It’s just after noon on a warm summer day in Manoa as Nancy Yoshida sits down with neighbor Jo Ann Yanazaki and a tardy guest to share a few remembrances from a life filled with everyday eventfulness.
Yoshida, 88, flips through pages of hand-scribbled notes, though it becomes readily apparent that she doesn’t need them.
"The coconut," she says, tapping her forehead, "is still fresh."
Yoshida has lived in the valley all of her life. Her father started out cleaning smokestacks in Iwilei. Her mother was a picture bride from Japan.
Yoshida, the second of eight siblings, grew up in a community where families farmed taro, bananas, gardenias and other wetland crops to sell in town and raised vegetables and fowl for day-to-day subsistence. Like most of the kids in the valley, Yoshida and her siblings wore hand-me-down clothes, walked barefoot to English elementary school, crafted their own dolls out of corn husks.
At Manoa Elementary School, children could get a bottle of milk and a big graham cracker for 5 cents. That was a few cents more than Yoshida could typically afford.
Sometimes the kids would eat mango and guava that fell off the neighborhood trees, but only if the fruit rolled onto the sidewalk. They were poor but they respected their neighbors.
After school, Yoshida would hurry to Japanese language school, ever aware that perfect attendance was rewarded with free school supplies at the end of the year.
At home, Yoshida and her siblings would haul buckets of water from a nearby stream to fill the furo for bathing. They ate dinner under the light of a kerosene lamp. And if the rice should happen to burn at the bottom of the pot, Yoshida’s mother would simply pour some tea onto the caked remnants — ochazuke!
"We learned not to waste anything," Yoshida says.
Yoshida left school after the eighth grade and helped to support the family by working as a maid for $2 a week. Her brother Noboru Oda later got a job delivering newspapers, in part because it allowed him to purchase an extra $5 of gas during wartime rationing.
The World War II years were particularly difficult for the family. Yoshida remembers her Japanese-speaking mother sitting silently on the city bus lest she violate the "English only" signs posted onboard.
She also recalls working for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which made its presses available to print Army maps, and being locked in the bathroom with her fellow Japanese-Americans when military personnel came to pick up the orders.
The deprivations and indignities of her youth did nothing to prevent Yoshida from marrying, raising a family and enjoying a full and happy life. In fact, as she observes the crowds of young people absorbed to the point of isolation by the images on their touch screens or watches and neighbors pass each other without so much as a smile or a nod, she wonders whether the deprivations of the current age aren’t appreciably worse.
"I just want to educate the younger generations," Yoshida says.
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
