Shiro Tokuno - My Dad

 Shiro Tokuno - My Dad

by Ken Tokuno © 2020

“Shine,” “Mond,” “Nursey,” “Fishface,” “Rikson.” Those were just a few of the nicknames that my father attached to people and animals of whom he was fond.  The more creative ones, like the ones just named, were bestowed on those he knew from when they were children or to his pet dogs. Dad was a true animal lover. For adults, the nick-names would be more closely connected to their actual names; thus, his good friend Blaine O. Vogt was called B. O.  It was a term of deep endearment, for when B. O. died, my mother told me it was the only time she had ever seen my father shed tears.

When Dad’s mother died of a heart attack in 1956 at the age of  69, the toll and toil of her life making her much older than the mere count of her years revealed, my father did not cry. I know because I saw him right after the news came. He was just sitting in the kitchen looking down at the telegram in his hand. My grandmother was a tough, tiny woman, who might easily have worn out at a much younger age except for her strength and should have lived much longer if not for an incompetent doctor in Japan, who diagnosed her chest pain as indigestion. She had been visiting two of her daughters who had been living in Tokyo, my Aunts Haru and Tey. She had born 7 children who then gave her 21 grandchildren, two of whom she never saw, my youngest brother and sister.

Beyond the usual love of a son for his mother, my father had a plumbless admiration for my grandmother, taking from her his valuing of hard work and thrift. He did more than simply espouse those values. He lived them. I can recall his habit of saving little pieces of soap when they were too small to use easily then mash them together to get the last remaining cleaning power from them. When he got birthday or Christmas gifts, he would carefully avoid drinking or tearing the wrapping paper so my mother could re-use it (although I never saw them used again; Mom had her limits). Beyond gifts, he rarely bought anything for himself that was not a tool, vehicle or something else of practical utility. He once did come home with a sleek 12-gauge shotgun he had been admiring. It was impractical because he rarely hunted. He used to use it to not so much celebrate as to commemorate New Years, going out in the yard to fire it into the air at midnight. Even his gifts to his kids were practical. Once he bought all of us identical white t-shirts for Christmas. Or it might be socks or even cash. If he over-spent on anything, it was fireworks, which he loved. One year he bought a huge cache of Red Devil fountain cones, Roman Candles and flares that the entire neighborhood could enjoy. It was a gift, but we knew Dad got a real kick out of as well. Sharing it was the only way he could justify it to himself.

As for hard work, it was rare to find him not doing something. On weekdays he would come home from his job and immediately go into the yard to do various chores. Later, when he bought a farm, he would climb onto a tractor and often drive it until it was too dark to see. I never once heard him complain about being tired. It was an inconceivable condition for him. The only time I saw him rest was at family gatherings on when the weather prohibited outdoor work. It was not that he liked to be busy. He had to be busy. 

My father not only worked hard, but he made sure his children worked hard. I can’t remember an age when I wasn’t outside helping him in the yard. I did so with no small reluctance as most suburban bred lads are likely to do. My regular duties were common enough: sweep the porch and walkways, pull weeds, water the lawn, pick up any litter in the yard, clean out dead leaves around the shrubs and—in the winter—cut and haul firewood. I had to do those even before I could do my school assignments, let alone play with my friends. Then when we moved to the farm I discovered, at 13,  the callouses and blisters of true work in the field. I looked back on my suburban minutiae fondly on nights when I would myself drive the tractor until dark, cultivate the crops or irrigate until sundown and sometimes even after. This lasted until I was 20. I like to think it was my decision to stay home and go to a community college for two years, but I suspect that my father had subtly, maybe even subliminally, convinced me to stay so I could help him with the farm work. Of course, Dad was hard at work at least as long as I was and my two younger brothers, and sometimes my sister, joined us when they were old enough.

