A eulogy for my mother Hiroko Takahashi
Thank you for coming to this remembrance and celebration. My name is Dean Takahashi and I would like to tell you some stories about my mother.
Hiroko Takahashi was born in Kingsburg, California, on August 6, 1933. She was the daughter of her father Suyematsu Matsuoka and mother Taju Akahoshi (maiden name), and she had a total of 10 other siblings. She passed away at the age of 90 on January 19, 2024, in San Jose, California. She is survived by me, my wife and our three children.
My mother’s parents were from the island of Kyushu, Japan. They were from the Kumamoto prefecture and the towns of Hitoyoshi and Yatsushiro. Her parents came to the U.S. by ship in 1908 and 1912. They migrated because younger siblings were not allowed to inherit land and America offered the best opportunity for getting ahead. There was a window from 1882 to 1924 when the Japanese were welcome in the U.S. for emigration.
They started as farm hands and eventually became farmers. Hiroko grew up on a farm in Kingsburg, California. She was the youngest of nine surviving children in the family. When the U.S. entered World War II after Pearl Harbor, Hiroko was caught on a family trip overseas in Japan. Her parents went back in the spring of 1941 to visit a sick relative — the father’s adoptive parent — and take care of her. My mother was eight. It took almost two weeks to get there. This was not what you would call an easy childhood. For the record, they did not want to be there.
Her parents and sister Tami were stuck there for the duration of the war in the family’s home region of Kumamoto, in Hitoyoshi. The Akahoshis had a farm in nearby Yatsushiro.
The experience during the war was difficult, as she was an American who spoke little Japanese and was put in a younger grade. They spoke only Japanese so she forgot her English. My mother never talked much about that time, though my father said she was teased by the other Japanese kids for her poor language skills. She was like a girl without a country.
Life was simple. Her mother sewed her school uniform in sailor style, and she sewed all of my mother’s clothes without any patterns on them.
Years later, my mother told me that as the war progressed, food was scarce. They grew crops like daikon and sweet potatoes in places such as the field at the school. Eating rice was a luxury, and so they lived on tsukemono, or picked vegetables.
Meanwhile, my father, who had not yet met my mother, was in an incarceration camp in Tule Lake, California. He hated the U.S. government because it fed him macaroni for 30 days in a row, but he enjoyed playing baseball behind barbed wire. He was 10 when he went into the camp, and he lost five years of his life, as an enemy alien. Somehow, later in life, he made peace with this hardship as he became a part of the American military.
My mother’s siblings in the U.S. were incarcerated in a camp in Poston, Arizona, where the wind was so fierce that it blew and into everything like a firehose. In that area, the only thing that was free to come and go as it wished was the wind. Her siblings had a hard time. Her brother Mac died at age 18 from a lung disease. The family was not allowed to take him out of the camp to get medical care. Many decades later, I found a five-page autobiography written by Mac while in camp. He referred to himself as a “shrimp.” It was part of the records on the family in the National Archives.
About 110,000 Japanese Americans were held in these kinds of camps during the Second World War. Our family was in the “yes yes” group, meaning they indicated in an oath that they were loyal Americans. My uncle Shiro Shiraishi was a member of 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and he came back from the war in Europe with a purple heart medal, even as his wife was incarcerated in Poston. Yet Tule Lake had conflict, as the “yes yes” group was mixed with the “no no” group.
Back in Japan, my mother saw American bombers frequently flying overhead later on in the war, almost always on the way to somewhere else. About 60 miles away, an atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki in August, 1945, ending World War II.
I asked her about this a couple of times, and it showed me how our memories, and our identities are built on shifting sands — as articulated by Charan Ranganath of UC Davis. One time she told me she could see the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb over Nagasaki. Another time, she said it was too far away for her to see.
Just last year, I saw a statue of the Virgin Mary in the United Nations building. It was hauled out of the ruins near Nagasaki. Half of it was seared black from the atomic bomb blast, while the other half was unscathed. I am glad my mother was not too close.
My mother’s father died in 1946, when my mother was 13. After seven years in Japan, my mother and her family left on a troop ship called the General Gordon for San Francisco in May, 1948. It was really uncomfortable traveling on the ship, she said.
During the war, a neighbor held the farm for the Matsuokas while other siblings were incarcerated in camps for Japanese Americans during the war. Because of that kindness, the Matsuoka family was able to return to Kingsburg to continue farming and growing grapes. Though she was 15, my mother returned to elementary school to learn English. And she was once again put in a younger grade to catch up on the language.
