Well we lived a very happy, simple life. Weekdays, we went to school. Weekends we could go out on Sundays after Sunday School to play with our friends or we often went fishing with my dad and they used to have river fish called Gori. So we’d go up the river with my dad and we’d spend all afternoon fishing and that was an excellent fish for frying into crisp fish. So we used to enjoy that. I used to go down to Kole Kole, which is a picnic area, with my friends and we’d jump into the water and swim.
I still remember one day, Mr. Honda, who was a photographer in Hilo came to see my dad and he says, “Oh you know your daughter, Yuri-chan, is such a tomboy. Did you know that she was jumping from this rope into the Kole Kole River?” And my dad was so shocked he says, “What are you doing?” So when I went to Hilo High School, he stopped me from taking physical education. He said, “You take some other kind of course instead of phys ed because you’re too much of a tomboy.
But you know, my dad was the very one who got me started because he wanted the boys to learn kendo and in Hakalau he started this kendo jodo [sic] and so he asked me to go with my brothers to do kendo so I was one of the two girls in the state of Hawai‘i doing kendo.
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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