I do not think my father’s intent in making us work so much was based on any advice he had from his mother or anyone else on how to raise children. He knew that he valued hard work for all the other things it gave him, so he wanted us to have that ethic and secondary gifts as well. And they were true gifts. Hard work taught us to stick to a task, do it well, be resourceful, and take pride in completing a task. But this isn’t about me and my siblings.

My father was the fourth of four sons and his name in Japanese meant only and exactly that: Fourth son, Shiro. He was born in 1918 in Palermo, California, a tiny hamlet tucked south of Oroville. Palermo was a small farming community in which there were no other Japanese families. His father owned a house surrounded by a productive olive orchard, but the family business was as much running a labor camp as about growing olives. Most of the laborers were single Japanese men who were sent to work other farmer’s land for which my grandfather got a share of their wages in return for brokering their employment and giving them room and board. Seeing his mother having to cook for dozens of men was just one of the things that gave him a great deal of respect for hard work.

In 1929, when the Great Depression hit, my father was only 11, so his sharpest memories were of times of privation, which surely shaped his thriftiness, but his mother was also of profound influence as she managed to feed and clothe her seven children. Part of this management involved making sure that each child took care of the younger siblings. Thus my father’s oldest sister, Haru, was as much a mother to him and his younger sisters as his actual mother was. His older brothers set examples of hard work as well, although they engaged in their share of antics. Once his older brother, Ted, was trying to throw a stick through a door, so he had my father throw the door open. The flying stick missed badly and gashed my father on the forehead, leaving a small shaped scar there for the rest of his life. Ted was not the athlete my father was.

By the time he was in high school, Dad was not only strong and fit, but a very good athlete as he played four sports at the varsity level: baseball, football, basketball and track. For a Nisei he was big, five feet, eight inches. He was fond of telling the story about a tri-school track meet in which his coach asked him to compete in the pole vault, an event for which he had not practiced. He placed in the event and Oroville High won the meet. Despite his ability, he faced racial discrimination. The coach of the JV basketball team cut him from the squad, but the varsity coach saw his ability and not only put him on the team but started him. Like most men, my father was a great sports fan; maybe more so, given his prowess as an athlete himself. Early on, he infused in his children an enduring love of the San Francisco 49ers and later the Giants. He went to the University of California in Berkeley and thus we also became huge fans of Cal football and basketball. He lettered in Boxing and Track at Cal from which he graduated in 1942. He spent two years at Sacramento City College before matriculating at Cal, where he majored in Economics. He was a good student, although I never saw his grades, but they must have been good. I knew that Economics was a hard major and he later was able to enter a master’s degree at UC Berkeley. He saved money by living in the campus co-op and did not go home to Palermo very often. When he did travel from Berkeley he would hitch-hike home, earning praise from his mother for saving money and, thus, reinforcing his thriftiness. In his senior year on campus in the fall of 1941, he would occasionally see a beautiful freshman co-ed as he sauntered into the main library. He was too shy then to introduce himself to her, so he bided his time. Time was not on his side nor was it a good time to be any Japanese-American in California. He would see a lot more of her in a vastly different location: Topaz, Utah. The co-ed was my mother, Asako Maida. 

My mother admitted that she had been attracted to the handsome man who stopped by the library. She imagined that he might be a deep thinker, since his expression made him look, in her words, “like he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.” She never expected him to materialize at her place of work at the employment office of the internment camp where they had been incarcerated. Her family had been shipped to Topaz by the War Relocation Authority. They had to live in hastily built huts where the wind blew dust in all through the year. Dad arrived months later, in September 1943, after his family had originally been imprisoned at the Tule Lake Internment Center. Entering the office on Christmas Eve, he was as surprised to see her as she was to see him, but he did not show it. He had come to apply for a job in Washington D.C. He wanted the application form, but he also asked for a date. He was not one to waste any time. The camp was holding a New Years’ Eve dance. Did she want to go with him? She thought he was being fresh and declined to assent. In other words, she ignored him.

