How hard was it adjusting to Hawaii, not knowing a word of English?
Mazie: In those days they didn’t have English as a Second Language class. In Kaahumanu school, I think there were 5 kids from Japan. I was almost 8 at the time. I really credit the public schools for doing their best to help us learn English. I think what we did was, once a week, we’d trot off to a teacher who didn’t speak any Japanese, so we wouldn’t be tempted, and we sit there for an hour just speaking English. My mother decided if I could just learn to count from one to one hundred in English, everything was going to be all right. I would come home from school, and she would come home late from work, and she would have me count from one to one hundred in English. It was like a talisman for her to get to that point. On of the hardest thing for me (moving to Hawaii) was getting used to the food. I was brought up in very rural Japan – you never ate thing like butter and cheese, so the smells of these food were really hard for me to take. The principal at Kaahumanu decreed that every k