Hiroko later attended Kingsburg High School, where the star athlete was Rafer Johnson, who won a gold medal in the decathlon in 1960 Summer Olympics. She moved to Los Angeles to live with her sister Tami and her husband Vic Takagi.
This is where my Dad came into the picture. Thomas served in the U.S. Army in the Korean War. He was an interpreter and an interrogator who went into Korea at Inchon. He came back and went to college on the G.I. bill. My dad loved history and he thought about being a teacher, but he decided accounting would pay the bills better. He later told me to study what I wanted, as he had forced himself to study something practical.
Hiroko became friends with Mitzi and Richard Toshima. She studied cosmetology at the LA Trade Technical College. Through mutual friends at a wedding, she met Thomas Takahashi, her future husband. He asked her on a date. At first, she said no. He persisted and they went out. They got married on October 23, 1960, and lived in Sacramento, California.
In Sacramento, Thomas got a job working for the state of California. He had a long career there and managed a team of auditors in the Department of Agriculture. Thomas and Hiroko had two sons, Tracy — born in 1963 — and me, born in 1964.
Hiroko worked for the state of California in the Department of Motor Vehicles and at Calpers for decades.
My memories of my mother are cloudy. She spoke English most of the time and resorted to Japanese talking to my father when she didn’t want my brother and I to understand. She often used the Japanese word for honestly when getting frustrated with me. I went to Japanese school on Saturdays but dropped out to play baseball.
She tried to teach me Japanese but it didn’t stick, except for some of the curse words. We went to the Gedatsu Church often. She always cut my hair herself. She made us food like onigiri, okazu, tamagotoji, tsukemono, bread and butter sandwiches, and occasionally sukiyaki. When we were young, we visited Kingsburg often, learning about life on the farm and connecting to the place where my mother grew up.
My brother and I were rascals, doing things like climbing up to the roof of the house and tossing things down from it. At a young age my mother and father were trying to figure out how to survive during World War II. They grew up with shikataganai, or it cannot be helped.
But they gave us a relatively comfortable life. My brother and I had real childhoods where we could be irresponsible. We grew up longing for freedom and listening to Bruce Springsteen. We rode our bikes to school and often took off for the dirt paths without permission. I played with toy soldiers on my bedroom floor until my mother made me clean up the mess. Later on, this continued as I played war strategy games on maps on the bedroom floor.
My parents were not happy when I got kicked out of summer school for lighting a firecracker in a locker. My punishment was painting the fence during the summer. My brother and I got into the business of painting our relatives’ houses.
My parents were never rich. Our idea of going out was dining on Asian food at the Asia Cafe or Wakanoura, and once and a while the Matsudas would take us to a steakhouse. But my parents did enable my brother and I to go to college at UC Berkeley. In 1988, I wrote a story about my family’s experience during the war and it ran in a newspaper.
The Takahashi family received a redress check after the U.S. government apologized for the incarceration. They used the money to take us all on a trip to Japan in 1992. Her sisters Tami and Shiz went at the same time and we all saw my mom’s family in Hitoyoshi for the first time in decades. They still had a farm where they grew rice. The highlight of our trip to Hitoyoshi was cruising down the Kuma River in a boat. We took pictures of her at her old elementary school where she learned Japanese, and the rice farm in Yatsushiro that her relatives still owned.
That was the only time Hiroko had ever returned to Japan. I asked her why not. She said once that the burden of obligation was so large when it came to visiting friends and family. The closest we got was taking her to Hawaii. When I went to grad school at Northwestern in Chicago, my parents drove me out there across the country and gave me the car so I could get around.
My dad was the one with the big personality and he always talked a lot. My mother was quiet. She talked with people more privately.
When my brother died tragically at age 30 in 1993, she kept saying why couldn’t it have been her instead. It was an unimaginable hardship for her in particular. But we leaned on each other and survived that nightmare. My father, my mother and I watched a trial where one of the people who shot my brother in a case of mistaken identity was convicted of murder. We saw justice, while so many others have not. At the sentencing, I asked the convicted killers to turn their lives around, whether they were behind bars or not.
We understood that their imprisonment would not bring my brother back. Years later, I read a series of stories in the LA Times — the newspaper where I once worked — about one young man who was convicted, and how he had dedicated his life in prison to help provide hospice to dying prisoners. The reporter interviewed me for that story, and I was grateful to speak across the decades and say I was glad he had turned things around. He had reformed his life, behind bars. I read that story to my mother, and we both shared tears about it. My mother’s whole life was about being resilient.