Nonetheless, Shiro showed up at her door soon after and asked if she wanted to go to a movie. She was taken aback by his boldness, but she went. She also went to the New Year’s Eve dance when he showed up at the door to her family’s shack and impertinently asked her if she was ready even though she had not accepted his invitation. Nonplussed, she got ready, went and had a nice time, even after he proposed to her that very evening. She did not answer this time either, but he saw her as often as he could and they eventually did get married. He left the camp soon after that, then volunteered for the army. She joined him a little over a year after that first date and they wed on February 17, 1945 in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was training as part of the Military Intelligence Service. For there was a war on and he had enlisted to be part of a top-secret group of Nisei who were being trained to do translation and interrogation in the Pacific Theater where they could easily be mistaken for the enemy and shot. Some were. 

Dad was deployed as the war was winding down and it ended even as his ship was transporting him to the Philippines, practically as a newlywed for the small amount of time he got to spend with his new wife. He never got to be an active part of the war effort. In fact, he got sick in the Philippines and did very little. He eventually wound up in Japan to assist in the efforts to reconstruct the Japanese economy. After all, he had earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from UC Berkeley. While in Japan, he urgently tried to find his sister, Haru, and his brother in law, Kozo Fukushima who had been living in Hiroshima before and during much of the war. He refused to believe that they had been there when the atomic bomb was dropped. They weren’t. Using his military connections he found where Kozo was working and, clad in his full army uniform, approached Kozo who did not recognize the stern young soldier and thought he had done something wrong. He soon realized that it was his young brother-in-law. My father had lots of company in Japan with two brothers in law (one being in the army with him), two sisters and a lot of friends, but something was missing.

For well over a year, my father was without my mother. The army did not at first allow wives to join their husbands in Japan. Certainly, the situation there was still unsettled the policy was not merely bureaucratic. My parents wrote a lot of letters to each other until they were permitted to reunite. Finally, in January 1947, Asako Tokuno joined her husband in Tokyo and, in November, his first son, me, came along. They were to have four more children: Shira (1950), Tony (1952), Riki (1956) and Merijune (1962), It speaks to the peripatetic nature of his early career that we kids were born in four different cities.

My father had told my mother that his dream was always to work for the State of California and do some small farming on the side. By 1958, he had attained his job with the State, after a series of private and federal jobs. He found a position as a senior economist with the Department of Water Resources in Sacramento. Just two years later he bought a farm and moved his family into a house he had built in 1961. Along the way, he had bought three houses, renting out each one as he moved, then selling all three to buy the farm. His thrift and his understanding of the value of real estate had earned him the second half of his dream. 

It was not ever his intent to be a full time farmer. He just wanted to emulate his brothers, invest in the land, and have a chance to work outdoors. He loved to drive around the neighboring area with me beside him in his old green 1954 Chevy pickup and point out the various crops: corn, rice, peaches, sorghum, wheat and all of the abundant crops in the Sacramento Valley. He only had a modest property on 40 acres in Natomas, just north of where the Sacramento Airport now sprawls. His first crop was cucumbers. Forty acres of cucumbers raised for their seeds. He lost money that year. The next two years, he changed the crop to watermelons, also for seed. He lost money both of those years too. Then he switched to grains, usually sorghum, but occasionally safflower, wheat and even barley, never making a profit. It used to worry me, this perennial loss. It took me years before I realized that the “loss” was only on paper so he did not have to pay any income taxes. He could legally deduct the interest on the farm mortgage, the costs of seed, water, and labor, which included a salary he paid to his sons. I think it hit me when he told me that he had never paid any taxes. He had learned a good deal about economics, indeed.

For he had not stopped with a bachelor’s degree. In 1952 he got a master’s degree in Agricultural Economics, again from UC Berkeley, this time making use of the GI Bill. He had had to rush back to California in 1951 before his eligibility expired. You see, in 1948, the three of us had returned to California because my mother’s family wanted to see me, the first male born to her parents, but my father had loved being in Japan so much that he returned there even as Mom was pregnant with my sister, Shira. When Shira was born my father was still in Japan and he didn’t return home until she was 15 months old. Her name was not a Japanese version of Shiro, but was taken from a book my mother read about a Jewish girl and she liked that “Shira” that “seemed like a feminine version of her husband’s name. 

