When you remember a good story, tell it! We'll all pitch in and add our two cents in the comments. Let's save our family history!

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Primary Age Daddy


Obaachan always brags about how smart her Takao was in school. In elementary school, the school was divided into achievement levels, and the groups met on different floors, the lowest group being on the first floor and the highest on the fourth. Of course Takao shot right up to the fourth floor ahead of all his cousins, even the older ones. Apparently his older cousin was having a hard time in math and was getting tutored, and Takao was there and would sit in. When the cousin couldn't get it, the tutor would turn to Takao, who would invariably give the correct answer. This of course made Obaachan's in-laws upset, and got his cousins in trouble for not doing as well as Takao did =).




Daddy was a bit of a loner, but everybody liked him and he always had a lot of friends.


Daddy loved dogs. He had all sorts of dogs over the years. Mom always heard about Shiro, which was a little white spitz.

Obaachan ran a few restaurant/kiosks in her day, and had soft-serve ice cream. I'm sure Daddy got his fair share of them =).



I think we all know the pig story, but here is Mom's retelling for posterity's sake:

At school, Daddy didn't recognize what a pig was in some kind of homework or classwork, and the teacher may have ridiculed him a little bit. This, of course, made Obaachan unhappy (to say the least), and being the excellent mother that she was, they got on a train and went into the city to the zoo in search of a pig. When they couldn't locate one they asked a zookeeper where the pigs were kept, and he replied, "Madame, this is a zoo. You find pigs on a farm." Takao never let Obaachan live it down (though she tells the story the best).


When Daddy was 7 or 8, he was laying under the kotatsu (Japanese table with a heater underneath and a quilt over the top), and while he slept he developed a third degree burn on his leg. As an adult he still had about a 4-inch ovular scar on his calf from the burn.


This bicycle wasn't his; it was a prop at the photo studio.

With cousin Yasuko. Obaachan contributed a lot to raising her after Yasuko's mom passed away.


We think maybe Dad is the 4th from the left on the top row, looking over to the left.

Third row back, first on the left.

Third row back, fourth from the right:
Daddy's drawing is the biggest face in the lower left corner, with a long, straight line for a nose. He misspelled his name: Yamata Takao =).

Same picture as above, but bigger.