Thomas Takahashi died from a stroke in 1998. I was at his side with my mother at the time, and she said, “He didn’t get a second chance.”
Hiroko lived another 26 years, mostly at a home on Farm Dale Way in South Sacramento. She didn’t have a lot of hobbies, but she was used to a lifetime of service. She welcomed Nancy into our family when I got married in 1993. She often helped the Matsuda family with cooking and other chores as they entertained, and she volunteered frequently at the Gedatsu Church and later at the Asian Community Center. She took care of the Matsudas as they passed on, first with my aunt Frances and later with my cousin Susan.
She really shined in the role of a grandmother. It was her reason for going on with her life. Those cute girls completely upstaged me and Nancy. She took the girls shopping for clothes at Marshall’s and Arden Fair often. And she always had a lot of food ready — including her banana cream pie, guacamole and ice cream drumsticks — when we visited her in Sacramento. She kept a craft table for the girls. She kept Japanese and Hawaiian children’s books like Momotaro, the Littleist Opihi, Chibi and Tute Nele and Nene.
My mother loved taking her grandchildren to the nearby Edwin L. Z’berg park to play soccer or basketball or just go for a walk with a stroller. And she was always present at big family gatherings, offering generous gifts. She also loved gardening and took the flowers she grew to the graves of her husband and son often.
One time we took our oldest up to the snow for sledding in the mountains. I let her go on a saucer and my mother was supposed to catch her. But she veered off course and started going down the hill. My mother ran after her, dove, and caught her just as she was about to head off further down the hill. I didn’t know my mother in her 70s would be able to take a dive like that. She took care of the kids often so we could take date nights.
Grandma was an active pen pal and she had fun creating paper cranes for the girls at restaurants, using the paper from chopsticks. And she enjoyed doing art projects.
But I guess caring for others took its toll. She would go to the store and forget where she parked her car. People would help her find her car again. She would go to the bank to figure out her account, not realizing that she was doing this just about every day.
It took a minute for me to figure out that our roles were reversed and it was my time to take care of her. I was not ready for this, but I had to learn how to do it on my own. I had to make the time for it. I had to learn patience. I had to slow down. And I made tradeoffs, as it meant I had less time for my own family. I believe in the end that taking care of her was good for my soul. Her problems were the problems that all of us will face as we learn to take care of each other in our old age. My mother used to dwell on bad memories, but that faded away as she forgot them. She took it easy, and she enjoyed the joy of her grandchildren.
We had repetitive Groundhog Day conversations all the time. She couldn’t remember something she said to me three minutes ago, but she could remember her childhood with her siblings like my aunt Tami. Her hearing declined, and this was really isolating for her. It took years for me to find hearing aids that worked pretty well. For all that I’ve written about technology, it didn’t really serve my mother well in her old age.
She had been diagnosed with dementia for perhaps eight years. We moved her near us in 2017. We moved her into memory care after they found her wandering lost down the street a couple of times. She declined rapidly, and lost her ability to walk. These places did their best to take care of her.
I didn’t think she would be gone so soon. She no longer recognized me around a year ago. Dementia is a disease that takes someone away from their loved ones before they are gone. It is such a cruel thing, particularly because you always wonder if she’s still in there. Like my mother at my father’s deathbed, I was hoping she would get a second chance.
I visited her and she held my hand and squeezed it while I played Big Band music for her. I saw tears run down her face after I returned after a COVID lockdown. I tried to feed her to keep her alive and I held her hand while playing music. With our family reverend by my side, I said goodbye, and I said I loved her.
I was glad to be able to feed her and hold her hand while playing music for her again a few days later on the day she died. If there is a blessing to dementia, my mother had no fear of death because she didn’t know it was coming. And I was able to prepare for her passing a long time before she was gone.
Still, I will miss her. As we collected her pictures and gathered our memories of her, I have come to think that she isn’t really gone as long as our memories of her are alive. Thank for all of your support for us. Thank you for the kind condolences and for coming today. And thank you to my mother for giving me life and some hard-earned wisdom about real life, resilience and aging with grace.
A public memorial service will be held at 11:30 am Pacific time on February 24 at Gedatsu Church, at 4016 Happy Lane, Sacramento, CA 95826. Family contact is deantaka@gmail.com.
Donations can be sent to the Alzheimer’s Association on behalf of Hiroko Takahashi. Or you can send koden to:
Dean Takahashi c/o
Gedatsu Church
4016 Happy Lane
Sacramento, CA 95826