I suspect that my parents had a hard time adjusting to each other after my father returned. After all, he had been living like a bachelor for two years and she had been leading a carefree life in her parents’ house, able to devote all her attentions to her two children. I had not only the full attention of my mother, but of both her sisters as well as my grandmother who thought I was a royal prince. Yes, I was terribly spoiled as a result and I am certain of one thing: a major source of their differences was how to raise me. My father came from a “spare the rod, spoil the child” family, whereas my mother came from a childhood full of sisters and dolls and parents who never raised a hand to their children. My mother once told me that she almost left my father because of the way he punished me. They were able to work it out and I was no longer spoiled which was to my benefit. My father continued to issue corporal punishment upon me, but never with anything but his hand. Still he was fairly rough on me and Shira compared to our younger siblings. One of the saddest memories I have waiss the time Shira broke her wrist when she fell off a swing and Dad, thinking it was a sprain, twisted her arm to see if it was broken. Shira screamed in pain but Dad insisted it wasn’t broken. Mom prevailed though, taking Shira to the doctor where she was fitted with a cast. Dad wasn’t being sadistic, but he wanted all of his kids to be tough. He used to say that a lot: “You’ve got to be tough.”

As tough as he was when Shira and I were young, he was also more playful in those days. One thing we used to like to do with Dad was to play “horsey.”  We would rough house around, with him letting us ride on his back.  Then we would usually end up by massaging his back or plucking white hairs from his scalp.  He paid us a penny for every ten hairs. We used to enjoy playing crocodile or alligator or whatever he called it.  He’d lie on the ground and we would jump in and out of the space between his legs and he would scissor them to try to catch us. As he got older and had more kids, he got less strict, but also less playful. These memories come from what I remember of life in our first house from the time I was 3 until I was 7.

He bought our first home close to Richmond, where my mother had been raised. Under the GI Bill, he paid an amazingly low $3000 for it even for those days. The house was in El Sobrante, a small bedroom community shoehorned in the hills due north of Berkeley. The house was well furnished with a lot of fine furniture and artifacts my parents had shipped from Japan. After the war, Japan was so destitute that my parents could afford to buy some very nice things there even on Dad’s modest pay, such as a sandalwood tea cabinet, a finely carved chest, and even an elephant’s tusk carved with a row of small elephants of descending size (an ornament I would now abhor). My father also kept a nice yard with an immaculate front lawn, numerous flowering plants and some bushes. Dad surrounded the side and back yards with a redwood grape stake fence, something he was to do for every house he bought. It required a lot of work, but it was beautiful and unique. 

My parents both loved music, although you could hardly tell that Dad did. He never bought records, listened to music on the radio or watch his favorite singers on television. When he was in a good mood, however, we would hear him warble a bit of a tune from a Nat “King” Cole recording, such as “Darling Je Vous Aime Beaucoup” or “Mona Lisa.” I knew he liked “King” Cole. In fact, they had gone to see him and his trio at a nightclub and gotten their autographs. I wish we had heard him sing more because he must have had a good voice having once been part of a church choir. I think he was just too embarrassed to sing seriously, hence the short warbles. I remember one fragile acetate short playing  record that sat in the house. I think at one time it was possible to put a quarter into a machine and record your own small 6 inch disc. My parents did that, but the audio was so poor you could hardly make out what they were saying. Or maybe they were singing. It was hard to tell.

