My dad had made this huge round table for dinner, you know, that we all sat around it. And we had really, in my memory, excellent dinner times. My mother was an excellent cook and because we had sashimi everyday for him, the fisherman used to come and sell fish on his car. I mean a little…truck. So he’d come about two, three times a week. So besides…well, maguro (tuna) for him because that’s all he had for sashimi – maguro. And from time to time, you know, the red fish. They call it…what do they call it? Not tai (red snapper), but…can’t think of the name now. But once in a while, the red fish. But usually, it was maguro. My mother used to cook fish either fried for leftover maguro or she would make nitsuke like…she’d get a lot of the fish heads and then also the eggs of fish she used to cook that in shoyu (soy sauce) and sugar. It was very, very good. And so I grew up with mostly Japanese food. Besides the fish, we had things like nishime. My mother used to make mazegohan. And she used to make sushi on special occasions and, you know, once in a while, when we had to take food to school she would make sushi for us.
So my memories of our life in Wailea was really excellent as far as food and enjoyment was concerned. And my dad really enjoyed having people over for dinner so he’d have people over and in those days, chicken hekka1 was a specialty. So on those days, my mother would make chicken hekka and they’d sit all around eating that and enjoying it.
1. Chicken hekka is sukiyaki made with chicken instead of beef.
Date: May 31, 2006
Location: Hawai‘i, US
Interviewer: Akemi Kikumura Yano
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
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