Sleeping on Potatoes | Asian American Memoirs

A Japanese American's shrewd, expansive and hilarious account of going from the internment nightmare to success in the executive suite of a major tech corporation.

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Sleeping on Potatoes
by Carl Nomura
Erasmus Books, Bellingham Washington, 2003, 248 pp, $18.95

EXCERPT

n 1927, at dinner with his family, my father, Kazuichi Nomura, was stunned to see a bottle rolling across the table toward him. According to an old Japanese superstition, this was a sign that he was going to die three years hence. My father was fifty-one years old and in good health, but from that moment on he was preparing for his own death. As part of this, he decided that he must have his entire family around him when he died. It was this self-interest that prompted him to order my older brothers and sister home from Japan.

Then, when he had everyone together, he began to agonize over the future. He told his wife, "My children have no one to marry. We must go where there are many Japanese people. We will move to California."

[CONTINUED BELOW]

My father was a stern, uncompromising man, with a ferocious temper and a childish temperament. My mother, Mizuko Takahashi Nomura, long-since resigned to his tyrannical ways, said nothing, but began to plan the move.

MY MOTHER MIZUKO'S STORY
Hiroshima, Japan

     In 1601, the Takahashi family moved from Kyoto to Hiroshima. We know this because the Takahashis played an important role in Hiroshima history, and their family history, going back for thirty-two generations, has been kept on scrolls stored at a temple.

     Once in Hiroshima, they built a home by the ocean. And then began the massive, generations-long task of filling the ocean shore with rocks and dirt from the mountain. As soon as a new area became viable, it was turned into farmland. After 300 years of toil, the Takahashi family had a vast estate with acreage stretching into the man-made seacoast.

     It was the custom in Japan that, in each generation, the oldest son inherited everything. In the generation before my mother's there were three sons. My mother's father, Kichinosuke, was the third, and therefore, a very unlikely heir. This meant he would never be wealthy, but that did not concern him. This circumstance gave him the freedom he felt wealth would deny him.

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