A major strength of my parents marriage was that, in addition to loving music,  they shared the same dry sense of humor, plays on words. I think it was my father who invented the idea of a Dad joke and my mother could match him pun for pun. In fact, she took special delight in word play that allowed her to say things she would have never said aloud. Thus, when we moved to El Sobrante, just off the San Pablo Dam Road, she would get tickled giving directions by letting people know that they needed to take the “Dam” road. Dad was more likely to spin stories that resulted in outrageous puns. I will torture the reader with only one example:

On safari in the heart of Africa, a group of Americans were startled by a white man in a loin cloth who  carried a bucket of paint which he used to daub stripes of white on the trees before vanishing into the jungle. When they got home, one of the men told his son about this odd event. Twenty years later, the son was on safari and he saw the same man with the same paint. He too told his son. Twenty years later, the grandson of the original American went on safari and when the same man descended on them, the grandson stopped him and asked “Who are you and what are you doing?” The man replied, “Tarzan stripes forever.”

I should point out that the above named Blaine Vogt was also a master of the pun, which had a lot to do with how well he got along with my parents.

I don’t know that anyone would have called him talkative, yet Dad had a way with words that went beyond puns. He was known for an array of unique catch phrases, which he used as fit the situation. He did have back pain, but when he said “Oh, my aching back,” he was referring to some sort of unexpected and vexing problem, perhaps in addition to his back. When he was vexed at my inability to think through something with due consideration, he would tell me “Use your head, boy.” When he got older he began to use disconnected references such as “sakana fish.” I am still not sure what he meant by that, only that “sakana” is Japanese for fish so he was saying, in effect, “fish, fish.” Equally mysterious was his morning quip “coffee, coffee, coffee” said rapidly. One set of words he never used were swear words, at least around his family.

My father remained close to his family of origin for his entire life. His youngest sister, Alyce, lived in Richland, Washington and on two summers, we made the long drive up Highway 99 to visit her and her family. We also made frequent trips to visit his older brothers on their farms north of Sacramento. The eldest, Tony, kept the original Palermo house and farm. My Uncle Ted settled in Yuba City and my Uncle Tim in Gridley. My siblings and I spent a lot of summer days helping my uncles harvest their crops of tomatoes and peaches. Each Christmas Eve, the Tokuno clan would gather at the Palermo house and drive home singing Christmas Carols and arriving just ahead of Santa. When the clan got too large, Dad found banquet halls on military bases to use for the reunions.

Before he bought his own farm, he had entered into a corporation with his sisters, Haru Fukushima, Tey Imaoka and Alyce Ko. They invested in a 20 acre parcel of land about 15 miles south of Yuba City and they called it “TIFKO” which was short for Tokuno, Imaoka, Fukushima and Ko. Of course, my father and we kids did all the work. Dad planted prune trees there. Later, he bought another 60 acres adjacent to that land on which he planted more prune trees and eventually a prune drier. He taught his sons how to care for an orchard and earn some money while doing so. I think I got 25 cents for every tree I pruned in the winter. Of course, we spent a lot of time driving back and forth to the orchard, sometimes hauling a tractor or other farm equipment.

On some of those trips, Dad was even prone to picking up hitchhikers, partly because of how he used to have to hitch rides and partly because he often found them interesting, Again to my chagrin, this often happened when I was with him so I would have to put up with some strange man’s strange smells for a good distance until we had to part ways. He liked to talk with strangers and wherever he went, it was not at all unusual to find him chatting merrily with someone he had just met. Perhaps it is wrong to even suggest that these people were strangers, because it often seemed that no one was really a stranger to Dad. People liked him. It was a lesson in patience for me when he would drop by for a “short chat” with one of his friends leaving me alone in the pickup for what seemed like hours with nothing to do but watch the flies bump against the windshield. He liked people whom other people didn’t particularly care for. One of my childhood pests was a boy named Clifford Smith who everyone called “Butch.” He was generally disliked by all the other boys in our neighborhood, because he was big for his age, lacked social skills and had a slight speech impediment. Dad was the one person in the neighborhood who talked to him, so Butch would come around our house, much to my chagrin. 

