokyo during the war. She met her husband, Edward E. Calloway, who was a civilian engineer working at American military base in Tokyo and married him. In 1960, after having 2 children, Terumi moved to the U.S. with her family and settled in the Bay Area and had two more children. Later they moved to the Lompoc area where all of her 4 children - 2 girls and 2 boys - grew up. In 1977, they moved to Inglewood where she resides now. Terumi was widowed in 2009, and she currently works as a caregiver. (April 2016)