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Show 38 Nisei Christian Journey, Vol. II Califo~ni~. So she came to America and stayed with the Coo krill family. Mother Cooknll. IS gone now, b~t her son who was 2 or 3 years old then is still living .. I would hke to go see h1m sometime. For the longest time my mother was h1s second mother. She took care of him from the time he was very small so there's that attachment. My mother was a Christian and my father was a Tenrikyo (Shinto sect) believe.r. There was a doctor that came to that hotel where they stayed whUe they were s1ngle who asked my folks to go to this place that was cool and shady and spen~ the .afternoon. The hotel room was hot. In those days they didn't have. fans or thmgs hke that so my father went with him to this cool place and met w1th a Japanese who was attending Pacific School of Religion preaching away. My father listened to him and found his talk very interesting and thought this a good way of life and decided to become a Christian. Founding of Japanese Congregational Church Later he and a few others got together and formed the Japanese Congregational Church around 1908 or thereabouts. My mother started attending that church and met my father. She said she was the only lady there but she went anyway. She thought how tragic that Nihonjin (Japanese) had to live on one side of the track and couldn't live where hakujin (Caucasians) lived and were treated like trash. In fact, she wrote a book and said so. Early Years The earliest thing I recall is living on B Street. My folks were renting a house on B & Kern Streets. My father worked as a gardener for the various people who were well-to-do and living across the tract. On the west side, A, B, C, D, E, & F up to G was where the Japanese, Chinese, and other nationalities lived and the white people lived on the other side. My father did their garden work. He went to work on his bicycle. Fortunately for us, Lincoln School was only 2 blocks away. As a youngster I remember walking to school. There were a lot of first generation Germans that spoke German. Their youngsters were Nisei, too. There were a lot of Armenians and Chinese, also. We didn't feel the haiseki (discrimination) so much in school because we were all children of foreigners. Our church, the Japanese Congregational Church, was on F Street, and the Methodist Church was on D Street. That church is older than ours and the question always arose, "Why start another church when there was one already?" One thing I remember is we had a very wealthy Japanese friend who was a rancher living in Bowles, a town about 12 miles south of Fresno. Imagine! It was back in 1918 and he wanted to take a trip to Japan and stay for one whole year! He had enough wealth to do this! He asked my father to move to his place and take care of it. So we moved to his place and lived in their house for almost a year. My sister and I went to school out there in the country for about a year. She was in the second grade and I was in the third grade. |