As good as he was with strangers, he was also fond of his entire extended family, as already noted. He was particularly fond of his two younger sisters, Tey and Alyce. One difficulty that arose from this was that he was extremely protective of them, so when Tey married Henry Imaoka, Dad had some trouble with it. Fortunately, Uncle Henry was a salt of the earth kind of guy who was exactly my father’s kind of man. My Aunt Alyce married a smart, low key man named Roy Ko, who also got along well with everyone. Sadly, Uncle Henry died suddenly of a heart attack while stationed in Japan in 1962. My Aunt Tey returned to America and was soon being courted by Sukeo “Skeets” Oji. Now Skeets had been the best man at my parents’ wedding, so he could have once been considered my father’s best friend. The fact that he wooed and wed my Aunt Tey soon after Uncle Henry’s death did not sit well with my father at all. Moreover, Skeets had not even attended Uncle Henry’s funeral. He was furious at these betrayals of Uncle Henry’s memory so at my cousin Albert’s wedding reception, he got drunk and called out Skeets who quavered inside the house. My Uncle Tim, the older brother who was closest to him, had to get my father into a vice grip until he calmed down. It was the only time I had ever seen my father drunk (although one of his quirks was that he liked his beer warm). He never reconciled with Skeets, as much for the sake of principle as anything else.

There was no question that my father was a man of principle. As willing as he had been to join the army during Work War II, he was very much offended by having been thrown into a concentration camp. Years later, he would write an extensive testimony to Congress in support of a bill to provide reparations to the survivors of the camps. A firm believer in education, he had also served as president of the local school board. This enabled him to go to the elementary schools in the area in his full uniform (he had become a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves) to tell the children about his experience as an American citizen who had been imprisoned and explain the concepts of civil rights.

He always tried to do the right thing. Once, shortly after he had had surgery to correct a problem with his spine, he came upon an accident in which a man was pinned under a truck, People were just standing around, but Dad grabbed a 2 by 4 and tried to pry the truck up, even with the heavy a cast on his neck. He was infuriated that no one would help him but simply watched as the man died before their eyes. Another time, in Japan, he intervened when a husband was beating his wife and the man came at him, fingers spread to gouge his eyes out. That was a mistake, but the man could not have known that Dad had earned a college letter in boxing. Dad ducked, then floored him.

That surgery just mentioned came after he had noticed a weakening in his right hand. It might have been aggravated by an incident in which he, I and my brothers were coming back from getting  load of sand to spread around out house in Natomas. We were driving on the levee road and got a flat tire. We had to shovel some of the sand off to make jacking up the truck a little less dangerous, but as my father was changing the tire, the jack slipped. It was the only time I had ever heard fear rise in my father’s voice. He said, “Ken my hand’s caught.” I quickly righted the jack and got the wheel off of his hand. Fortunately, the tire was still firmly bolted to the wheel and his hand had been flat on the ground so his hand was not injured. It is the only time he ever used my name in addressing me. What was his nickname for me? “Boy.”

He never said, “I love you” in those words. Like many men he was not comfortable with overt displays of emotion or affection, yet I knew that he not only loved but was proud of me and all of his children. I often heard it in the tone of his voice or how he shook my hand when we said goodbye. He lived a long life, dying at the age of 91. Sadly, age and a series of small strokes took his memory so the last time I saw him, he did not know who I was. I then knew that we had had our last goodbyes. He passed away a few weeks later. Like most of us, he was afraid of death, so it was an equivocal blessing that he had no idea he was close to death even as it came for him.

While my father was not of the number who George Eliot suggested led a hidden life and lie in unvisited tombs, he was not a great man. While my father did not lead a perfectly exemplary life, I would be proud to think that I achieved as much as he did. While my father nourished his own dreams, he certainly shared the fruits of that nourishing with all who knew  him. He taught me that generosity lies beyond the giving of material things and what he gave to me I am still discovering.